By Heidi Happonen

What began as one faculty member’s search for professional development has grown into a formal partnership between Northeastern’s College of Professional Studies and Professors Without Borders. But it’s the story of how it happened that reveals exactly why the two organizations belong together.

Professors Without Borders (Prowibo) is a UK-based nonprofit founded in 2016 that operates on a deceptively simple premise: rather than asking learners to come to education, bring education to them. Led entirely by volunteers, including its CEO, Caroline Varin, Prowibo deploys educators to universities and communities across the globe, from Nigeria and Ghana to Malaysia and Turkey, designing programming around the specific needs of each local partner. This spring, the organization celebrated its 10-year anniversary. The CPS partnership is part of what comes next.

A Fellowship That Changed Direction

The connection started quietly, the way the best partnerships often do.

Ilka Kostka, a faculty member at CPS, joined the inaugural cohort of Prowibo’s Women in Higher Education Fellowship (WiHE) in 2024. The Fellowship is virtual, global, and free, and designed specifically for early and mid-career women in higher education. It is open not only to professors, but also associate deans, directors, and doctoral students. Fellows from the US, UK, Pakistan, Poland, Mexico, Italy, the UAE, Australia, China, Botswana, and Nigeria gathered monthly for learning sessions, mentoring groups, and the kind of cross-cultural conversation that rarely happens inside a single institution. Kostka found it so inspiring that she returned the following year, this time as Deputy Chair to co-lead the second cohort with Dr. Julia Sargent, who is based in the UK.

“The goal is really to provide access,” Kostka explains. “To meet people where they are physically and professionally and in terms of their career stage.”

Fellows describe the experience in terms that speak directly to that mission. “Engaging in the WiHE was not only insightful but transformative and deeply rewarding,” says Grazzia Mendoza, a 2025–2026 fellow from the United States. “I left with a stronger network, bolder ideas, an increased sense of confidence, and a renewed commitment to shape meaningful change in my context.”

For Nayana Guerrero, a Fellow from Mexico, the Fellowship’s cross-cultural reach was its own lesson: “It has reinforced the belief that the world is accessible to anyone with the drive to connect with others who share similar challenges and passions.”

Mariah Silva, who leads much of CPS’s student engagement initiatives and is a recent Master’s degree graduate in Nonprofit Management with Leadership and Communication at Northeastern, joined the Fellowship in 2025. When Prowibo founder Caroline Varin came to address the fellows and mentioned she was looking for volunteers, Silva didn’t simply raise her hand — she had already done her homework. She had read through Prowibo’s financial filings, analyzed the organization’s revenue diversification challenges, and arrived with ideas. Varin was impressed.

That conversation led to an invitation. Would Silva want to co-chair a new initiative: an NGO fellowship boot camp designed to bring together nonprofit leaders from across Africa to learn about partnership, collective impact, and organizational resilience? The answer was yes.

From Conversation to Cohort

The NGO Fellowship that Silva now co-chairs with Tara Sinfield-Hain (an Honours BSc Student of Psychology & Cognitive Science based in Luxembourg) and Sharon Monethi (the Founder of Women of Age Foundation based in South Africa) drew more than 300 applicants. The Fellows represent nonprofits with radically different missions from youth sports to support for survivors of domestic abuse and community health and education access. But the design of the program is precisely that: bring unlike organizations into conversation and let them discover how much they have in common.

“When the Fellows were talking through their problems, I kept hearing them say, ‘Oh my God, you’re experiencing the same exact thing I’m experiencing,'” Silva recalls. “Even though they have totally different missions. And it’s just that light bulb moment where they could say to each other: we could figure this out together.”

That dynamic reflects a theory introduced to the fellows by CPS faculty member Dr. Cantrell Bruce: the strength of weak ties. Connections forged outside your immediate network, with people who don’t already share your assumptions, are often the ones that generate the most innovative thinking. Groupthink is a proximity problem. The NGO Fellowship is, in part, a structural solution to it.

Tara Sinfield-Hain, Silva’s co-chair, put it this way: “Although the NGO Fellowship has only just begun, we are already seeing the positive impact it is having on our Fellows. At the heart of the program is peer-to-peer learning. As a Co-Chair, this means not only learning from the Fellows themselves but also creating opportunities for them to learn from one another and further develop skills together.”

Sharon Monethi, the Fellowship’s third co-chair, echoes that sentiment: “The Fellowship has so far shown that there was greater need to support NGO leaders. Fellows’ enthusiasm has proven that our commitment towards building a broader community of support, learning, and collaboration is of most critical importance.”

How Six Professors Changed the Equation

When Silva needed speakers for the NGO Fellowship, she did what felt natural: she reached out to Northeastern professors in her graduate program.

She expected one or two to say yes. Six or seven said yes. That critical mass of faculty engagement was enough to formalize what had grown organically. CPS and Professors Without Borders signed a Memorandum of Understanding, establishing an official institutional partnership.

“This was very spontaneous,” Silva reflects. “Ilka started in the Fellowship. Now she’s running a fellowship. I started in a fellowship. Now I’m running a fellowship. I introduced a professor to this, and now there are a lot of professors partnering.”

Why CPS, Specifically

The alignment between CPS and Prowibo isn’t incidental. It’s structural. CPS has spent decades building a model of education designed for people who are already navigating full lives: working adults, career changers, international students, and mid-career professionals. That same orientation is exactly what Prowibo’s programs require from the educators who show up to teach them.

“A lot of our students are international,” Silva notes. “So, when we’re teaching in these fellowships with a lot of international perspectives, we can’t just apply a US lens. We have to adapt the curriculum to meet people where they are in their country.” The example she offers is pointed: recommending a $2,000 AI tool to an NGO in sub-Saharan Africa isn’t meeting people where they are. Finding the free equivalent, and knowing why that matters, is. Ilka adds that applying a global lens to opportunities and challenges facing women in higher education is also important to the success of her Fellowship. Fellows are purposefully chosen from all over the world to build a truly diverse global community.

CPS faculty bring that instinct because they’ve had to develop it. The college’s student population has always demanded it.

There’s also a deeper consonance around mission. Workforce development and preparing learners not just with credentials but with the practical capacity to contribute meaningfully to their communities and industries, sits at the center of CPS’s identity. The NGO Fellowship is workforce development in one of its most direct forms: equipping nonprofit leaders with skills in strategic communications, financial sustainability, collective action, and partnership that they can take home and multiply within their organizations.

As Silva puts it: “We’re helping these countries improve their workforce development by partnership, collaboration, and collective impact. Just creating a network and a web where people can rely on each other.”

What Comes Next

Neither Kostka nor Silva is treating the MOU as an endpoint. Both are already thinking about what a deeper, more intentional version of this partnership could look like, from badging, formal coursework, structured pathways for CPS faculty and staff to volunteer, and training pipelines for those who aren’t yet qualified to teach abroad but want to be.

The Women in Higher Education Fellowship received more than 180 applications this cycle, more than ever before, and more than its 20 available slots can accommodate. That gap between demand and capacity is, in one sense, a limitation. In another, it’s a roadmap.

“I think it can spontaneously grow, but it could also thoughtfully grow,” Silva says. “Maybe this started off spontaneously, but we could think about how to build something impactful here. Not just one-off experiences, but something continuous.”

For now, the partnership is young and the possibilities are still being mapped. But the instinct that drove it, that education travels, that expertise is most powerful when it meets people exactly where they are, is one that CPS has been acting on for a long time. Professors Without Borders just gave it a new address.

Learn More

To learn more about Professors Without Borders and the Women in Higher Education Fellowship, visit www.prowibo.org.