International Youth Volunteerism Summit (IYVS)

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Just Naive Enough to Plan a Summit
by Nathaniel Wittemore, IYVS co-founder

Summit directors Jon Marino and Nathaniel Whittemore. Photo courtesy of Graham Webster

Day after day, week after week I met with volunteers. Whether it was Serbia, Israel, Egypt, or Uganda, I heard the same thing everywhere. Young people didn’t have the skills or knowledge they wanted or needed to really make change. They didn’t have the resources to move beyond “good intentions.” In some situations, their lack of preparation was contributing to unintended harmful consequences.

It was the summer of 2005. Jon and I had been planning the inaugural International Youth Volunteerism Summit for a few months, and I was traveling from Hungary to Rwanda and everywhere in between, researching youth engagement.

We knew that more kids were getting involved than ever before; but what we didn’t expect were the gaps in current approaches to engagement that were producing widespread underutilization of young passions, energies, and talents. What we didn’t understand—at least at the start—was the incredible need for updated educational programs to prepare students for a new type of global involvement.
IYVS began as a learning environment designed to speak to this need by building the capacity of its participants to engage in responsible, effective, and sustainable global change. It did this by helping people focus on their unique passions and assets, enabling those passions through skills-driven workshops, connecting them with a community of similarly driven and critical peers, and providing outcome resources and community support.

IYVS is part of a larger initiative: the Just Naïve Enough Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University. In the coming years, we will be working to provide undergraduates with incredible opportunities to become fully engaged global citizens. On-campus capacity building will form skills like fundraising, team management, and project management. Global engagement programs will allow students to work with international communities to design asset-driven projects that change lives. Critical analysis will help us adapt to changing international relationships. Alumni community support will ensure that student’s global engagement doesn’t stop when the program ends.

The Just Naïve Enough Center is more than a place and a set of programs; it reflects a generation of young people skeptical and idealistic at the same time; a group of people working to understand rather than minimize the challenges and opportunities of a changing world.

Break a Leg, and Save the World
At the IYVS Summit 2006

By Nicole Price Fasig and Erica Schlaikjer

The boulder slammed into Miriam Young’s leg, knocking out three inches of her tibia, and there was nothing she could do to stop the pain.

“You could scream into the ocean and no one could hear you,” Young says. “It was just the waves roaring.”
It was a beautiful sunny Saturday in October. Waiting to begin her new internship at a women’s job training center in Mbour, Senegal, Young and her friends took a weekend trip to the national park of the Madeleine Islands off the coast of Dakar, the country’s capital. The group spent the late morning swimming in lagoons and hiking up steep volcanic mounds. They were a 20-minute boat ride away from the main coast, utterly isolated. It was your typical Lonely Planet adventure. But what started off as a day of harmless exploration turned into a near-death catastrophe when a sudden rockslide sent the young travelers tumbling.

“It felt like a dog was biting into your leg and wouldn’t let go,” Young says of the intense pain she felt ripping through her body as huge rocks pummeled into her, trapping her between two boulders. Her severed left foot was attached only by torn skin and ligaments, exposing the bone deep within her shin. There was blood everywhere.

Young, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign junior who had been in Senegal for two months on Minnesota’s “Studies in International Development” experiential learning program, couldn’t even recognize the sound of her own screaming.

This isn’t going to work, this isn’t going to work, she thought, even as her friends eventually came to her side and waited for a helicopter to transport her back to the mainland, where Senegalese doctors stabilized her wound.

Young was evacuated back to Chicago, where she faced the fear of amputation, followed by a month of hospitalization and more than 10 surgeries to her leg, including bone and skin grafts. She endured a year of slow recovery and temporary withdrawal from school.

But out of total helplessness came strength.

Young says she went to Senegal with the same lofty ideals that many activists share, but her accident gave her a completely different perspective.

“What I found out instead was that I was the one who needed help, instead of the one who was helping,” she says.

