Global Community Project: Service Learning in South America
Tom: Just a couple things to wrap up. First of all, do you want to tell us what the Global Community Project is?
Christian: Oh sure, yeah. The Global Community Project it's a non profit I started several years ago and what we do is we take mostly high school kids, and some middle school kids, and we do a service-learning and cultural exchange trip. And so far we've done them only in Patagonia, the place where I know really well. I know the community really well. And so we go to Chile and the students spend you know, sometimes up to five nights with a local family, getting hooked up with some local kids, go to school, spend time with their family, practice their Spanish. And then we take the whole group — the kids from the States and the Chilean kids — and we go to the national park and in the course of doing some trekking we also so some some service projects.
We've done some trail building work and go to some national park. We have given trail building courses to the guides and other volunteers. Well, to the guides and the rangers and other volunteers in the national park. The last trip we did a huemul census. The huemul is this endangered Patagonian deer and so we helped the rangers and local scientists try and figure out how many were in the area. We did a little bit of rock climbing, which was really awesome because the kids that we brought from Jackson... All the kids who came with us had been rock climbing before. And some of them had been climbing with me before. And so they got to teach their new Chilean friends how to do some rock climbing. So that was a blast.
Really the goal is to gain some new perspectives on how people live in other parts of the world and also instill in people this idea of service and giving back to communities and how rewarding that is to give your time to a project that has some really tangible results.
Tom: How would somebody get involved?
Christian: To get involved you basically contact me.
Tom: Okay.
Christian: I'm Global Community Project right now. It's a really small organization. …We tend to do a trip every other year. It's been a bit of a struggle to get funding for it in order to help offset costs, because it is expensive to travel to Chile and make all this stuff happen. One of the things that I want to try and do is to connect with other communities, where a local community can put together a group that we facilitate the whole process and make it happen. So, you know, a school from San Francisco could put together their own group, and we'll make it happen, things like that. But, it's a pretty small organization right now, but has been incredibly rewarding, and from that, from those experiences, and actually creating the organization and the whole curriculum was part of my Master's degree project.
And from our experiences doing the global community project, we've expanded some of the stuff that we do for Aerial Boundaries as well. So, for example, we're coming up on our third Patagonia trip, Patagonia Leadership Development course for the Wharton School of Business, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania. And so we've taken a lot of the lessons we've learned at the Global Community Project and are applying them to these university and also corporate programs, where we, again, we go down, we do some trekking, and the students do a community service project, a "Social Impact Project" is what the Wharton school calls it. And we've done some strategic planning for some non-profits down in Patagonia. Last summer, last season… Patagonia summer, we…
Tom: Right. Their summer, our winter.
Christian: We worked on a regional recycling program. This year we may do some business development with some small businesses, because these are business students that we travel with. So, it's an opportunity for them to practice their leadership skills. We have leaders of the day. And then to, again, kind of give some tangible benefit back to the local community, and it creates a better connection with people, and you get to hang out with people more because you're doing these projects with them, and so, that's been really rewarding. One of my favorite things to do as a guide now is doing those trips.
