Programs & Projects

The McGovern Center was been granted faculty approval in April 2021 to organize and provide a new single-credit course for DWU students called “The Challenge of Global Leadership.” The course description is as follows. “This single-credit course examines the challenge, potential and progress in the developing world. How can we best understand and appreciate the difficulties facing developing countries? What avenues of addressing these challenges bear the greatest outcome? How can we be most effectively engaged as leaders? Through podcasts, videos, readings and daily news, we’ll learn to be effective global leaders who live out the DWU motto: Sacrifice or Service.” The class promises to be quite popular and has already five students enrolled even though it was offered after most students had completely enrolled for the fall.

Our student club carries out the vision of George McGovern by promoting civic engagement on DWU’s campus and in the community. MEG is a nonpartisan club and meets weekly to discuss current political and social issues.

Our McGovern Engagement Group, affectionately called “MEG,” had a fantastic year together. Pictured is a group of students who gather regularly to discuss, and yes, debate, social issues, public policy and world development. A good number of the group is planning a trip to Uganda in May 2022. We’ll be working with a faith-based development agency called AsOne Africa. AsOne was started by '15 DWU graduate, Andrew DeVaney. The organization provides high-quality education, business development, medical clinics and farmer education in four communities in Uganda. If you are interested in supporting this trip financially, please email joel.allen@dwu.edu.

DWU students have partnered with McGovern Center supporters and local leaders around the world to alleviate food security issues through innovative, locally-led, and internationally-supported projects. In Uganda and Rwanda, Africa, we are working on food security issues that include school lunch projects and the gift of livestock. In both countries a local school parent-teacher organization works with the McGovern Center to select families in greatest need of food assistance. Small livestock (typically a goat) are gifted to a family. The family cares for the goat until it reproduces then keeps the primary goat and works with the PTA to re-gift an offspring to another family in need. 

The program has gifted more than 60 goats and four cows in Uganda and Rwanda since the project began in 2013. In 2015, the McGovern Center also created cooperatives to help manage the growing livestock programs in the communities and are supporting local animal care specialists to help train animal recipients to properly support, feed, sustain and grow their livestock operations. Each cooperative member also contributes a portion of his/her earnings back to the group and the group collectively decides ways that they can work together to support other community needs, like access to education.

Donations toward this project don’t just support a family in need, they provide them with the tools they need to build their future. A donation of just $50 supports the gift of one goat.

Give to Livestock for Life

Through colorful imagery and playful rhyme, a new children’s book tells the story of how one cow makes a very big difference in the life of a little boy

The true story of Haptamu, a boy in Ethiopia, is told in “A Moo For You/All That a Moo Can Do,” a book written, illustrated and produced by Dakota Wesleyan University students and their professor.

The book is on sale for $20 through the DWU Store or at Amazon. The proceeds go to the McGovern Center's Livestock for Life program.