The renowned Alan Shawn Feinstein Community Service Center at Johnson & Wales
University in Providence, Rhode Island, invited NAEIF President Ted Wills to
help them design a weekly enrichment course to prepare students for a service
project to Mexico in February 2005. To help inspire the participants, NAEIF
sponsored a visit by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student
activist Sindhura Citenini, founder of
Nourish International, in December 2004;
In April 2004, the foundation sent the recently graduated Mexican student leader
Dr. Georgina Pérez-Liz to be the keynote speaker
at the first national student conference of GlobeMed.
Her speech was
considered the highlight of that meeting. NAEIF also sent two student leaders
from
Nourish International at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the conference;
NAEIF provided promotional assistance to GlobeMed
student leaders at Northwestern University to support its awareness and
fundraising activities on campus on behalf of indigenous communities in Mexico
in 2003 and 2004;
During the summers of 2001 through 2003, NAEIF’s president
led Northwestern University students studying at the
Universidad Panamericana
on a weekend service trip to remote indigenous communities. Year after year the
students reported in their final evaluations that this was the best part of
their entire visit. As a consequence, the two universities have incorporated
these trips to the countryside into their annual program;
NAEIF consulted with Medicina y Asistencia Social,
a Mexican foundation that serves indigenous communities, in the development of
its web site, among other projects; and
NAEIF helped
the medical school of the Universidad Panamericana to develop its "tele-medicine" capability as they attend to remote indigenous
communities.
