 "Photo: Elizabeth Moskowitz, Daily Texan Staff")
The nonprofit organization Students of the World, or SOW, enables university students to go abroad and learn through hands-on experience while informing others of positive global changes.
The nonprofit uses media (short films, photography and journalism) to document how innovative, non-governmental organizations are working to diminish social problems in developing countries around the world.
“As a photojournalism student, it was a great opportunity to travel and document positive change in the world,” said junior Megan Peyton, who traveled to Paraguay with UT’s SOW chapter this year. “I witnessed a different way of life that no study abroad program could ever offer.”
In 1999, Duke University sophomore Courtney Spence founded the organization as a student group. It has since spread to six university chapters across the country, including UT.
“SOW is a way for students to engage in the world and actually go out and experience it while creating media and helping non-government organizations tell their stories,” Spence said.
UT students started their chapter in 2003 and traveled to Uganda to document foundations that supported orphans affected by AIDS and war. A feature-length film, “Children’s War,” based on this trip and the SOW cause, is currently under production in Austin. UT has since had five student teams travel to Guatemala, Kenya, Israel, Thailand and Paraguay.
Six or seven students will be chosen through applications and interviews this fall for the next trip in summer 2009. In the spring semester, the team will choose a nonprofit organization to document and begin preparing and fundraising for the trip. Students of the World trips are funded primarily by student fundraising, but offsets some costs such as housing or transportation.
After the trip, students will do events on campus to raise money and awareness for their specific cause.
This past summer, a team of seven UT students journeyed to Paraguay for four weeks to study and document Fundación Paraguaya’s organic agriculture school, “where students are taught to farm and sell their products, with the income going directly to the school and their education.”
The students documented this rural, yet innovative, approach to education by filming, updating a daily blog and photographing the school’s students in their surroundings.
“The students make money through their classes to help support the school and then graduate with technical agricultural skills and business leadership experience,” said UT sophomore Jamie Doak in a blog post while in Paraguay. “They become rural entrepreneurs and leaders in their communities.”
The school’s unique structure has students, beginning in ninth grade, divided into weekly rotating teams. One group works in the fields, milking cows, feeding pigs, planting orange trees and tomatoes, while another group spends a week in the classroom learning administration, history, chemistry, agricultural theory and other academic subjects.
The founder of Fundación Paraguaya, Martín Burt, described the school as “education that pays for itself.” This description is also the title of a five-minute documentary put together by the team to create awareness and gather support for the school.
The student videos from all Students of the World chapters were highlighted last week at the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting. “CGI is a nonpartisan catalyst for action, bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges,” according to SOW’s Web site.
With the support of the initiative, the student organization recently launched a new Web-based program, See Change, to help spread the knowledge of non-profits around the country.
See Change is a media outlet and a fundraising Web site that allows students documenting NGO’s to upload their daily journals, digital photography and video diaries to reach a wider audience.
“The flow of knowledge that we facilitate is what I’m most proud of,” said Chris Severen, team producer for SOW in Paraguay, “SOW is unique because we give students a real film project that can effect real change.”
“Ultimately, we want to change the way that nonprofits communicate with the world and I think the best way to do that is through media impact,” Spence said.
For more information on SOW and See Change, visit studentsoftheworld.org and seechangenow.org.
The article was very well written.