Young’s personal experience as a disabled person inspired her to submit a project proposal to the International Youth Volunteerism Summit in order to support others with disabilities, as well as to strengthen communities and build peace.

Young says that the ideals of self-sufficiency and independence that we are taught to cherish in the United States are a total myth.

“Of course we depend on each other,” she says. “Furthermore, we’re responsible for each other.”

The goal of Young’s project, “The Small Steps Playground Project,” or “Projet Petits Pas,” as it is tentatively named, is to build a safe and accessible playground for children who are victims—or potential victims—of landmine explosions in the war-torn Casamance region of Senegal, where more than half of all landmine victims are under the age of 18, according to Rencontre Africaine pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme (RADDHO). The model is based on a similar “safe playground” built by the Croatian Red Cross. Young acknowledges that building one playground in one community is not a total solution to end landmine casualties, but it is at least a small “first step” in that direction.

“This project is completely IYVS-inspired,” Young says. “It would have never happened if this conference hadn’t come along.”

Before the Conference
Young applied to IYVS at the urging of her adviser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she graduated with a degree in international studies and commercial French, with a minor in African studies. For the first time in her life, Young says, she was challenged to apply theory to practice, to create a specific solution to a specific problem.
She had already been serving as co-president of International Impact, a student-run campus organization that coordinates volunteer projects around the world, so the concept of IVYS—to “engage with global problem solving in a more responsible, sustainable, and effective manner”—was both familiar and exciting to her.

“Going into it, I was a little intimidated because of everyone’s biography,” Young says. “I couldn’t believe what students my age were doing across the country.”

But she soon discovered that instead of being pretentious over-achievers, all of the delegates she met were refreshingly sincere and down-to-earth, and the speakers were thought-provoking.

“I was just breathless,” she says. “I could barely keep up with all the different people there were to meet.”

Attending IYVS
Young was not alone in her admiration of her fellow delegates. Ryan Richards, a senior at Juniata College, is admittedly a veteran conference-goer, but he views IYVS differently than his other experiences. In his eyes, the summit was in a class of its own. “It really satisfied a hunger I hadn’t found satisfied at other conferences,” Richards says. “I was struck by the power of being around such amazing people. We honed and sharpened one another.”

Participants at the conference were organized into groups based on the main topic of their project, including gender issues, environmental advocacy, and economic solutions. Group members met over lunch every day as well as in between sessions. These meetings were an important time for individuals to share what they learned. A facilitator led discussions about common hurdles as well as innovative ways to overcome them. Many participants expressed that they had as much to learn from each other as they did from the accomplished speakers.

“I think the most meaningful part of the conference was just getting to know the different delegates within my small group,” says Ryan Pederson, a sophomore at Northwestern University. “It was really exciting to see how people were working within their own communities and the experiences they’ve had.”

A number of the speakers were not so far removed from their college days themselves. Many came to the conference to speak about initiatives they first conceived during their days as an undergraduate.

Michael Silberman, one of the founders of EchoDitto (www.echoditto.com), an online enterprise that specializes in communication and community-building via the Internet, helped get his venture off the ground as part of the grassroots movement behind Howard Dean’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. He spoke at the “Integrating Internet Technology” seminar. Our generation has a unique grasp of the scope of the Internet, Silberman says. He suggested various ways that participants could raise awareness of their causes using the most up-to-the-minute means of communication.
Seeing successful individuals make the leap from college into a career motivated Richards. “It was inspirational to see people at the next step and expand our universe of what is possible when we don’t have to go to school every day,” he says.

Richards and Young both attended the “Organic Community Linkage” seminar led by Alex Steed of Hip Hop Without Borders, an arts organization that seeks to unite people across cultures through art and music. Both identified strongly with Steed’s message and his straightforward style. Young was attracted to his emphasis on a connection to the greater community. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, she observed firsthand how individuals would isolate themselves from the rest of the city in secluded neighborhoods.

Richards focused more on personal bonds. “Relationships are the grease that allow social organizing to happen,” he says. Steed taught him to, “Look people in the eye. Get to know them. Do what you’re passionate about and nurture friendships. They can be allies if the friendships are sincere.”

