Matt Rumley teaches a guitar chord to a new friend during his Mountains to the World trip to Honduras

Many students enter college wanting to change the world. Matt Rumley certainly did. At UNC Asheville, Rumley harnessed that youthful idealism to real-world solutions through studies in international human rights law. And when he became the first student to take advantage of the University's new Mountains to the World Travel Fund, he realized that the world could change him.

The Mountains to the World Travel Fund was created in fall 2007 through a grant from the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina to make international volunteerism a reality for UNC Asheville students. The $100,000 gift provides a stipend for travel to destinations around the globe, allowing students to experience new cultures while volunteering to help the neediest people in those countries. The work is meant to be tough as well as eye opening.

Rumley traveled to rural Honduras in November with volunteers from the Asheville-based Hope Center. Rumley, the only college student on the trip, worked on facility repairs at an orphanage and assisted a medical team as they treated the local population.

"To torture a cliché, this trip changed my life," Rumley said. "My perspective on the world shifted because I was taken out of my comfort zone and put into true poverty. My experiences posed the greater question of how I can change the world, so it was a total affirmation of what I want to do after graduation."

Rumley, who graduated from UNC Asheville in December, is applying to graduate school at the University of Essex and the University of London, where he hopes to pursue a degree in international human rights law.

Mark Gibney, UNC Asheville Belk Professor of Humanities and coordinator of the Mountains to the World Travel Fund, believes that the connections between the experiences students have while traveling and their academic goals is what makes the fund so important.

"This fund will help UNC Asheville students become global citizens," Gibney said. "It's my hope that our students will go from the mountains to the world, and home again, bringing back to campus what they've learned. I want our students to get excited about the rest of the world and to allow that enthusiasm to inform their academic pursuits, their undergraduate research and even their career goals."

Gibney emphasized that the fund is an especially perfect fit for UNC Asheville's liberal arts mission.
"One of the hallmarks of the liberal arts education is discovering the sense of the other – learning about the lives of people who exist in diverse times and places," he said. "Travel is absolutely the most efficient way of doing this, and by volunteering while abroad, our students also gain a stunning glimpse into the lives of people very different than themselves."

The $100,000 donation will be used to aid students over the next three years. In addition to Rumley, dozens more students have already applied to become Mountains to the World Fellows, including 14 who will travel to Montero, Bolivia during spring break. Students may choose to join a charitable organization traveling to another country – as Rumley did, they can pursue faculty-led travel opportunities, or students can organize their own service learning trip. Each student can receive up to $1,200 for airline tickets and other incidentals on trips ranging from two weeks to a full semester.

Rumley's nine-day trip took him to a coffee-growing region outside Santa Barbara, Honduras. He spent his days pouring concrete, fixing plumbing and hanging out with the kids, who were desperate for affection and interaction. He also assisted the Hope Center's medical team when they went on house calls in remote mountainous areas. He was even permitted to observe surgeries.

"The work was hard and the range of emotions that I experienced with the children was tough," he said. "But I found it hard to leave. I wanted to stay for another month or two."