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