Revealing our Roots: A Conversation with Brandon Blache-Cohen

This past summer we sat down with Brandon for a conversation on his Collaborative origin story. The following was edited lightly for our blog.

When I think of the current iteration of the collaborative I think about things that predate me. They tell these stories going back to 2002, a group of people who were interested in global service learning, basically went into the woods and had a fire and talked about how this work can be better-how it can impact and influence both students and communities. My understanding is that that grew into the Institute at Cornell. And Amizade was a co-pilot in that for a long time.

I actually had Eric [Hartman, Collaborative co-founder] in college, his very 1st class he ever taught. It was my last class at Pitt almost 22 years ago. I had just gotten back from Semester at Sea. I'd already completed all my majors so I could take whatever I wanted. I changed every course I had, and one of them was called Democratic Citizenship taught by this kid who hadn’t done anything before. It was so cool. He was the only professor who ever asked anything outside of the classroom of me.

Part of my coursework was that I had to work in a homeless shelter for 1 evening a week I cannot emphasize how important that was for someone who'd already done a lot of service, who'd already been around the world – literally circumnavigated the world – but I hadn't a mile from my house played cards with people experiencing homelessness. Friendships with someone living in such a different lived reality. Eric forced that on the students. And it was amazing.

Later, one of my favorite professional experiences was in Skaneateles, New York, where we held an Institute. We convened folks at an old nunnery – there were nuns all around. It was right on the lake, it was fall 2010 or 2011. It was just a great group of people. The weather changed a lot. It was this very unseasonably warm fall day, and then it snowed a bunch in the night. It was just a really, really cool experience. A lot of people who attended that are still in our network, still working with us in different ways.

You know, we had held Institutes, not just at Cornell, but also in Syracuse one year, usually on a college campus. That felt like our super bowl. That grew into globalsl. Academic folks picked up the ethos of fair trade learning that had been discussed for many years. It grew really quickly.

Kansas State was probably the biggest gathering I remember. There was Notre Dame also, we bounced around the country. At the same time, all this was percolating Amizade and our community partners were frustrated with the sector, especially the study abroad side of what we do. For-profit companies could come in and talk about service learning or volunteerism but really it was just an exploitative practice to extract resources from communities and charge students money and make a profit from it.

We got really interested in the marketplace, of what was going on specifically in study abroad and service learning. We realized that no one was policing this. Administrators were really vulnerable to it and had no idea – and oftentimes were even getting kickbacks

So we worked with our partners to create the concept of fair trade learning. There's a lot of stories that we've published on how that ended up playing out. At the end of the day we were  looking for a market-driven language that people could understand. Basically, we can't destroy certain things, so maybe we can just get people to inch into a better place.

And so that's why we created these ideals. Eric and Cody (at the University of Middlesex, Dubai) and I were really integral. As the Institute was growing we merged in with a lot of the ethics at the same time. It was a response to the ills of the sector. It was also when a lot of healthcare volunteering was booming.

I think there was another phenomenon going on and it relates to Barack Obama. I never thought that volunteering would not be cool, or would fall out of favor in America. And it has, the data points to that, especially amongst young people. It is not a coincidence that it rose at the same time as this political movement going on in the United States with Barack Obama as My Brother's Keeper movement. It really did have an influence on this. 

Our job at that time was a lot easier, to recruit students for what we do. The language was so much more altruistic. Now it's so different. We can't use the same language that I see in Ireland, in Europe where that altruistic language is very popular with people today. People there are moved by human rights and children's issues…

Eric was the leader of this, and he saw a really important bridge between the academy and communities, that higher education is supposed to inherently be merged with. Jess and Nora, and everyone did a great job growing it. I was at all of the Institutes and Summits, for a good portion of a decade. I probably didn't miss any. Then COVID happened and messed with everybody.

Another great memory was the first gathering after COVID at Cornell. I came with a whole bunch of people on our team and we also had a lot of our community partners. There were 80 80 or 90 people there, it was our first time being in public and for many of us. The first night we get an email saying someone just tested positive for COVID-it was the person who sat next to me the entire day.

