Values-Driven Education - Stewardship

At the 6th Annual Exhibition of Institutions hosted by the National Council for Higher Education ARCC was asked to present a paper on "The Role of Universities in Advancing National Cohesion and Integration." The following is a portion of the paper presented by Jeff Atherstone, the Director of ARCC, on the role of values in education for advancing national cohesion and integration.

EXAMPLE #3 – STEWARDSHIP

Uganda has been called “the pearl of Africa.” We have beautiful soil, abundant rain and sunshine, along with thick and diverse vegetation. Yet many people in our country are hungry and ranked among the poorest in the world. How can a country be so fertile and yet so poor at the same time?

Jesus Christ told us that “the poor will always be with you” and so we are not claiming to have the answers to end all world poverty. We do believe that we can do better and alleviate a great portion of the poverty around us through teaching proper management of time and resources, which we call stewardship.

In order to teach the value of time some of our students pay us in units of time rather than in Uganda shillings. In 2009 we established a Scholarship Fund to help students from disadvantaged regions of Uganda. Currently we have 85 students enrolled in this program. Each student is required to pay a small fee of less than 100,000 UGX per semester in addition to working 10 hours per week on campus. Students in this program are assigned jobs in the library, IT lab, kitchen, farm, maintenance and secretarial services.

With 85 students providing 10 hours per week this is the equivalent of having 21 full-time employees working for free. Between the Scholarship Program and our Friday Community Days, discussed under the value of community, over 40% of the human resource hours on campus last term were performed by students in a volunteer capacity. As I mentioned before, practicing values-driven education has the potential to save your university money.

Along with practicing stewardship with our human resource we also practice stewardship with our natural resources. Currently our campus has 20 acres of which only 6 are used for classrooms, offices and dormitories. The rest of the 14 acres were covered in weeds when we bought them 2 years ago. Our philosophy with land is that if we don’t have finances for buildings we will use the land for farming. Currently our campus has 4 acres of matoke, 4 acres of beans, 2 acres of potatoes and 4 acres of assorted vegetables, including pumpkin, eggplant, peppers, onions and tomatoes. We have also incorporated 250 fruit trees into the landscaping of the campus.

This term our projection is that the farm will provide over 50% of the food served to our 200 staff and students this term. With the majority of our students boarding on campus this represents a huge savings to the school that can be used in other areas to improve the library, IT and other student services on campus.

Our goal is to build a university campus that provides a model of our value of stewardship in the way we care for creation. We also have plans to add on solar panels to collect power from the sun and to build water collection tanks to capture the rain from our roofs to be used for our campus farm.

Click here to watch our Stewardship Video. 

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