Caitlin Cohen, a junior at Brown University, also was eager to learn about working effectively within a community. The “Asset Mapping” session engaged her more than any other. She says it was the positive outlook of the seminar that struck her the most. “It’s sort of interesting to think of things from the other perspective, not just problems in the society, but assets and things you have to work with,” Cohen says.
She sees this as another way to overcome the cultural barriers that often hinder work in foreign countries. “It’s very easy to accidentally come off as incredibly critical of a society that hasn’t had the same degree of ‘developmental success’ as American society,” Cohen says. “One way to overcome this is to focus on the successes.”

“Critical Reflection,” another conference seminar, addressed the difficulties of serving a community, especially when its customs are completely foreign to the volunteers. All projects should fit in with the community’s agenda, says Paul Arnston, a communications professor at Northwestern University. While this may seem like common sense, many of the service efforts fail because they reflect the priorities of the volunteers, not of the community. Arnston encouraged delegates to really engage in the communities they hope to serve.

That’s exactly what Young hopes to do in returning to Senegal. Many delegates proposed projects that would benefit countries they had previously studied in, often as a way to give back for their own experiences there. Young says that her experiences on that fateful day in October contributed to her resolve to spend her time and effort serving others. She works to see past physical appearance and recognize the humanity in people, regardless of their seeming foreignness, a practice that can be surprisingly difficult even when an individual undertakes a project with the purest of intentions. “People who didn’t have to help me stepped forward to help me, simply because I’m human,” she says, and the weight of those actions resonates with her still.

While Young was extremely impressed, and often overwhelmed, by her fellow conference attendees, she also found that many were on the same level as her. In applying to IYVS, individuals had to propose specific projects they hoped to pursue after the conference was over. All the participants there were deeply committed to their efforts abroad, no matter what stage their plan was in. Some, like Young, took the conference as an opportunity to explore a new idea while others were looking to expand upon already established efforts. For Richards, the specific focus of the fellow delegates was a major strength of the summit. “It assumed that people had an idea and had motivation,” he says, “so it could focus on equipping people with tools to implement them.”

And the benefits of the conference did not end when individuals walked out the door. Attendees had the option to apply for a grant to fund their projects and the organizers of IYVS are making a concerted effort to remain in close contact with delegates.

“I feel like I’m maintaining a relationship with IYVS,” Richards says, “and I’m excited about where that’s going.”

Reflecting on the Conference
Looking back on her accident in Senegal and her weekend as an IYVS delegate, Young says it was destiny that led her to create this project, something she realized through the conference.

“The whole experience, from the point on the island to the whole year of recovery, was so enlightening about this whole idea of service and charity,” Young says.

She says she never took herself seriously before, but now she’s confident she can make her playground idea a reality.

Young is working with a professor from her Senegal study abroad program, Dr. Ousmane Sène, the director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, to establish connections with local organizations and communities in need of disability assistance. And she is waiting for a response from RADDHO, a non-governmental human rights organizations based in Senegal.

To get the project off the ground, Young plans to recruit volunteers from International Impact, her university’s global service organization, and she hopes to partner with local Chicago elementary schools to connect young American students with children in Senegal and collect donations for playground equipment.
Young says she feels forever indebted to the multitudes of people who have offered their assistance to her since the accident, everyone from her Senegalese hospital roommate to her American friend Ben, who held her leg up for five hours right after the accident.

“Where’s the Hallmark card to say ‘thank you’ for that?” she says.

But Young is saying “thank you” in her own way, by building a playground for peace and setting off a ripple effect of compassion based on a proverb she learned in Senegal: “nit nittaay garabam,” which is Wolof for “Man is man’s medicine.”

“I have always remembered this because, on the island, it was literally proven to me,” she says. “We had no tourniquet, so we made one out of my friend’s bikini strap. We had no pain medicine, but holding someone’s hand was actually very effective. So in the lack of medicine, we had each other.”