The national organization Student Movement for Real Change now has a GW chapter that is trying to connect students across the globe.
One of GW’s newest student organizations, the group helps coordinate international service projects and raise awareness about global issues.
“The Student Movement is committed to engaging student leaders on issues that don’t receive enough media attention while also connecting students to opportunities to make a difference today,” said SMRC founder and Executive Director Saul Garlick. “We connect students with projects in the developing world that they can fundraise for.”
SMRC also connects students who have international internships, sponsors an international pen-pal program and helps student leaders start college chapters, co-sponsor conferences, lead workshops and initiate projects.
“Our most central way of empowering students comes with our leadership development work on college chapters,” Garlick said. SMRC currently has active chapters on 20 college campuses and Garlick hopes to expand to 100 campuses by the start of the next academic year.
Senior Kris Ansin, who recently returned from studying abroad in South Africa, started GW’s chapter of SMRC.
“I never thought I’d be the one to bring an organization to campus,” Ansin said.
However, after being contacted directly by Garlick, Ansin conferred with other student leaders and started the chapter that has been meeting since the beginning of the semester.
The 30 students involved in SMRC at GW “are in the best possible position to make change,” Ansin said. “They’re coming from a position of ‘why not’ instead of ‘why.'”
“As global as this school thinks, there are many regions we overlook, Africa being one of them,” he said, adding that he hopes to raise awareness about health and education issues in this region.
SMRC has already built a school in the Limpopo Province of South Africa and is working to build a water pipeline that would provide clean drinking water for more than 20,000 Kenyans.
Raising funds to support SMRC’s projects is the other goal Ansin has for the GW chapter. The group is selling blue and white bracelets for $10; all of the proceeds from bracelet sales go to SMRC’s national organization to help fund various international projects.
“The major reason we decided to bring SMRC to GW is that we felt there are so many student groups on campus that a sort of ‘white noise’ has resulted,” said Julia Masters, another senior who helped bring the group to campus.
Masters said that the large number of student organizations has caused students to block them out instead of getting involved in any one advocacy campaign or philanthropic project.
Masters said she hopes that fun events and different advertising techniques will enable SMRC to stand out in the crowd.
Masters has spent most of her free time starting a Joining Hands pen-pal project at Ludlow Taylor Elementary School located in Northeast D.C. Volunteers from GW’s SMRC chapter go to first through sixth grade classrooms and help children write letters to students at the primary school SMRC has built in South Africa.
Volunteers give students individual attention and help draft pen pal letters as part of a program to improve writing skills.
“The primary goal is to make writing a focus in the education of elementary children both in the U.S. and in South Africa,” Masters said. “By showing these children how big the world is while they are still young we are hopefully helping them to dream bigger and see that they can be a part of helping make the world they live in a better place.”
SMRC’s first official event at GW, a showing of the Academy Award-winning film “Tsotsi,” which is set in South Africa, will take place this Friday in Marvin Center room 403. The group will sell Student Movement bracelets and provide pizza.
