Building a program that takes budding activists to places in need
By Denise Horn
Five years ago, when I interviewed for my position in the international affairs program, the director, Denis Sullivan, asked me, “How do you feel about traveling abroad with students?”
I think my immediate answer was “When do you want me to go?”
Since then, I’ve taken students to South Africa (twice), Thailand (twice), Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and, this fall, India, all under the auspices of our wildly popular Dialogue of Civilizations initiative, which offers students an international learning experience led by Northeastern faculty. Along with my research and teaching, these trips have provided some of the most fulfilling moments of my career.
In my research, I study the impact U.S. foreign funding for women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has had on developing and democratizing states. My work has taken me to Estonia, Moldova, and Thailand. Through it, this academic gets to be an activist, to demonstrate how improving local involvement in civil society can protect human rights and human dignity.
It also shows my students that they, too, can work locally to make a global impact.
My class, Globalization and International Affairs, enrolls 250 students each fall. In it, I talk about critical international issues, such as human-rights violations in Uganda, food insecurity across the developing world and in the United States, and human trafficking in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. I tell my students that, regardless of the issue, their actions or inactions are going to have a global impact. I often ask them, “What can you do? What are you going to do?”
Imagine how much more effective these questions are when students actually experience a problem for themselves. Five years ago, I helped develop a peer-to-peer training group in grass-roots organizing and NGO development, which has grown into a Northeastern program known as Global Corps. Students volunteer to learn how to identify problems in their communities, invent creative solutions, and build organizations that can actually implement their ideas.
They begin to see that even “small” solutions can have lasting effects. That composting leftovers from Northeastern’s cafeterias can raise awareness about hunger and waste.
Or that working with the Red Sox to implement a recycling program can morph into a thriving organization that harnesses dozens of student volunteers from several universities throughout the Boston area. (Look for this group, the Green Team, in action the next time you go to Fenway Park.)
The summer of my first year at Northeastern, our training program went international. We’ve taken students to work with students in other countries on a variety of local issues, from poverty and community development on South Africa’s Eastern Cape and in Salvador, Brazil, to human trafficking and citizenship rights in northern Thailand.
Students learn that the best way to make a change in any community is to listen—to gain a deeper understanding of the culture and the politics, and let the community explain what’s needed—not to dictate uninformed “solutions” from a relatively privileged position.
During these international trips, students are often uncomfortable: Monsoon season in Thailand can be brutal; so can a July winter in South Africa. They’re often confused: The first training we did in Thailand included students from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and the ethnic hill tribes of northern Thailand—few of whom spoke English, or even Thai. And they’re often frustrated: In Brazil, the locals can seem to embrace an idiosyncratic conception of time.
But, more often than not, the students are exhilarated by the challenges, eager to learn, ceaselessly creative, and respectful of differences. Colleagues abroad tell me how much our students have positively influenced the way they view college students, and Americans in general.
Remarkable projects have been undertaken, some continued by the local group members after we leave, some continued by our students at home. A documentary film that educates northern Thai and hill tribe people about the issue of human trafficking was produced. Book drives were held for South African libraries. Programs were started to bring citizenship education to children living in shantytowns in Brazil, and distance learning to Burmese children begging in the streets of Mae Sai, Thailand.
In all, more than 350 students have participated in our local and international trainings. Many have embarked on exciting careers in the U.S. State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations. They work as community-health experts, staffers in international and local NGOs, documentary filmmakers, environmental activists, human-rights activists in the Middle East and Africa, and international English teachers.
They have become local leaders of human-rights organizations like Invisible Children, which shines a light on the suffering of child soldiers in northern Uganda. They’ve created student organizations such as NUCALLS, which provides free peer-to-peer tutoring on campus in a multitude of languages.
Some are Presidential Scholars and Fulbright candidates. One young man, Alexander Alvanos, won the prestigious Swearer Student Humanitarian Award last year.
For all these public successes, I find I truly live for the moments of personal growth my students relate. A recent graduate who had planned to pursue a career in child psychology told me her experiences with children in Thailand convinced her that her life’s work should be in community health. She’s now pursuing a master’s in public health.
Another student came into training telling me he had nothing to offer the group because he wasn’t as smart as the others. After he realized he had great strengths in communication and organizing, he flourished at school.
There’s been some satisfying institutional growth, too. Both the international affairs program and Dialogue of Civilizations have grown exponentially. And Global Corps is expanding across disciplinary divides. In May, Dennis Shaughnessy, director of the College of Business Administration’s Social Enterprise Institute, and I led a group of students to the Dominican Republic, where they learned about microenterprise by interviewing the poorest of the poor in the bateyes and slums that surround Santo Domingo.
This fall, we launched a new semester program in India, led by Lori Gardinier, director of the human-services program, and me. Thanks to a grant from the Deshpande Foundation, nineteen Northeastern students spent six weeks in Hubli, Karnataka, working in local NGOs, creating new community solutions with their Indian peers, and putting theories of social entrepreneurship into practice.
I’d like to take credit for all our successes, but our programs are only as good as the energy, talent, creativity, and curiosity of our students. In this regard, Northeastern has been extraordinarily blessed. Indeed, many programs have been sparked by a student asking, “Why can’t we go there?”
From that first day I was asked whether I wanted to take students abroad, I haven’t stopped thinking about where we might go. Last year, I spent the fall semester researching civil society and human-rights issues in Southeast Asia. Now I can’t wait for the chance to say, yes, let’s go there.
Denise
Horn is an assistant professor in the international affairs program.
She earned a doctoral degree in political science from Rutgers
University in 2005.