Students for Humanity is a student association based in Milan, aimed at promoting values of solidarity and social responsibility. Today, the association represents a platform for all volunteering initiatives developed within Università Bocconi.
Students For Humanity organizes events, fundraising, experiences abroad and awareness campaigns so that university life is lived from the point of view of forming people and citizens who are aware of their surroundings.
Our Initiative
Our initiative stems from the desire and need to supplement university education with experiences and opportunities for reflection that can teach us respect and dignity, equality and solidarity. We propose volunteering not only as a form of help to those in situations of social and economic hardship, but also as a form of awareness of the world around us, as an opportunity to learn valuable life lessons from others. We believe in the importance of being active citizens and attentive to the problems of the local reality, but with an international outlook.
Students for Humanity …
… is involved in different aspects of volunteering.
Firstly, it operates on the territory of Milan, through the establishment of a Volunteering desk, where people from all ages are able to get in contact with volunteering associations of Milan operating in different fields.
The association’s activities in Milan include Mobile unit services, where volunteers meet homeless people in the evening/night and give them food, blankets and clothes; serving meals or giving food to people in need; giving clothes to people in need; playful, educational, artistic workshops with people with mental disabilities; helping in a plant nursery, gathering seeds and taking care of plants and many others.
Nevertheless, the core activity of the ‘Students for Humanity’ association is ‘Working for Wasa’, which was born in the summer of 2011 from the desire of some young people to bring direct and concrete help to the Wasa community they had met during a trip.
Working for Wasa
The ultimate aim of the project is to provide high quality education for the children and young people of Wasa, while at the same time ensuring adequate housing conditions and providing scholarships for the most deserving students, so that they can continue their studies. In all this, we work to enable the village of Wasa to become self-sufficient. The village of Wasa is located on a plateau in the heart of Africa.
Specifically, it is located 80 kilometers south-west of the city of Iringa in Tanzania. Every summer, volunteers from the airport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, travel around 600 kilometers by bus, passing through typical African landscapes, panoramas and scenery in the space of ten hours.
With ‘Working for Wasa’, new volunteers leave every year in order to be able to provide new perspectives and get ideas for new aid initiatives. We strongly think that the best way to really help Wasa’s community is to get to know their point of view and their habits, not to change them but to try to integrate them with a more modern perspective which will allow them to become self-sufficient while not leaving their customs. Also, this also allows us to spread knowledge and awareness of the project.
The chosen volunteers are selected and trained throughout the year, and they travel to the site during the summer months to continue the project and monitor conditions in the village of Wasa. During the year, the continuity of the project is guaranteed by the constant flow of communication between Working For Wasa’s contact persons and a number of local reference figures, first and foremost Baba Stan, the local priest in charge of the mission that hosts the volunteers every summer.
