Products & Services

Nahaal

Nahaal Scholarship Foundation is a non-profit organization providing academic scholarships to financially needy Iranian students attending higher education universities.

Nahaal Scholarship Foundation is a non-political, non-religious organizations founded and administered by its volunteered board of directors. Nahaal's funding is provided thru annual fund raising, monetary and non-monetary contributions of Iranians as well as non Iranians who value the importance of this humanitarian act. Through this scholarship program, Nahaal seeks to identify and encourage talented, yet financially less fortunate students and help them reach their highest professional potentials.

Each year, based on the availability of funds, approximately 25 to 30 applicants receive this scholarship based on their academic merits and financial standing. The scholarship amount in recent years is approximately $375 US Dollars to be used towards academic fees and expenses.

Nahal: www.nahaal.org

Iranica

Since 1979, the Encyclopaedia has been supported as a "major project" by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the foremost sponsor of educational, academic and research projects in the US.

Encyclopædia Iranica is a historic undertaking: the most extensive compendium ever conceived on the past and present culture of the people who speak an Iranian language and their contribution to the broader history of human civilization. In fact it is the only precise and reliable reference work on the lands, life, culture and history of all Iranian peoples and their interaction with other societies.

To ensure the completion of this monumental work the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation has been established since 1989. Partially supported by the NEH, the ongoing publication of the Encyclopædia Iranica is made possible by donations from institutions and individuals to either Columbia University or the Foundation, both tax exempt organizations.

To find out how you can help with an ongoing research project which is designed to promote the study of Persian history and culture please click here.

Iranica: www.iranica.com

RELIEF INTERNATIONAL

RELIEF INTERNATIONAL dedicates itself to seeking and addressing the long-term developmental needs of its beneficiaries even while in the emergency phase. The agency recognizes that disasters have the most negative impact on the lives of the poor; yet disasters, and especially the movement of the populations, can also bring about unexpected, positive social change. This context can therefore serve as a window of opportunity for eradicating poverty and social injustice.
RELIEF INTERNATIONAL focuses on serving people who typically have not received due attention, and in several large-scale crises RI has been the first US-based agency to provide high-impact development emergency programming to communities in need.
RI believes that as a humanitarian agency one of its main functions is to communicate the pronounced needs of the vulnerable and affected populations to the international community. RI thus consults closely with the local communities it serves in order to ensure that its programs do not impose solutions from the outside but rather address their needs and requirements for the long term.

Relief International: www.ri.org

Ronaghi Foundation

Award for Best Business Plan
Award now offered in both fields of:
- Biotechnology
- Information Technology

The economies of developed countries have grown rapidly during the lastdecade due to the expansion of high-tech industries. The Ronaghi Awardfor Best Business Plan was created to promote education and high-tech industryin Iran. The aim of this award is to encourage Iranian people, both inside and outside of the country, to develop their innovative ideas into a business plan that can be implemented in Iran. Business plans bring innovative ideas to an executable program, enabling entrepreneurs to keep an eye on the factors that are most critical for their success. In a business plan, applicants present how they foresee the realization of their business idea in a society where there is a big market for high technology, which is considered asa first step for starting up a company.

At the dawn of the third Millennium, an extraordinary technological revolution is nfolding in our planet which is radically changing the way human beings live, communicate, develop interests, learn, research, produce and trade. This revolution, dramatically illustrated by the development of the Internet, is rapid, massive, permanent and unending in all aspects of life in the developed world. It is the vehicle of the current transition from the Industrial Age, based on capital and labor, to the Information Age,
based on knowledge and communication. It has had an extraordinary impact on the new generations in the West. Computers and the Internet have now brought about an explosion of perspectives for tens of millions of children and youth who can use this new medium and technology as a natural part of their daily lives in order to realize their full potential.

In contrast, this gigantic process is sharply accentuating the gap between the developed and the developing countries by producing a deeply uneven and divided world of the digital haves and the digital have nots, with its striking consequences in terms of global inequality in the years ahead. The great majority of the world population, living in the countries essentially deprived of information technology, will pay a high price in their economic, social and cultural development in the increasingly global competition in the new century. There is, however, a major difference with the past. Information technology, in particular the Internet, has created for the first time in human history an empowering tool to eradicate effectively the roots of underdevelopment. The basic precondition is to make the new technology available and integrated consistently at an early age in the education of the hundreds of millions of the children in the third world.

The Science and Art Foundation (SAF), which was set up as an educational non-profit-making educational charity on 1st March 1999, aspires for such an ideal future world. It believes that progress in education, communication, research and development based on information technology and the Internet in the third world is the vital key to solving the developmental problems in the third world as well as the global and regional problems facing humanity. SAF also maintains that the globalization of all human activities, exemplified by the applications of the Internet, has prepared the ground for
a worldwide campaign to equip the younger generations of the developing world with the new and empowering information technologies enjoyed by the youth in the West. By acting now, this vision is within our reach.

Science & Art Foundation: www.science-arts.org

The Persian Student Association (PSA) is a non-political volunteer student organization whose objective is to sponsor Persian social and cultural activities and events, to promote an understanding of Persian culture, to help foster friendship among different cultural groups, and to provide a source of union and support for the Persian community at Stanford.