what? why?

Welcome!

I wanted to begin by introducing myself, I am a third year global studies major with a focus in non-profit humanitarian work. This is my academic/field notes blog.

During this spring semester I am going to Rwanda, where I will be following the internship that I have had for over a year to the source of our efforts. The organization that I work for is call World Dance for Humanity (http://worlddanceforhumanity.org/) (WD4H). WD4H is a Santa Barbara based non-profit supporting sustainable, grassroots development projects in rural Rwanda.

Through this blog I also hope to raise the consciousness of my friends, family, and members of the 1st world to the struggles of the majority of the rest of the world. I also hope that writing in this form will allow me to digest the things I am learning and be able to express them in a concise way.

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I am going to begin by explaining what exactly WD4H does.

Our mission is to provide help and hope to 25 Rwandan communities struggling to survive and create a sustainable livelihood for themselves. These communities are organized in government-sanctioned cooperatives. A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise. Many of these co-ops are made up of groups of people that share a common theme: widows, orphans, former sex-workers, unwed mothers, people with HIV/AIDS, impoverished farmers, and members of previously warring ethnic groups – all of whom now depend on each other to survive.

The key to these ventures is that the ideas and plans comes from the co-op members themselves. 

 Our different prongs of assistance include:

  1. Annual student stipends for 200 students (primary school, secondary school, and college)
  2. Goats, full-grown pregnant cows, chickens, and pigs
  3. Parcels of farmland
  4. Training in business, agriculture, leadership, and cooperative management
  5. Funding for community-run businesses, including 4 reusable menstrual pad businesses, 3 sewing businesses, 3 bakeries, a ventilation brick business, 2 event rental businesses, a café, and a fish farming project
  6. Health insurance for 600 people each year who can’t afford the $4 annual fee
  7. Mattresses for people sleeping on the ground; solar lights for people with no electricity

I don't want to sound like a brochure for WD4H but I do want to display the size and scope of our efforts and most importantly how WD4H goes about this type of work much differently compared to other non-profits. Our holistic approach allows us to aid in the development of every part of these peoples' lives. We work from the inside out, so that these cooperatives truly feel they OWN these projects, and the changes happening in their lives. As opposed to how most NGO's work, where project ideas and concepts are thought up  by a board of privileged people in a far away land, with no concept of what the people they are servicing need. 

WD4H is also a breed of it’s own because our main non-physical goal is to help the people we work with to reimagine their own existence. Instilling in them that they do have the capability to recover, grow, and flourish.

As for my role in all of this, here are a couple of things that I want to focus on during my trip:

  1. How non-profits decide where to allocate funds (When everyone is struggling in their own right, how do you decide who needs what the most)
  2. How the people receiving aid view the countries and people they are receiving these things from and how they view the inequality in the world in general
  3. How these cooperatives created such a strong sense of community in a country still working to rebuild itself after the 1994 Genocide
  4. The environmental and economic impacts of WD4H's new permagarden project
  5. The social impacts and health impacts of a reusable menstrual pad project, and it's effect  on the taboo of menstruation in Rwandan culture (I will talk about this project more extensively in a future post)
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I want to finish by saying thanks for sticking with me and now that we have a base for what WD4H does in Rwanda and what my purpose there will be, I'm really excited to share everything :) My hope in this blog is that through my experiences you can gain some insight into the struggles and growth of the rest of the world!

- Grace