From the Challenges of the Adventure Learning Grant to Enduring Global Engagement

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Susannah Arnhart is an ALG alumna (2010-2012) whose heartful exploration of ecology and creativity led her to the Peruvian Amazon. She lived and learned with Shipibo-Conibo families. Although their elaborate textile culture initially called her, she’s grateful for what she learned of Shipibo language and oral literature, indigenous governance, and ethnobotany. Susannah has gone on to teach natural building. She currently works with youth and homesteads in Japan.

Kathryn Johnson is a queer, non-binary writer and consultant who has spent the last two decades protesting, organizing and lobbying on incarceration, trade, immigration and U.S. foreign policy.

After living in Guatemala from 2007-2010, they served as Assistant Director of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, and have traveled frequently to Mesoamerica leading delegations, conducting research, and accompanying migrant caravans. They have also worked with the American Friends Service Committee, coordinating the organization’s policy work on immigration, trade, and U.S. engagement with Latin America and helped defeat the Trans Pacific Partnership with Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

Kathryn has a B.A. in International Trade and Human Development from Fairhaven College at Western Washington University and a Master of Public Administration from the Evans School at the University of Washington.

Kathryn Johnson is a queer, non-binary writer and consultant who has spent the last two decades protesting, organizing and lobbying on incarceration, trade, immigration and U.S. foreign policy. They spent 2004-05 in Chennai, Madras, India on an Adventure Learning Grant.

After living in Guatemala from 2007-2010, Kathryn served as Assistant Director of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA. They have also worked with the American Friends Service Committee. Kathryn has a B.A. in International Trade and Human Development from Fairhaven College, WWU and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Washington.

Anna Van de Grift is a Geography Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University who currently researches water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) insecurity for people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, Washington. Anna joined the Fairhaven community as an agricultural laborer and artist in 2007. Those experiences motivated her pursuit of higher education in order to use her research in service of community advocacy. Her ALG project was on the ethics and practices of microfinance Latin America, which influenced her later research on politics of control and access to water for highland communities in Peru.

Through this work, Anna traveled with government officials and politicians to remote communities to observe contentious negotiations over water rights and infrastructure development as well as joined farmer activists to observe illegally drilled wells. Using ethnographic methods, she documented community leaders’ accounts of wetland loss. She considers the Peruvian central highlands her home second only to the Pacific Northwest. Between her time at Fairhaven and her master’s at Syracuse University, Anna also lived and worked in Japan. Due to the pandemic and travel limitations, her current research has shifted away from Peru. However, her concerns for social equity and processes of marginalization continue to underpin her research on water governance policy, everyday strategies to access and control water, and the diverse ways in which humans value water including to enhance health and well-being.

Anna Van de Grift is a Geography Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University who currently researches water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) insecurity for people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, Washington. Anna joined the Fairhaven community as an agricultural laborer and artist in 2007. Those experiences motivated her pursuit of higher education in order to use her research in service of community advocacy. Her ALG project was on the ethics and practices of microfinance Latin America, which influenced her later research on politics of control and access to water for highland communities in Peru.