Students – The foot soldiers of community action

Students are often tagged onto international conferences to add legitimacy without giving them real influence. Not so at this month’s Talloires Network conference outside Cape Town, to which 40 student delegates from all over the world were invited on equal terms and where they were given a perfect environment to network with each other and prepare collective input.

Students played a key role in some of the activities, and were also genuinely consulted by the network leadership.

“The students are the focal point of what we do,” says Tony Monaco, chair of the Talloires Network steering committee and president of Tufts University in the United States, which hosts the secretariat of the global network of engaged universities.

“Through community engagement, we try to give them experiences along with their more traditional education. The skills and experiences they acquire are important to transform their own world views and make them more aware of their personal role in their communities and how they take their education and use it to benefit society.

“Since students are the focal point, they need to be a focal point throughout. Their voice needs to be heard and their feedback has to be taken into consideration. That’s why we gave them a prominent role in our conference in South Africa.”

Varied group

The group of students at the conference, held from 2-4 December at the Spier wine estate in Stellenbosch, was extremely varied and emphasised how community action may mean one thing to one student and perhaps something completely different to another.

Fridah Karwitha, a Kenyan student, said community work had almost become second nature for her after she had been bullied entering a private school while not being able to speak a word of English.

“I made up my own babble which sounded a bit like English,” she says.

“That made me the laughing stock of the school. Really, I was the dumbest kid in my family and ever since that experience I just wanted to help others to avoid ending up in a similar situation.”

“So when I went to high school in Samburu, I started an initiative where the smartest students helped the others. I launched a lot of different support activities and by the time I got to university I was doing all kinds of community action, except that I had to go to university to learn that it was what people called community action.”

For Kimberly Kujinga, a medical student from Zimbabwe, the situation was almost opposite. Initially the only child in a well-off family in Zimbabwe, the economic crisis in her country from 2000 onwards passed by her largely unnoticed.

“I simply missed it,” she says today, not without irony.

“I went to an expensive private school and my destiny was basically set from day one. I had lived a protected life with all my clothes from my earliest years still packed in suitcases in my rooms. I had never even given anything away in my life.

“I was going to be a medical doctor and I became a member of Rotaract, the youth branch of Rotary International, not because I knew much about what it was, but simply because that’s what you did.”

“Very soon after I joined we visited an orphanage six hours out of Harare.

“That was a long trip for me. It completely changed my life. I got back home, collected my suitcases with clothes and found an orphanage in Harare to give them all away.”

From then on Kimberly launched an ever-expanding portfolio of community support activities, ranging from cleaning up the campus and planting trees to campaigning for better hospital services.

As the first female president of Rotaract Zimbabwe she became the ambassador of the vice-chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe. She is also the campus coordinator of a Zimbabwean NGO that promotes youth leadership for community action.

“If I hadn’t done all this work, I’d probably be sitting my exams right now, but I cannot be happy without it anymore,” Kimberly says.

Testimony to empowerment

Just like the other students, both girls told their stories in Cape Town, not dutifully, but passionately bearing testimony to the empowering force of community engagement.

Students may be the focal point of the Talloires Network, but because of the temporary nature of their status, students are a volatile quantity. Harnessing their experience can be difficult.

Fridah, Kimberly and all of the other students who joined the conference in South Africa will no longer be students in just a few years. They will need to pass on the baton one way or another.

“This is something that requires a lot of attention,” says Tony Monaco.

“For leadership roles, many places target students who are neither too junior nor too senior, so they have some experience when they come in and their knowledge is not immediately lost when they leave their positions and can help with follow up.”

The student presentations and recommendation in the last plenary sessions of the Talloires Network conference came with a loud and clear call for students to obtain a more permanent role in the network.

This was answered with a direct recommendation in the closing document – the call for action – which recommended that students be given a permanent position on the steering committee in the future.