This year’s winners are focusing their projects on helping survivors of domestic violence navigate emotional challenges in Portland and teaching financial competence to Ghanaian schoolchildren.
By Cara Nixon
June 2, 2026
The 2026 Reed Projects for Peace awardees will be helping communities both near and far this summer—right at home here in Portland, and across the world in Ghana.
Every year, 125 or more student leaders nationwide are each awarded $10,000 grants to implement a over the summer.
Caitlin Sullivan ’27, Diya Reddy ’27, and Cora MacMillan ’27 will be focusing their project, Writing Narratives of Peace, in Portland, implementing tools to help survivors of domestic and relationships violence navigate emotional and identity challenges.
Caitlin, Diya, and Cora, who study psychology and creative writing, will use a group writing workshop in their project, a clinically-backed model of narrative therapy. The funding they’ve received will allow them to create a workshop curriculum model to be used by partner organizations in the future, meaning the project can support survivors in the years to come.
"The work we're able to do with the Projects for Peace grant we received is often overlooked and vastly underfunded,” the group says. “Working creatively to support survivors of domestic violence in Portland is work we are passionate about.”
Meanwhile, Vincent Kwaning ’27 will be conducting his own project on an entirely different continent. Building Futures, The Financial Habits Initiative is a five-week intensive program designed to instill financial habits in schoolchildren in the Ashanti Region of Ghana.
“I believe that financial competence is a foundational skill, much like reading or writing,” Vincent, an economics major, says. “By focusing on early-stage habit formation, our initiative aims to provide children with the critical tools for saving, budgeting, and responsible financial decision-making, setting a trajectory for lifelong economic resilience.”
This year’s Projects for Peace awardees join other Reedies who have received this funding and used it for a variety of projects around the world, including Majd AlSehnawi ’28, Yuki Nagura ’28, and Isara Moriya ’28, who last summer conducted work in Japan and Syria.