First Draft

Something that I have yet to experience in my lifetime is traveling outside of the USA. Recently I have been given the opportunity to do just that and more when I signed up for a trip abroad to Tanzania with a nonsectarian volunteer group called GIVE. On the trip I will be joining fellow college student volunteers from around the globe in building self-sustainable structures with the natives, along with helping them learn English. Currently I am a part of a FSU GIVE Facebook group because there is not an official club on campus yet. Through that group I was able to connect with Emily Orstad, a FSU senior who has been on three different trips abroad with the group and is going on her fourth soon. However, a question that I wanted to answer before going was how GIVE community ended up in Tanzania and if they are asked to come aide, or have they been imposing themselves upon the natives?

Founded in 2011 by Jake Allison, GIVE states on their website that their mission "is to inspire growth, empower global citizens, and ignite sustainable change worldwide." Unlike other tourism organizations where the focus is on business, GIVE focuses on sustainable development. Following an Asset-based community development model, the organization focuses on sustainable development by using the host community's assets and resources for the bases of development which also means that the organization does not simply ask what the community needs. Instead of handing a finished project to the community, the organization works alongside the community's leaders to form an action plan to achieve their ultimate goal of getting the "host communities to take full responsibility...as soon as possible."

As for the volunteers, they are college students from around the globe and the organization's goal for these volunteers is to become global citizens. It is their thought that these global citizens "will become the next generation of social entrepreneurs, parents, community leaders, educators and so much more – working together to end extreme poverty and uplift every member of the human race." The goals of GIVE seem to be logical to me as hands on interaction with a level of poverty, poverty that might not have been felt by the volunteers until their experience, may lead to them seeing it not just as a third world problem, but a battle that must be fought by the human race