Senior in finals for service award

Senior Caitlin Ryan was selected as one of 15 national finalists for the Students in Service Awards. Ryan, an Indiana Daily Student employee, is representing IU in the competition. The winner will be announced March 18.

“It is really exciting,” she said. “It is exciting to be the only person from Indiana to have made it this far.”

Ryan’s service project is called Books & Beyond, a service learning project that connects college students at IU with TEAM school students in Newark, N.J. The writing partners work together to write children’s stories centered on a general topic during the course of the year.

Rwandan students at Kabwende Primary School are also writing stories. The stories are all compiled into an anthology and delivered to Rwanda, Ryan said.

“The core value of the project is that everyone in this world has a story to tell so everyone’s story is important,” she said.

Ryan, along with four other students and five teachers, traveled to Rwanda during summer 2009 to deliver 2,000 books.

“It was amazing,” she said. “It was my first time in Africa. It was a cultural experience for sure, but it was also really cool to see the project go full circle because when we were building it up, we were thinking about that this is benefiting three different groups of students in two countries, and finally we got to see the part outside the U.S.”

The Students in Service Award winner receives a $5,000 scholarship, $2,500 for his or her nonprofit project and $2,500 for the community organization with which he or she is partnered. Ryan, however, applied for the award because of the potential benefit to the project as a whole.

“I mean getting the scholarship would be nice, but I mainly did it because I saw it as an opportunity for us to get a grant and support our project,” she said. “This is the first year they did this particular competition, and I didn’t realize how big of a deal it would be and how many people would enter. You can see what all the students are doing around the country, and it is really amazing.”

Ryan, who is planning on traveling to Rwanda again this summer to deliver more books, said Books & Beyond has made her college experience.

“I mean I love the academic things IU has to offer and I have learned a ton in the classroom, but I have learned almost more outside the classroom through my involvement in this project,” she said.

Ryan said she sees the project continuing to be successful after she graduates.

“In my first and second year, it was like, ‘I am investing myself in this because this is a good thing to do,’ and this year it has been more like, ‘this is awesome and I want other students to have this opportunity in the future,’” she said. “I think it is going to go really well.”