Last week, as part of the Dean’s Fellows Spring Speaker Series: “Stepping Out of the Ivory Tower,” Daniela Papi Thornton, a Notre Dame graduate, lectured on how students can make international service more meaningful, and in the long run really more effective. She focused on social entrepreneurship as a key to international development.
While living in Cambodia, Daniela founded PEPY which is an educational development organization and PEPY tours which is an educational travel company. With about 100 students entering into service each year after graduating Notre Dame and countless more getting involved in service during their time at Notre Dame, I found her talk to be very relevant and think the messages she shared can be valuable to many people in the community. Below are a view key points from her lecture:
1. Invest in people
In 2004, Daniela and Greta Arnquist decided to plan a cycling adventure across Cambodia in order to learn about and contribute to education programs in the area. A few other friends joined them and “The PEPY Ride” was formed. In conjunction with another organization, the team raised funds to help support a school building project in Cambodia. When Daniela arrived at the newly built school, which was supposed to support up to 500 students, before her ride began, it was empty and had only a few regular teachers.
This was a turning point for Daniela and the rest of the team. They realized that to make an impact they couldn’t merely invest in building structures to support education, they would have to invest in people. In this case, they had to train teachers and train those who wanted to be teachers.
Daniela explained that people often feel an obligation to help those less privileged that them and different organizations make it seem easy to do so by just suggesting that you donate money or certain supplies such as books or bikes. Issues are often much more complex than just a lack of a resource.
2. Service learning needs to shift to learning service
Service learning has become very popular and consists of bringing people to developing countries to learn through doing service. Daniela argues that this can be detrimental to communities being “served” and disproportionately benefits volunteers. People who want to do service first need to learn about the community they want to help and then use the knowledge they have gained to come up with solutions to the problems they have learned about. For example, a social entrepreneur should not come up with an entire business model to build an orphanage in some country without first making sure that this is what the country needs.
Daniela gives an example of learning service by explaining what a volunteer may say upon arriving in a new country. He/she would say, “Hi, I am here to learn. How can I help you?” or “How can I be of value to you?”
When done this way people are learning how to serve and service can become something that is not solution led, but problem led. If you are aware of a problem then you can act with intentionality and measure towards it unlike if you simply begin with a solution.
3. “Action without learning is ignorance. Learning without action is selfishness.”
Daniela shared this quote during her lecture and I think it encapsulates a lot of what she spoke about. Initially, as she admitted to, she was ignorant because she did not take the time to learn about what was really missing in the education system in Cambodia. The second half of the quote is relevant to some, not all, people who go on service-learning trips. Often, they go to country to help for a few days and while they may learn about the community they are in, they don’t necessarily take an action at home or come back to the community in the future.
If you are looking into service programs or trying to figure out how you can help others be sure to consider some of Daniela’s points!
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