KDCHI ALUM SHARUNDA OWENS DEPARTS TO AFRICA FOR LOVE, PEACE AND ART
“We have the ability to touch the lives of so many people through collectively organizing”

Sharunda Owens of Chicago, IL is a community servant and has the passport to prove it. It’s chock full of  stamps from Ethiopia, Jamaica, Kenya, Egypt and in a month she will jet off to South Africa on a Fulbright Grant with the U.S. Department of State. As part of the program, she will research arts-based programs for the development of at risk youth (i.e. street children, juvenile offenders) in the areas of poverty reduction, literacy, and HIV awareness. Owens will be working with the South African Department of Art and Culture as well as several NGO's in the area.

Sharunda’s commitment to service is deeply rooted and stems long before her time as a sister at the Alpha Kappa Chapter of Kappa Delta Chi, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She’s always involved herself in organizations that reinforce her drive to learn about resolving the multiple socio-economical circumstances that isolated many of the peers she grew up with. She is also grateful for the opportunities she’s experienced, “from being a first-generation college graduate, applying to law school, joining a sorority, and traveling abroad as a humanitarian.”

Owens’s describes serving the community as walking a “thin line between selflessness and selfishness, carefully balancing, in order to assist communities in a non-paternalistic way.” She hopes to inspire fellow Kappa Delta Chi sisters and other Greeks to fuse their passion for service, commitment, and the power of the individual to make change. To undergraduates, she recommends starting in a study-abroad program as she did in Cairo, Egypt for a semester. “Once you go abroad, outside of your comfort zone, you begin to see that many of the problems that you see in vulnerable populations at home, such as poverty and educational disparities, are global problems that plague communities around the world!”

Sharunda is not alone in her plight to serve and joins several other sisters currently serving abroad. She adds that KDChi instills this greater vision and commitment to changing people’s lives. “The philosophy of service-learning has been tremendously insightful to my career and it’s more than volunteering your time. It involves self-reflection, group participation and educational feedback; which is critical to serving vulnerable communities and is part of the KDChi culture.” Mrs. Owens will move to South Africa for a year and hails from the Alpha Kappa Chapter of KDChi located at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is an active member of Kappa Delta Chi’s marketing committee and will move with her husband.

*The Fulbright Program is extremely competitive and was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the the United States Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). Approximately 294,000 "Fulbrighters," 111,000 from the United States and 183,000 from other countries, have participated in the Program since its inception over sixty years ago. The Fulbright Program awards approximately 7,500 new grants annually.

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