Call for volunteers: The Language Buddy Project

The Language Buddy project matches volunteers with scholars affected by the war in Ukraine, who are struggling to publish their work in international journals for language-related reasons. The project team is responsible for matching academics based on the field of expertise of the volunteer, and the topic of the project of the Ukrainian scholar. After that, the communication between the two parties continues independently.

This project has been active for one year. In that time, more than 60 projects from scholars affected by the war in Ukraine were matched with experts in their field. Most collaborations were successful, and we received a lot of positive feedback from both volunteers and scholars receiving support who found the experience very useful.

There were however some requests that unfortunately could not be matched, due to a lack of volunteers in certain fields. More specifically, the project is lacking volunteers in the following fields:

• Social sciences (especially: Democracy, European politics)
• Law and Jurisprudence
• Engineering
• Material Sciences
• Business
• Economics
• Linguistics
• History of Art
• (History of) Religion

 If you want to become a volunteer, whether you are part of these fields or not, all that is needed is good working knowledge of English and a bit of your time. The Young Academy Groningen hopes to establish proof of the concept, and then to attempt to upscale the project, to support all researchers affected by war and other crises around the world.

 For more information on the project, and to sign up as a volunteer visit our website.