National Office Blog

Summer 2009 Projects

Hey everyone!

We’re happy to announce our partner organizations for the summer of 2009!  Below you can find information about each of our partners, the projects we’re supporting, and which Nourish Chapters are involved with each.  Also, if you feel so inclined, you can click here to donate directly to a Nourish Project.  And now, without any further ado:

Partner: Kigezi Community Project
Project: Cycle for Health Initiative
Chapter(s): Boston College

The Kigezi Community Project works in Kabale, Uganda, a region where hilly terrain, a lack of paved roads, and an inability to access motorized transportation make it difficult to mobilize people, goods, and basic resources.  The Cycle for Health Initiative addresses this problem by working with community health care organizations to effectively distribute donated bicycles and train employees in their maintenance to increase access to health care.

Partner: African Sky
Project: Organic Cotton Scrub Tailor Shops
Chapter(s): Emory University

African Sky is a community development organization that works with individuals and communities in Mali to confront the devastating effects of endemic poverty and inequality.  Emory University will be working to support the Organic Cotton Scrub Tailor Shops project, which facilitates local tailor shops in creating organic cotton scrubs.  The sale of refined products (scrubs) rather than raw materials provides farmers and tailors with a direct revenue stream and fair wages.

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Last Saturday marked the first deadline for Nourish’s 2009 Chapter Founders selection process.  In the months of January and February alone, we received 32 applications from students across the United States.  Applicants represented a wide range of universities, including Brown, Cornell, Georgetown, NYU, UPenn, Vanderbilt, Chicago, and many others.  In the coming weeks, these students will participate in a series of interviews before the newest group of Chapter Founders are selected to begin Nourish chapters.

Since the beginning of the selection process in January of this year, 264 interested students have begun Chapter Founder applications—a number that is expected to grow as the second and final deadline of April 19th approaches.  Ten to twelve students will ultimately be chosen to receive 500 dollars in startup capital, the opportunity to attend Nourish’s annual Summer Institute in Chapel Hill this August, and professional training and support throughout the year as they return to their campuses and begin their chapters during the 2009-2010 academic year.

If you or anyone you know are interested in applying, you can go here to tell a friend, and you can also visit our Chapter Founders page to start an application today!

Founding an organization is one of the most difficult things someone can do. It takes time, skill, dedication, and a healthy amount of luck.

Nourish International does everything it can to make sure that it’s Chapter Founders are as successful as possible. Our Chapter Founders program selects for students with the right mix of motivation and leadership ability. Each chapter receives $500 in start-up capital, training at the Summer Institute, and support from a full-time staff member throughout the year in order to make sure that our Chapters thrive from day one.

On the whole, we’ve succeeded. Of the 19 Chapters we founded last year, 14 have grown to the point of running multiple ventures on their campus, a success rate of over 70%. Even more impressive, this summer we expect 90% of our Chapters to participate in implementing a project abroad.

Despite our success, however, it’s important to be upfront about the places where we haven’t been as strong so that we can learn from them. Of the 5 Chapters that haven’t been able to run multiple ventures, 2 have been working to gain student organization status on their campus (the college version of “incorporating”), which will allow them to raise money in the future.

The other three chapters have folded.  Those Chapters are Princeton, Tufts and Virginia Tech.

More information on why these Chapters folded, and what we’re doing to make sure that this is the exception rather than the rule, will be available later in 2009.