A Georgetown student group won a $40,000 grant from Reebok International Ltd. last week for its efforts to draw attention to and alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Students Taking Action Now: Darfur was named one of three finalists for the grant earlier this month and later won an online vote, conducted by the MTV-U cable channel, for the final prize. The group, which has over 600 student members at Georgetown, plans to use the grant money to create an adopt-a-camp program that would allow universities across the country to sponsor individual refugee camps in Darfur, helping to provide for their humanitarian needs.

Nate Wright (COL ’06), who co-founded STAND and received Reebok’s first Human Rights Young Activist Award, said the grant will allow STAND to expand its national efforts to highlight the needs of the suffering in Sudan.

“I feel that this victory gives us a tremendous opportunity to save lives while at the same time giving us a large responsibility to increase our efforts,” Wright said. “With the resources of the grant put into a large project that reaches out into the broader community, I feel we will have a

tremendous impact.”

Wright participated in the filming of a documentary on the Darfur crisis produced by MTV-U in March.

Patrick Schmitt (SFS ’06), a STAND member, said that the group also plans to launch a national summer conference intended to raise awareness of the situation in Darfur among high school students. He said that the conference would bring high school and college students together in Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of Darfur issues and reach out to new students in the area, such as summer interns.

STAND is also considering an online non-credit course on Darfur, genocide and human rights geared toward high school students, Schmitt said.

“Whenever we wanted to do a big event, we always ran into some obstacles, funding being one of the major ones, so with this funding, we can focus more on the contents of the event rather than just logistics,” STAND member Chiaki Ota (SFS ’07) said. “This would make the situation in Darfur and the sufferings people are going through very personal to the people here, which would motivate them to act even more.”

The push to increase turnout for the Internet vote at Georgetown involved multiple student groups. Students distributed flyers, sent e-mails to friends and family members, and displayed posters with information about the online poll. Georgetown officials also sent out a broadcast e-mail about the vote.

STAND was founded in Sept. 2004 by a group of Georgetown students, and has expanded to include members at over 170 universities in the United States and 18 in Canada. The organization has promoted awareness about the Darfur crisis through numerous campus events, including rallies and candlelight vigils.

“If you were to ask me when we began STAND last September where we would be today, I would have never thought we would be this far and have impacted this many people,” Wright said.

The other two groups competing for the $40,000 grant proposed different Darfur-related projects. The Genocide Intervention Fund at Swarthmore College proposed a “100 Days of Action” campaign to raise money for relief efforts and a letter-writing effort to government officials.

The Sudan Coalition at Duke University proposed the creation of a speaker series to bring prominent speakers to campus and efforts to promote activism in area high schools.