BY ARIEL MARTINO

In print | Published February 5, 2009

Yongjun Heo ’09 and Mark Hanis ’05 are scheduled to speak at the upcoming Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting from Feb. 13-15 in Austin, Texas.

Hanis will offer a crash course in starting an organization, while Heo will serve as a panelist for a presentation entitled “From Global to Local: How the Environment Impacts Health.”

The meeting is the second annual colloquium of students, college and university presidents, NGOs, celebrity activists and national youth organizations.

Former President Bill Clinton will host the event with the aim of encouraging college students and administrators to commit to addressing global issues in a productive, inspired and innovative manner.

While at Swarthmore, Hanis became increasingly interested in genocide intervention, an interest that was provoked by his four grandparents who were Holocaust survivors and reading works by Samantha Power.

“I was also empowered by Swarthmore’s faculty, administration and President Bloom’s ‘ethical intelligence,’” Hanis said in an e-mail.

As a result, Hanis and several other committed students started Swat STAND, an anti-genocide organization that is still active on campus. After graduation, Hanis and three other Swarthmore students moved to Washington D.C. and began the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-NET).

“We’ve grown GI-NET from the four Swatties who moved to DC to a seventeen-person full-time staff with a $1.9 million budget and are now working to expand our work from Sudan to other areas of mass atrocities, including Iraq, Congo, Burma, Sri Lanka and Somalia,” Hanis said.

Hanis hopes to use his experience in building an organization from a small student effort to an internationally-known NGO to inform his upcoming presentation.

“This session will be geared towards an audience whose commitments are more developed and ready to be scaled up to the next level.

These discussions will address long-term strategy, donor relations, liabilities, fundraising, staffing and other factors relevant to building and sustaining a long-term commitment or organization,” Hanis said.

He does, however, offer the caveat that it is always better to build on and improve an existing organization than create an entirely new organization.

Heo began his organization after receiving funding during his sophomore year from the Swarthmore Foundation to work in a health clinic in Venezuela.

The result was Pemón Health, an organization geared at providing sustainable healthcare in Urimán, Venezuela.

The organization specifically addresses the deficiency in healthcare professionals in the area, limitation of medical supplies, misunderstandings of basic healthcare and lack of modern medical supplies. These factors, compounded with endemic malaria, parasites and malnutrition, have led the area into what Heo calls a “health crisis.”

Elisa Lopez ’11 joined Heo and nine other students this past summer in Venezuela. The group worked on a waste management project and distributed mosquito nets and clothing.

“While some of the students held community health workshops in the school, others assisted the doctor with medical emergencies,” Lopez said. “As a native Spanish speaker, I naturally became a main interpreter and soon started collecting data and information about the village by interviewing villagers, which fits perfectly into my sociology and anthropology interests.”

Lopez and co-Vice President Erin Scanlon ’10 plan to continue the organization after Heo’s graduation.

“Interest and dedication in the group is high, so I am hopeful about the coming years. Attending the conference should be very beneficial, since we will have the opportunity to create partnerships with other students,” Lopez said.

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