Looking to volunteer abroad over the summer? It turns out that there are more options than just DukeEngage.
Students of the World has been sending service-minded undergraduates across the globe for a decade. Founded by Courtney Spence, Trinity ’02, in 1999, the organization’s mission is to highlight social issues through student-produced media.
As a sophomore at Duke, Spence found herself interested in both activism and documentary studies, but was at a loss for an outlet that utilized both of her skill sets.
“I wanted to marry the two concepts, international experience with storytelling and media,” she said.
After fleshing the idea out with friends and Duke administrators, her vision became more and more of a reality, garnering enough support to send a pilot group to Russia that summer.
Working in an orphanage village, the team lived with families for several weeks and captured their experiences through photography and writing.
“We hung photos at coffee shops.... We got word out any way we could,” Spence said.
The response to their work that summer was so positive that they were able to send a group to Cuba the following year. When Spence graduated in 2002, the program at Duke was still thriving and the Universities of Texas and Michigan were forming their own chapters. Subsequent chapters at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brown University, Columbia University in 2007 and New York University have been established.
Since then, Students of the World teams have worked both domestically and in 30 different countries, including Thailand, Guatemala and Tanzania. Paired with local non-profit organizations, volunteers use media to raise awareness for the groups and their causes. This takes the form of anything from documentary films to still photography to written words.
Last summer, sophomore Ashley Tsai helped create a stop-motion film for Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, the section of the city most ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. As a student, Tsai, like Spence, was drawn to both creative and philanthropic endeavors.
“I wanted to be able to use artwork to do something that benefits others,” she said. “[Students of the World] gave me the perfect venue to take my artwork to the next level, to do something bigger with it.”
Though it would be easy for an initiative like Students of the World to dwell on suffering and hardship, Spence stressed that her intent is not to exploit sentimentality.
“We’re storytellers focusing on solutions, not just problems,” she said. “We’re bombarded with messages of terrible things; It’s important to recognize organizations and individuals that are doing incredible things.”
Senior Dani Potter, who writes for Recess, worked with a team in Brazil in the summer of 2008. She said this optimism is one of the most rewarding aspects of the work.
“That experience has driven all of my further research and community involvement,” she said.
For the past six years, Students of the World has worked with the Clinton Global Initiative, which publishes their articles and screens their films at its annual conference in September. This, Spence said, has helped expose their work to many key figures in social activism. Students are also granted the opportunity to collaborate with industry professionals during the six weeks of post-production in Austin, Texas.
Spence believes that Students of the World is unique among the myriad service-oriented volunteer programs offered to college students.
“You don’t see many organizations doing what we’re doing, putting [the volunteers] in very intense immersion experiences with the purpose of storytelling,” she said. “We can be a microphone for voices that aren’t heard around the world.”
For more information about Students of the world, visit www.studentsoftheworld.org.
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