International service learning for sustainable development

hello

i’m caroline payne and i’m a political

science professor with a passion for

coffee

by the bean or by the cup as a source of

energy and most importantly to me as a

source of change

i’m going to talk to you today about

something that i call 21st century

colonialism

which i believe is undermining the

development of countries all across the

global south

in addition i’m going to tell you about

the warrior coffee project that i had

here at lycoming college in williamsport

pennsylvania

where we actively reject this 21st

century colonialism and its harmful

effects

i’m going to start with a brief

discussion as to what 21st century

colonialism

is in order to understand that we have

to first

understand the types of colonialism

which have preceded it

so first of all colonialism in its

original form which are probably most

familiar with

is a practice of primarily european

countries that for hundreds of years

forcibly located themselves in

developing countries in order to extract

raw materials for a low price

they would then take those raw materials

back to the home country turn them into

finished goods

and not only enjoy them at home but

export them back to the colonies and

sell them at a high price

many people argue that this is actually

the source of the inescapable debt

cycles that we still see

all over the developing world across

africa asia and latin america today

colonialism effectively ended around the

1970s

but we many people argue that it was

replaced with something called

neocolonialism

neocolonialism is where multinational

corporations replaced

states as the extractive forces in these

countries

in both cases of colonialism and

neocolonialism

the populations of the global south were

devalued

they suffered from a lack of transfer of

technology

and knowledge and they were often

regarded

implicitly as the other and more

troubling

as less than their counterparts in more

developed countries

unfortunately 21st century colonialism

is no longer a product of government or

corporate action

with the ease of travel and the goal of

intern of educational institutions

to make their student body more globally

aware and help their students

acquire what they call cultural

competence it has become a fixture

of secondary and post-secondary

education

in the form of international service

learning

what does this look like in practice

this

looks like high school and college

groups

going to developing countries and

building houses

that they’re ill qualified to build

leaving behind

structures which are not built to stand

the test of time

much less natural disasters that these

countries often encounter

it’s also leaving behind a still

unemployed

and underemployed workforce that

actually has the skills to build those

houses

it is well-meaning groups who cap wells

with merry-go-rounds

to make water extraction easier and give

kids something fun to do while they’re

helping their families

but not teaching locals how to fix those

things when they break

much less using resources that are

sourced locally so that when replacement

parts are needed

they can be acquired and can be

used to fix the broken material it’s

college and high school groups

flocking to orphanages so that they can

be

yet the next group of volunteers to hug

and play with children

only to also be the next group of people

to disappoint them when they leave at

the end of the week

early on in my career it was actually

an orchard project where we failed to

adequately vet our partner

and realized far too late that he did

not have the trust or the respect

of the community i came to this critical

opinion

of international service learning by

critically examining my own mistakes

as well as those of others in an effort

to quite simply get it right

because at the end of the day our

community partners

and our students deserve nothing less

i met my community partners on a remote

mountaintop in the dominican republic

about eight years ago

while there on a research trip i was

taken to a coffee farm and on that

coffee farm

not only did i learn more about coffee

than i had ever

thought could be learned but i learned

the importance of family

and community and taking care of one

another

they told me stories of who they came

from

and through hard work they showed me who

they are

on that mountain on that day they

left me with a question that really just

came

by observing them and that was this

how is it possible that these people

that worked

so hard that labored from sun up to sun

down

nearly every day still

despite that and despite the fact that

what they were producing was a really

valued commodity on the international

market they still were living in dirt

floor houses

they were still cooking on three rock

stoves and they still

had no access to power

and so when i left that day i left

knowing that i needed to answer that

question

and to find a solution so it turns out

the answer to

the question was actually quite simple

the

answer was they were getting paid as

little as 8 to 15

cents a pound in the worst years and no

more than a dollar fifty a pound

in the best years because there’s only

one buyer

for domestic coffee there’s only one

competitive buyer that has an effective

monopoly over the market

additionally there are very few

exporters and so it’s almost impossible

to get

green coffee out of the dominican

republic and to a market that can and

will

pay more for it

the solution was harder though both in

its form

what was it that that i right could do

and that we could do and maybe more

importantly how could i include my

students and i knew that i wanted to

include my students because i wanted

them to learn from this incredible

community i wanted them to learn from

the real world

i wanted them to be actively engaged in

solving real world problems

alongside real people that struggled

each and every day

and so i along with a very powerful and

supportive team

took that call to action and we answered

it with something called the warrior

coffee project

a project that we conceive of as an

alternative

model of international service learning

that actively rejects 21st century

colonialism

each and every day that looks like

what we think is a really creative

endeavor so first of all

lycoming college purchases green coffee

or what we

what is called unroasted coffee from

dominican producers

for a fair price most recently that

price was two dollars and 80 cents a

pound

a far cry from what they originally

received

we take that coffee and with our local

partners alabaster coffee and tea

company who roast it we serve that

that coffee throughout campus and also

sell it in retail bags

at various venues in addition to paying

