Summer-Fall 2001
CLA Grads Wage Global Peace
"With all the benefits of a vacation to Greece and the satisfaction of performing a service, a Global Volunteers trip feels like a richer form of travel. It's not just visiting the harbors, beaches, and tourist sites of the larger coastal towns. It's spending long, leisurely evenings talking with the elders of the mountain villages, eating meals prepared with ingredients fresh from our hosts' gardens, and building a connection with the children and their families."
The honeymoon they had planned was a Caribbean cruise. As her December 1979 wedding to Bud Philbrook (B.A. '69 political science, M.A. '81 public affairs) neared, however, Michele Gran (B.A. '77 journalism) grew more and more uncomfortable about starting her new life with a sun-and-surf vacation. Watching evening newscasts of Cambodian refugees fleeing their homeland in terror, she says, "It seemed kind of obscene to spend time in such a frivolous way. I didn't want to play on the same water where people were risking their lives."
"I tried to tell her it wasn't the same water," jokes Philbrook, who eventually agreed to what he now calls a "properly balanced honeymoon." As it turned out, that meant spending the first week at Disney World and the second week as volunteers in the impoverished, remote mountain village of Conacaste, Guatemala.
"It was a powerful, in-your-face kind of experience," Gran says of her introduction to Guatemala. "I got off the plane and started looking around for the exits."
Luckily, far from fleeing, they allowed themselves to be transformed. Today, the two U grads run Global Volunteers, a nonprofit corporation they founded that matches people who want short-term volunteer experiences with people who need help.
They admit it's been a tough journey from their honeymoon idealism to the realities of running an organization that matches 2,000 volunteers a year with people who need help in dozens of places in the U.S. and abroad.
When they began, says Gran, no model existed for short-term volunteerism. "It didn't seem logical that short-term help was a positive thing," she remembers. "It was a little fringy, a little on the edge. It was very, very hard to create an organization from scratch."
With his two U degrees, Philbrook had done work in economics that allowed him to "see at a microscopic level how what we had done could be beneficial." He used that background to write a grant proposal.
Michele, meanwhile, used her journalism background to develop a brochure for potential benefactors. With some corporate support and a board that included politicos and academics alike, the two sent their first team to Jamaica in 1984.
Today, the Global Volunteers headquarters is a renovated convent in Little Canada, Minn., where copies of Minnesota Business rest alongside African masks and Ukrainian dolls and photographs of grinning, gap-toothed kids from Guatemala and India. The organization owes its growth not only to determined business savvy and gut-level idealism, but also to its founders' willingness to expand to meet the needs of both volunteers and those they serve.
"The early volunteers were people on the edge of adventure," Philbrook says, "but if you want large numbers, you have to accommodate a wider variety of people.
"Today, we're doing more work with at-risk kids--kids who are homeless, Rumanian kids in the failure-to-thrive ward, kids who are premature or mentally challenged. The Rumanian health care system, for example, is hugely understaffed, so kids don't get any of the nurturing they need. Sometimes we say to volunteers, 'Just go play with the babies.'"
Prospective volunteers apply, and then meet with staff to determine interests, abilities, and affordability of the one-, two, or three-week experience. The response from volunteers is overwhelmingly positive.
"The ingredients are always there for failure," Philbrook says. "You have results-oriented North Americans going into cultures where time is wholly different, where relationships are more important than product, where nothing works, where roads are full of bumps and ruts. From the local perspective, these are rich Americans, whose pockets overflow. The local people must always be in charge. Even if we know the water is bad, they are the ones who must say, 'Our kids are sick.'"
The couple's own children--three boys aged 12 to 18--have been "fully engaged" in their parents' adventures, Philbrook says. They've taken turns traveling with their parents, one at a time.
Says Philbrook, "We genuinely believe we are actively waging peace. It's enormously gratifying work and we know we make a difference. Still, it's a drop in the bucket."
"And the bucket," adds Gran, "is leaking."