Every year at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, students bring something new to campus. This year students felt compelled to form a new student organization, the Humanitarian Society. What started off as a conversation between individuals whose families have been affected by various global crises soon became a collective effort toward breaking barriers.
They started by visiting every department across campus to begin a communal conversation between students, faculty, and our community. The Humanitarian Society's mission is to build a constituency of active humanitarians whose priority is to instill hope and positive change in their local and global community by focusing on preventing further atrocities through education and awareness.
The Humanitarian Society welcomes individuals from every discipline and culture who seek a greater understanding of the events happening around the world. It strongly believes in the power of awareness to change the attitudes, lives, and actions of individuals in the most critical situations. Ultimately, the students believe that through learning our history as it is being written, we gain the ability to prevent future humanitarian atrocities from being repeated. By connecting people together in a shared moment of awareness, they hope to better our community no matter what area of life we come from.
The students' on-campus events help them connect with their peers by giving them a chance to communicate about a variety of humanitarian crises through a more informed and broader lens, and provide an opportunity for students to grow and promote their roles as global citizens. With unique interactive activities, the students of UALR are able to get a clearer understanding of the complicated world of humanitarian aid and global affairs. It is for that particular reason that they have taken the opportunity of forming a bridge between campus life and the world around them.
For their first event, they have chosen to connect with the Wisdom House Project in an effort to raise awareness on the war in Syria. Students at UALR have shown great concern toward the current conditions in the war-torn country and have connected personally to kindergarteners at the Wisdom House, our Arkansas-supported school in Idlib, Syria.
This event will take place at UALR in the EIT building auditorium from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Friday. By being aware of the world as a whole, they hope that their peers will feel a sense of responsibility to learn and take the first step toward becoming active and progressive humanitarians.
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Zayna Abdulla and Humam Shahare are students at UALR, and executive director and president, respectively, of the Humanitarian Society.
Editorial on 02/20/2020