a fair price for the green coffee

we also make a profit from our roasted

coffee and so we take all of those

profits

and we subsidize the cost of travel for

student groups to get to the dominican

republic where they engage in

international service learning and they

work alongside the community

of el niro and hito so our projects can

essentially be broken down

into two main categories for the

long-term development project

students have been involved in a number

of ways

such as using their research skills

which are skills that they do possess

right unlike building houses and they

use those skills

in order to help connect

farmers with information about what the

international coffee market expects

so that they can choose if they want to

alter

their harvesting or production

capacities in any way to meet the

demands

of the international market those

students have

also collaborated with farmers by

launching most recently a micro lending

program

where farmers can take out loans to

upgrade their pr

their production facilities so that they

can improve the quality of their coffee

for our short-term development projects

those include

things like collaborating with community

members to ensure that they have a

reliable water supply coming to their

homes

working with a local entrepreneur to

establish a pico

program so that people who don’t have

power in their homes at least have

some source of light and ability to

change

charge their cell phones so that they

can get information as needed

and then finally exchanging effective

pedagogical

information with local teachers

some of that might sound familiar it

might sound

similar to other international service

learning programs that you’re familiar

with

but we think it’s important to note that

there are four things that we do that

are different

and we do these things in an effort to

avoid that 21st century colonialism

first and foremost we employ a

sustainable model of development

where the core of our project is coffee

a product that the community has the

knowledge and the resources

to produce exceptionally well and

they’ve been doing that for generations

in order to do this all all we’re

helping with

is providing them access to an

international market that thus far

they’ve not been able to break into

and information so that they continue

to be able to access that market we’re

not giving them

short-term giveaways that yield

short-term results which a lot of

international service learning does

instead we’re positioning them

so that they are the source of their own

economic development

additionally by connecting them to those

other buyers

we’re we’re making sure that they don’t

become too dependent on lycoming college

things change sometimes we can’t travel

sometimes we might

have a different administration to come

in and have different priorities right

so we have to plan for the future and so

in doing that we want to make sure

that if we were to have to leave the

community for some reason

that we don’t leave them worse off and

so that’s really the heart of

sustainable development

third is the fact that we actively

work to balance a community

approach with a student-centered

approach while learning outcomes are

important

they cannot and do not for us

outweigh the outcomes of projects for

the community

we do this through the use of both

formal and

informal assessments of community needs

and

following those community needs

assessments this means having very

hard and involved conversations with

community groups

so that we can work with them to

establish a priority

for projects so what should be done

first and what can be

held off on until later and then also

talking about how we would collaborate

to foresee this project through to

fruition

before we make any commitment to a

project

faculty and students have a critical

period of self-assessment

where we ask ourselves formally what

skills we need and what knowledge we

need to successfully complete a project

and what we have if we feel that there

are some deficiencies

then we try to supplement our group with

area experts and also

do some knowledge building and some

skill building in strategic areas

if that’s not possible then

unfortunately

we don’t commit to a project it is

incredibly difficult to say no to a

community in need

but we actually think that this has been

an essential part of our success we’ve

been able to build

trust and a positive relationship with

the community

because we’re not willing to make

promises that we can’t follow through on

unfortunately they’re far too used to

broken promises when they work with

volunteer groups from the global north

and we’re trying

very hard not to be that group finally

we’re in this for the long haul one-off

trips to communities to volunteer

where a group has never been before nor

do they plan on returning

well those projects are not planned with

a community in mind

it takes time and it takes trust and

that’s

just not possible in a one week

or a one month trip we have committed

ourselves to many years

and we’ve seen that that is an effective

approach over time

by prioritizing the community needs we

have built a relationship of trust which

in the long term

has proven very effective at

accomplishing our goals

unlike projects that position faculty

and students

as the authority on what’s wrong we

actually are empowering community

members to recognize

things that they want to change and then

helping them

figure out how to be the source of their

own change all the while

teaching our students how to help them

so effectively we’re inverting the

traditional power dynamic

that you see in international service

learning

which i think is actually really

important

it gives students a more realistic view

of the world and a more realistic view

of their place

in it and most importantly

it refuses to position poorer

communities

as helpless victims and students as

saviors

so over the past eight years

we have accomplished a lot but there

remains a lot more to be done

both in terms of our program development

and

in terms of spreading the word about an

alternative model of international

service learning that we really believe

in

so the next chapter of warrior coffee

is helping spread the word the next

chapter for me

is helping other faculty and staff who

design

international service learning

experiences for students

figure out that they need to concentrate

and focus more

on sustainability they need to actively

work

each and every day to avoid dependency

they need to balance the community needs

right alongside

student needs and they need to commit to

a long-term relationship

in short my hope is that i convince them

to stop being perpetuators of 21st

century colonialism