The Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) is a passionate community that lights up our vibrant, collaborative, global commons. The CC Network is also critical to our mission of sharing. To support CC Network members, we launched a scholarship program for CC Certificate courses. 

Today, we are proud to highlight our first 10 CC Certificate Scholarship recipients. The CC Certificate provides an-in depth study of Creative Commons licenses and open practices, uniquely developing participants’ open licensing proficiency and understanding of the broader context for open advocacy.

From CC Brazil: photo of Juliana Monteiro, Museóloga freelancer and Profa. no Curso Técnico de Museologia, by Sebastiaan ter Burg, licensed CC BY 4.0

After launching the official CC Certificate courses in July of 2018, we offered 18 scholarships a year later. We’re thrilled to enroll our first scholarship recipients in the September 2019 and January 2020 classes! They join the ranks of 507 other participants from 42 countries or territories who have enrolled in  CC Certificate courses. These initial scholarships are just the start. We aim to increase the number of scholarships we offer by 50% next year, and further increase the number in subsequent years. 

Although we share more about our scholarship recipients on the CC Certificate website, we are delighted to name them here:

September 2019 courses:
Alice Joseph Mihayo
Brian Ssennoga
Fitriayu Penyalai
Margaret Lopez

January 2020 courses:
Juliana Monteiro
Margorie Merel
Jorge Gemetto
Nurunnaby Chowdhury
Raphel Berchie
Roshan Kumar Karn

How does the scholarship program work?

It’s simple. Creative Commons offers as many scholarship tickets as we can to CC Network Chapters. As leaders in the field with regular connection to local community members, Chapter leads and representatives determine the recommended scholarship recipients. They send scholarship recommendations and contact information to CC, and we help recipients register in the Librarian or Educator Certificate courses. 

The Scholarship program covers 80% of the recipient’s ticket, requiring scholarship recipients to contribute the remaining US $100. 

From CC Nepal: Photo by Roshan Kumar Karn, Director of Open Access Nepal, licensed CC BY 4.0

In this initial round, we’ve prioritized scholarships for CC network members in Global South countries who want to use Certificate knowledge to fuel their own community efforts and “pay it forward” to their communities. Once we are able to offer all interested CC Country Chapters in the Global South at least one scholarship, we will provide scholarships to other CC Country Teams until, one day, we’ll have at least one community member trained in every interested CC Network country.