The next morning I wake up, and my colleagues hear me coughing in the shower. I get out of the shower getting ready to go to the Institute, and they say, “Brandon, you gotta take a COVID test.” I'm like, “What are you talking about? I feel fine.” They insisted, “You gotta take a COVID test. We heard you cough in the shower.” I take a test: it shows up positive.

Now, if I had that same test I would isolate. Everyone like gathered around and was like, “This is positive.” And then we made the call: none of us can go to the Institute today. We'd rented a big AirBnB, so we all had to be out of Ithaca with our heads down and N-95 masks on. I felt bad that a good portion of the Institute that second day wasn't able to make it because of them. That was my last collaborative gathering, actually.

AllPeopleBeHappy works in communities in 22 countries. We don't typically work on university campuses. We have partnerships in each one of those countries, and they're not academic in nature. In the academic space the Collaborative would be our favorite people. I go to The Forum, I went to NAFSA this year, and I wander around roaming, looking for people. They're not there. They're with the Collaborative.

Collaborative events led me to great relationships, great friendships, some folks that we used to have a really good time with. It's not just talking about these issues and having activities around them. It's also about building a community of practice with people all over the country. These are the folks that we collaborate with all the time.

The Collaborative’s new home at CFHI, we're always cooking up ways of collaborating and working together. I consider them the go-to organization like us. When someone comes to us and wants to do health science work we always point them in their direction. It's where people can find their people.

Looking forward, there's a lot of challenge because the small players are collapsing right? Anyone who had a USAID grant obviously is in trouble, or connected to the State Department is in trouble. EPA. Department of Education. The motherships of so much of our work have been deleted.

At the same time I know that faculty members, academics who were part of that Obama phenomenon who grew up and got their PhD 10-15 years ago, they want to incorporate meaningful world experience into their academic practice. It's supposed to be the mission of most universities, and it's just not. And that's why the Collaborative is so important.

Within the Collaborative I hope one of the things that folks are thinking about, long term is not just how can we bridge community based global learning with whatever the relevant talk of academia today, but how can we really put pressure and change the academy. How can it be different? Thinking back to that class, that's how it should be. And it still isn't that way.

We do more project-based learning in some of the sciences, engineering and business. This is something I would have never predicted. When the collaborative was first starting, all of our partners were sociologists and anthropologists. It feels as if there's a major seismic change happening in higher education. This could be the moment, this could be the opportunity for a new birth of how we do higher ed, or at least a part of higher ed.

This is a niche of a niche, of a niche, of a niche, of a niche, of a niche-but it doesn't have to be that way. With what we're starting to experience with AI is we're gonna have to just have more meaningful careers.

My 11 year old daughter said to me the other day, “Dad, I'm really bad at math, so I'm never going to go to a good college.” I told her, “Math is not a thing anymore” if a good college is looking for a mathematician in 8 years, when you're going to college, I will be really shocked because AI, as of this year is better than the world's best mathematician.

I hope that what they're looking for is people who see the world a little bit differently, for people who can help to adapt and make meaning out of our labor. And I think thatthe opportunity in a coalition like this: how does higher education become more meaningful?

In my current work it's really an incredible gift to give out hundreds of thousands of dollars for projects. How do we decide what projects in our communities are getting funded? One of the criteria is meaningfulness. I've actually never seen this in a philanthropy conversation. A refugee does not typically have work authorization. Or in many of the communities we work in, people don't have the ability to just wake up and go to a job. So often in the West that gives us meaning.

So what do we do? How do we work with our friends who, waking up tomorrow, might feel pretty bad? It's not like something you want to do. So what we're looking at is all of our projects, they don't even have to be sustainable anymore. I think sustainability might have just died with USAID, in international development.

But they have to be meaningful. They have to give human beings a reason to have a great day and give back to their communities, and I don't think higher education is at all moving in that direction right now. I think it's business, as usual, trying to preserve what they've got, trying to make sure that they're not getting into scandals. It is not helping the world have a tomorrow that is not just worthwhile, but that makes the next day even better. So the Collaborative can put pressure. I think there's something there.