Last month, I was part of a group of 10 Iowa State students who traveled to the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas, as part of the university’s Alternative Spring Breaks program. The 1200-acre farm belongs to Heifer International, a non-profit that raises livestock to send to impoverished areas of the United States and throughout the world, the purpose being to develop sustainable communities centered around the animals.

The spring break program, which isn’t limited to Iowa State or even universities, mixes summer camp-styled activities and educational sessions with farm chores and related odd jobs. One of the odd jobs this year was to build shanties for a mock-up urban slum, where some students spent a night as members of the Global Village, a rough simulation of what it’s like to live with hunger.

After nailing up some metal sheets and wood planks to make walls for a shanty one morning, I walked back to the converted barn – where we slept in bunks most nights – to clean up for lunch. Along the way, Jacob Sheatsley, the ranch’s project coordinator, told me about his desire to expand the scope of the Heifer Ranch’s educational opportunities to supplement post-secondary school courses.

“This is definitely in early, early development form, and right now it’s nothing more than a brainstorm, so to preface it that way from the beginning would be important,” Sheatsley told me later over the phone after I’d returned to Ames.

“In my mind,” he continued, “this would be more for a food securities type class or a class that was wanting to get into food diversity, cultural diversity, things like that.” What would separate taking a trip to the Heifer Ranch from, say, simply staying in Ames and making use of the Student Organic Farm, Sheatsley said, would be a focus on the internal workings of Heifer International that in turn would give students an idea of where to direct their career paths or even how to set up their own non-profits in the future.

Already, Heifer frequently works with related non-profits, especially on projects outside the U.S., so long as the organizations embrace Heifer’s cornerstones, a set of 12 principles focused on sustainability and justice. The cornerstones are conveniently phrased to form the acronym “PASSING [on the] GIFTS,” a reference to the idea that once communities Heifer helps begin to thrive they will help other communities do the same.

Rex Enoch, who directs Heifer’s education department out of the non-profit’s corporate offices in Little Rock and taught a “Heifer U” morning class on one day of our spring break program, has been working on getting in touch with college professors around the country. “He’s developed relationships with a couple professors who have been using pieces and portions of Heifer’s development model in their current curriculum,” Sheatsley explained.

Sheatsley told me that should his idea take root, any complementary curriculum provided by Heifer would ultimately be a foundation for individual initiative. “I always see it as sort of setting the table and people can choose to eat or they can choose not to eat,” he said. “That’s pretty much the basis of experiential education. We’re not here to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. We’re just here to give you a well-rounded idea of the possibilities.”