Growing with ISOW: The Benefits of Student Leadership with Becky Breen

Becky Breen attended Wilfrid Laurier for a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Global Studies, with a French minor. Throughout her time in ISOW, she served as director of events in her third year and led the ISOW team as President in her fourth year where she helped establish critical partnerships throughout Southeast Asia.

When did you learn about ISOW? Why did you get involved??

I learned about ISOW through a field course on Israel and Palestine taught by Dr. Brockett. I was immediately intrigued by the experiential learning aspect of this course and saw many parallels to the work ISOW was doing at the time.?

Originally, I got involved because I felt ISOW was a club that focused on empowering student leaders by allowing them to use the knowledge and skills they had to help individuals affected by conflict while providing a learning environment that aligned with my personal and professional aspirations.?

What were your roles and responsibilities in ISOW?

Primarily, throughout my time as director of events I was tasked with coordinating with various stakeholders to ensure all ISOW events such as staff lunches, socials, cultural events were all held in an exciting and professional manner. One event that I helped plan was the Middle Eastern Cultural Evening.?

As I became President, I took a more holistic role in ISOW and was able to go to Myanmar and Vietnam where another student leader and I were able to help meet new stakeholders and work through a memorandum of understanding with an ISOW partner organization. Later, near the end of my time as President I helped spark conversations regarding ISOW’s Newcomer Scholarship.?

With regards to ISOW’s model of student leadership, how do you think the responsibilities you had assisted you in your professional development?

I think the experiences I had at ISOW led me to want to better understand education as a means for migration, International Affairs, and Social Justice; these were many of the themes that were explored in ISOW. Being a part of ISOW helped open many doors for me and I have since gone on to hold positions such as Director of a Refugee Ministry at a church in Waterloo and Internationalization Coordinator at Laurier Brantford! ISOW undoubtedly helped me build both soft and hard skills which helped guide me to my current career and provided me with many competencies I still utilize throughout my current work.

The trip to Southeast Asia opened up my eyes to how important transnational connections are. And I think that’s why I’m so involved with my current role in Internationalization - I can see the value in connecting with people abroad. Bridging those pathways to Laurier is important - just as much as seeing what’s being achieved abroad, and why that should matter to us. I think ISOW’s practical components really aided me here, because it’s one thing to read about some of these scenarios in a textbook, but to actually go out to all these different countries to have discussions with people and connect to them is another thing. I think that meshed nicely with my current career.

So for example, there’s a lot of really great international work going on at Laurier right now, but unfortunately there isn’t really a unifying strategy for it yet. There’s great work being currently done through various partnerships, but my work right now is supporting the SEO Global Strategy in trying to fill in the existing gaps so that we have a clearer vision of what we should be achieving with our international strategy.

What other skills were you able to develop throughout your experience as an ISOW student leader?

Generally, I would say ISOW immensely improved my confidence in both? professional and personal settings. Jobs can be really intimidating when you’re a new face. And in ISOW, your confidence comes from knowing your ideas won’t be dismissed. But then on top of that, everything I learned from my experience ended up being a massive boon for my career. When you’re with ISOW, you’re going to meetings with stakeholders in university administration and attempting to understand the politics behind a lot of their decisions. You’re networking, trying to make connections, trying to make pitches about ISOW to anyone who might be interested - spending time trying to make stakeholders and administrators see the value of what you’re doing was a really important skill to me, and learning how to tailor your pitch ended up being an essential part of my skill set as well.

What experiences were you afforded at ISOW that you thought were unique from other university-sanctioned clubs?

I think that having the opportunity to contribute to an initiative that is working toward something very meaningful and engaging in a way that is both ethical and sustainable was really special. You have mentorship opportunities and you can bring your own creativity to the initiative, but you also have that support from the faculty and from your fellow students. You also spend a lot of time bonding with scholars and really sharpening your intercultural competency - it’s fun to meet new people who you may not otherwise have known! By being a hub that fosters student participation, and by being student-led, ISOW has a lot of leverage in terms of being distinct at Laurier.?

And then the trips! A lot of the trips I undertook with ISOW were to places I may never have gone alone. And if I was to go alone to places like Israel or Palestine, I never would have been able to have the depth of reflection that was afforded to me, or to be able to engage with the experiential learning that’s crucial to ISOW’s model. We had the opportunity to dig deep, to reckon with history and to have intelligent people guide us through it. The trip I made to Southeast Asia’s another example - had I just gone as an average tourist, I don’t know if I would have picked up on the fact that visiting different schools on the border between Thailand and Myanmar was something I enjoyed doing! It was great to hear peoples’ different experiences, and having the opportunity to engage with that breadth of knowledge.

As much as it’s about learning, professional development, and global justice, ISOW is also fun!

What do you think your most important contribution to ISOW was?

Oh, well…that’s tough, because I don’t think anything I did there was truly me acting alone. We did everything as a team, and there was a kind of situational context when I was at ISOW in which opportunities would spring up because of past decisions or past meetings. So, for example, the trip to Myanmar in September, 2019 ended up being really valuable to ISOW moving forwards, but it started because of students in Dr. Brockett’s course proposing ideas for where the scholarships could expand, and conducting their own research through that lens. Granted, we all chip in a bit - and our position as students helped us relate to the people we spoke to on these trips - but as valuable as all that is, I think it’s worth stressing that everything we do is a team effort. So, I can’t actually take credit for any one thing.?

What’s one thing that you think undergraduate students should know about ISOW?

It’s important that they recognize the variety of ways you can engage with ISOW. Someone’s reason for joining doesn’t have to be so narrow. It helps if you care about access to education, sure, but there’s a lot of different dimensions to ISOW that are practical and beneficial. There’s aspects of business, of leadership, of research, of coursework…there’s a lot that I feel that ISOW can offer, and there are a lot of avenues to explore.?

If you don’t see a place for yourself in ISOW - well, you could join and fashion a place for yourself, because ISOW is designed with innovation and creation in mind. It’s been that way since the start.

How do you think ISOW speaks to student values at Laurier? What does a club like ISOW represent for Laurier?

Laurier is a huge advocate for enhancing student experience and student leadership which directly aligns with ISOW’s core values! ISOW provides a family-like environment for student leaders while being exposed to countless learning opportunities - you get to apply theoretical skills, but also practical ones too. These are skills you carry with you for life; they’re all transferable!

Similarly, I feel like Laurier is also a place that champions causes. I think they’re committed to global justice and access to education, and you can see how ISOW fits right into that. Laurier is all about ensuring ALL students can have great experiences on campus. Laurier and ISOW alike are constantly looking at how we can translate domestic student opportunities into new frameworks for overseas and international students.

International Students Overcoming War (ISOW) is a student-led and student-funded humanitarian initiative at Wilfrid Laurier University. ISOW seeks to meaningfully respond to the devastating impacts of war by providing full scholarships to students from conflict areas. It also seeks to educate Laurier students about the impacts of international conflicts by promoting intercultural learning and globally-engaged citizenship.

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