The Alt Break Experience

Alternative Breaks are an opportunity for students to travel and explore social justice issues through service learning experiences. These trips are student-led and participants work with communities for hands-on experiential learning, addressing global and local challenges. Alternative Breaks are part of Break Away, an organization that helps universities provide quality programming that exceeds the typical volunteer experience. The trips are based eight components: strong direct service, orientation, education, training, reflection, reorientation, diversity, alcohol and drug free. http://alternativebreaks2012.org/.

American University offers many Alternative Break programs, focusing on a variety of different social justice themes. In less than a month, me (Rebecca Stein-Lobovits), and my co-leader Rebekah Israel will travel to Haiti with 7 students and our faculty advisor, Shoshanna Sumka. This is American University’s third Alternative Spring Break to Haiti. After the earthquake in 2010, AU signed onto the Haiti Compact, which is a commitment to support Haiti through 2015. We dedicate our support by leading this Alternative Break trip and continuing the conversation about stability, reconstruction, and sustainability. Our trip will focus on women and youth empowerment, and we will spend our time in rural Haiti working with two organizations that promote community development and microfinance. To prepare for our journey, our group meets weekly for educational trainings on our partner organizations (APF and Fonkoze), women and microfinance, Haitian culture and Creole. We discuss the issues surrounding our trip theme, and our role in Haiti as an Alternative Break group.

The Alt Break participants will be posting more information about the partner organizations that will be working with on the ground, and a further discussion on women’s role in reconstruction in Haiti.