We are so excited to announce a new partnership with Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. A core group of social minded, passionate students have founded an Aynah Chapter on campus and we could not be more thrilled.
Read on to hear directly from Earlham students and their excitement in starting an Aynah chapter:
Why are Earlham students are starting an Aynah Chapter?
Earlham is a diverse college that has many students from different backgrounds. Even though, Earlham has many student organizations there are only few organizations that work with sustainable development. Therefore, starting an Aynah chapter at Earlham college will help to increase the engagement and thinking of students about sustainable development and organizing projects that can spread ways of sustainability around the world. Furthermore, at Earlham we are planning to organize a “Issues of Sustainability” course for Fall 2014, which will help students to learn about many aspects related to sustainable development and apply them in their class discussions. Aynah Chapter at Earlham will be able to provide a platform for students to come together and share their ideas and knowledge about community development while applying them in real life situations.
What are the goals for the Earlham College Aynah Chapter?
The Earlham Aynah chapter’s overarching goals are to promote education and engagement in sustainable development and cooperative practices. As a group of students from diverse academic backgrounds, we all have varied interests in these fields. We aim to combine our diverse perspectives and experiences to create a space for the Earlham community. Our Aynah chapter may reach these educational goals through hosting workshops, showing films, and having discussion forums, among other events. The chapter also hopes to cultivate a supportive community of students from diverse educational and experiential backgrounds interested in sustainability and cooperative projects.
More tangibly, our chapter hopes to regularly participate in Aynah-sponsored projects. These projects will allow the students in the chapter to gain valuable and applicable experience in the fields of sustainable and community development. Additionally, working on Aynah-sponsored projects will enable our chapter to contribute much needed resources and service to our global community. Specifically, the chapter aims to raise funds to pay for the construction of a community center in La Ribera, Costa Rica this year. The project would culminate in the some of the students in the Aynah chapter going to La Ribera to facilitate sustainability workshops in the new community center. The workshops will be developed during an interdisciplinary class in sustainable development and conservation the chapter is working to create for the 2014 fall semester.
What are you excited about as you start an Aynah chapter?
We are excited to….
…Learn about developing a project in a community of our interest and have a chance to learn from the process of planning, creating and developing experiential knowledge with a variety of approaches in the field
…Learn the ways in which we can both help and learn from La Ribera’s community and forge relations for future opportunities
…Learn from one another and form a group that shares common interests in sustainable development and experiential learning
…Travel to Costa Rica and make our time meaningful by bringing initiatives and learning from the ones already initiated there
Stay tuned for more updates from Earlham as Aynah staff visits the chapter the last week of March!
Aynah 