David Steiger has long been committed to making his community, and the world, a more equitable place. The 2011 graduate, from Switzerland, was one of the first students from the European continent to attend EARTH University. David is currently working for Robi, an NGO that provides services for vulnerable children in his small yet diverse hometown of Olten, Switzerland, where a significant percentage of residents are immigrants from places including Albania, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.
David has been working with the organization for eight years and is responsible for running one of the centers. As he explains his work when we talked to him, he turns the phone around and points the camera at a remodeled shipping container that serves as one of the organization’s locations, a space to offer children of various backgrounds a place to work on creative projects, teach respectful coexistence, and develop self-efficacy. David, an agroecologist not only by training but also by heart, is always using his background to teach others, and he is making sure his students are learning about composting and planting. “These are urban kids who live in small apartments,” he says, “it is so important that they are able to get close to nature, so I try and bring that in.”
As someone who has always sought out experiences and relationships across cultures, David has demonstrated an innate desire to work in multicultural settings and a capacity to do so with respect. One of his main takeaways from his time at EARTH was the way students, staff, and professors came from all over the world. “This was a part of the experience that made me feel rich, knowing people from different cultures and different backgrounds. I’m from a multicultural area—Switzerland is very diverse, and so is my hometown. I had already done an exchange program before university, but EARTH solidified that for me. You realize you can be close to somebody even if they come from a different place. My friends at the University were from wealthy and disadvantaged backgrounds, they came from all over the world, but that didn’t matter. Because we were all there, living together in the same way. We were one family from different places.”
During his third-year Internship course at EARTH, David was already demonstrating his commitment to social justice and his desire to work with the most vulnerable. He arrived in Haiti just after the January 2010 earthquake, the third deadliest to ever strike the country, a disaster in which an estimated 300,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands more left displaced from their homes and without access to clean water or sanitation. There he worked on a project installing composting toilets for the organization GiveLove, an NGO that organized the first large-scale humanure composting pilot in response to the urgent need for sanitation in the tent camps set up for the many who were left homeless after the earthquake. The NGO focuses on transforming waste into resources, taking a public health problem and turning it into an environmental solution, uniting ecological design with social justice. By creating a fertilizer through this process, people are then able to create gardens which can feed families and create an income at local markets. For people facing crises in sanitation, food security, and safety, this kind of intervention can be life changing.
For David, this Internship would begin a long relationship with Haiti that continues today. Over a decade later, he is involved with the organization Hand in Hand Haiti, a Swiss-based foundation working on issues including access to drinking water, irrigation, reforestation, and waste management. David serves as member of the foundation and works as a consultant on various agroecology projects, including one that collaborates with local farms and organizations to promote goat and livestock keeping. Due to the escalating human rights and security crisis in Haiti, he has not been able to travel there as he did before, but he is in contact with the local team to provide support and expertise.
Looking back on his time at EARTH, David shares the lessons that continue to influence him today. “My EARTH degree is always impacting what I do. The emphasis on community development, on doing hands-on projects, collaborating directly with people, and working with organizations like the one I’m working with—I learned how to do all of this at EARTH. My work in Haiti wouldn’t be possible without me studying in EARTH. It influences me still, in the way I learned to talk to people, in the way I communicate, in the places I want to work and the type of projects I want to be involved with.”
We commend David for his commitment to work with vulnerable populations and for living out EARTH values to help build a more sustainable and just society.