Responding to Disaster with a Service Learning Project for Honors Students

INTRODUCTION On Thursday, April 27, 2011, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of Alabama struck in the form of ferocious tornadoes touching down in various parts of the state. The dollar amount of the property damage was in the billions. Lives were lost and thousands of survivors' lives were seriously and in many cases forever disrupted. A few days later, the dean of my school, a school of business that is part of a larger university, dropped by my office unannounced to tell me that the university's president had just called to tell him that unnamed donors had agreed to give money to the university so that the school of business could help the survivors. He said "we" had a meeting on the matter later that day with a senior university officer. The following is a summary of the program that developed as we strove to provide help to the survivors, along with some lessons learned that might be helpful to others considering a service learning experience for honors students. I believe that our program demonstrated that a somewhat impromptu response to a disaster can be an effective service learning experience in an honors program. The disaster that befell our community was extraordinary in its impact, with a disproportionate effect on low-to-moderate-income families and neighborhoods. The generosity of our donors was also unique as was their desire for students to have a finance-focused experience. However, the lessons learned from how we responded to our misfortune should apply to disasters of all sizes and types and to responses that neither involve distribution of donated funds nor are undertaken by a school of business. DIRECTION FROM THE DONORS I did not know who our donors were or the amount of their donation when the dean and I attended our first meeting with the university officer who had spoken with the donors a few days after the disaster had occurred. We learned at the meeting that our donors were a group of local business leaders led by one individual with very strong ties to our university in both financial support and service on governing bodies for the university and its affiliates. Our university is a large public research institution that is part of a system of other research universities. As it turns out, the donors had only two directives to give us at the start: (1) that their funds should be used to help the survivors of the disaster and (2) that their funds should be used in a way that involved business students in some way. Either the donors or the senior university officials communicating with them provided early direction that the funds be used to make small loans to the disaster survivors, perhaps because this focus would provide the desired business content. Alternatively, the donors might have first decided that they would like to fund a loan program and then directed the funds to the business school because lending money is a "business." Lesson Learned: Although it was our donors who took the initiative, your school's development personnel might know of donors who could be contacted in the aftermath of (or perhaps even before) a disaster to fund a student-centered service learning project. Your school might have internal funding for such a project as well. I should also provide some background on myself because my experiences shaped the eventual design of the project. Just a few years before this event, I had joined the faculty of the school after a thirty-year career in business, mostly as a banking lawyer. I directed the school's honors program, which is a selective program for juniors and seniors focused on leadership. Most but not all of the students in the program are business majors. In our first meeting, the dean told me that he thought that these honors students would make excellent participants in the sort of service learning program that seemed to be evolving; in retrospect, this would have been an interesting hypothesis to research. …