By rgpederson on January 14, 2009
Often times people ask me if students can really make a difference on these short term trips. It’s an important question, and one that I don’t take lightly. I’ve seen many short term projects fall apart and make negative impacts in the local community. When done well, though, a short term experience does a couple of incredibly important things:
1. Change the students: These experiences open the eyes of students to a new reality, equip them to create change, and send them back to their home country with a passion for an under-served place and a better sense of how they can impact global change from whatever sector they enter.
2. Change the community: A well-done student project both makes a short-term difference in the community, and acts as a catalyst for community development in the local community. It initiates conversations that may not otherwise have happened, enhances the capacity of key community members to make an impact, and develops processes for change that long outlive the students’ presence.
3. Lead to larger initiatives: Sometimes, students stay deeply connected to their host organization and come back to work with the community to expand projects. I am personally inspired by two recent university graduates who were delegates at the first year of our Global Engagement Summit and have gone on to do incredible work in Kenya and Mali. Andy Cunningham of Duke University is now back in Kenya as Executive Director of the WISER project after a research trip with Dr. Sherryl Broverman in the summer of 2006. He is helping start the first model all-girls secondary boarding school and community center in Muhuru Bay, Kenya. You can watch parts of the groundbreaking ceremony and the first women’s soccer game here.
Caitlin Cohen of Brown has been working in Mali with the Mali Health Organizing Project to help 60,000 people in slum communities learn to design, implement, and evaluate their own health care solutions as well as organize to get government to invest in their health. MHOP has had a huge impact, as well as gotten some impressive media exposure: Caitlin was named one of the top 9 youth activists in the USA by DoSomething.org, and Doritos put her and MHOP on Nacho Doritos bags (100 million of them). Not bad for a 22 year old.
