After her first trip to Africa at 17, Kjerstin Erickson collected shoes for the children she had seen barefoot.
Looking back, she realized her “superficial knowledge” of problems in Africa had led her to design a superficial solution, full of good intent but possible ill consequences.
Erickson, 23, was the keynote speaker at the conclusion of the first International Youth Volunteerism Summit, created and organized by Northwestern students and held Thursday through Sunday on campus. Erickson, on leave from Stanford University, shared her path of realization, which reflected the summit’s focus on combining idealism and practicality to make volunteering most effective.
After donating the shoes, Erickson wondered if the feet of the recipients might lose their toughness. “What happens when the shoes wear out or their feet get too big?” she realized.
Today, Erickson is the executive director of Forge, an organization that does service work in African refugee camps. One program sends college students to Zambia and Botswana.
The conference, funded by NU, included about about 15 international and 60 U.S. student delegates. About 30 representatives from non-governmental organizations led workshops and spoke, and more than 50 NU students worked at the conference. Each student made a service project proposal and could compete for a $10,000 “outcome” grant. Many events were open to the public; organizers said more than 250 people attended an art exhibit on Uganda in Norris Friday night.
The students participated in six sets of workshops, ranging from Grant Writing to Communicating Your Vision.
Andrew Cunningham, a Duke University sophomore, is working on a program he created called VOICES. The program uses online classrooms for middle schoolers to help relations between the United States and China. He said the conference was successful at teaching tangible ways to improve international volunteer programs. For instance, it made him realize that VOICES, which stands for Virtual Olympic Interactive Community Exchange for Students, doesn’t convey the purpose of the program because it doesn’t mention improving U.S.-China relations.
“(The conference) was an inundation of business plans, business strategy and applying the for-profit model to the non-profit sector, which I thought was a useful and enlightening process,” he said.
Two leaders at Global Youth Partnership for Africa talked about how to “reconceive” how people should think about Africa – not as one place but as the 53 countries and 3,000 ethnic groups that make up a complex continent. But they also invited the 17 workshop participants to suggest who the partnership should be targeting with programming, and they asked delegates to reach out to them if they need information.
Nathaniel Whittemore, a Weinberg senior, said he and the other co-director of the conference, Jonathan Marino, a SESP senior, are already planning to have another conference, and they hope to be involved.
He said there are ideas for using soccer games between international and American delegates to bring them together, as well as looking for grants outside the university. He said the young organization representatives inspired students by showing them they didn’t need to be a certain age to make a difference, but he also might engage more people in their 30s and 40s with more “real-time experience.”
“Our suspicions and our personal feelings about what young people in global change need were not only confirmed but augmented” by the summit, Whittemore said.
Reach Kristin Barrett at [email protected].
