A club on AU’s campus is struggling to attract a membership since its inception last fall.
Partners of the Americas, a non-profit organization, creates partnerships with Latin American countries to bring social and economic development projects across borders, according to the organization’s website.
The club at AU is part of Partners of the Americas Campus, an organization to bring more youth involvement to the organization through university partnerships.
However, the club is struggling to keep students engaged. Two interest meetings last week failed to spark interest.
“It’s kind of disappointing because what we’re finding is that AU students tend to be in their own bubble,” said Nathalia Montoya, vice president of the AU chapter and a sophomore in the School of International Service. “What we’re finding is to keep students engaged is to let them have more responsibility.”
And that’s exactly what Partners AU President Ukiah Busch, a SIS graduate student, sees for the club in the long term.
“The whole idea behind Partners Campus and Partners AU is that the ideas for projects will come from the membership,” he said. “As the membership grows, more ideas can be implemented.”
Busche created the AU division of the organization as part of his day job at the Partners of the Americas headquarters in D.C.
“The idea with Partners Campus was to create an opportunity for students at universities to become members of Partners of Americas and to design and implement their own service and development projects,” Busch said. “The student chapter was a different idea that would allow us to access a whole different demographic.”
The club seeks to provide students with the resources to create their own development projects and to provide networking opportunities by bringing speakers to campus, he said.
“As far as the network, Partners of the Americas in general emphasizes the importance of connectivity and networking,” Busch said. “Not the D.C. definition of that word that you network to get work, so much as networking in the sense of collaboration.”
In its first year, Partners AU brought a dozen speakers to campus and held several fundraisers, Busch said.
The AU chapter of Partners Campus’ biggest challenge is developing projects that have an impact on a broader, more global, scale.
“We want to have impact in Latin American communities, but it is hard to do that over a distance,” Busch said. “The easiest fallback on when you can’t make a direct impact is to fundraise for somebody who is having a direct impact.”
Last year, the group raised $300 for One Laptop Per Child, an organization that donates $100 laptops to students in Latin America, Busch said.
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