When you see a sophomore girl selling towels in Red Square next month to raise money for a charity, know this: she could have been in movies.

But lifelong surfer Emi Koch (COL ‘12) turned down that opportunity years ago to start an international non-profit to support opportunities for impoverished children instead. Now, she’s head of Beyond the Surface, International, a group that raises money to support centers where underprivileged children in Peru, South Africa, and India can learn to surf—a positive activity, Koch said, for children in poor communities where there usually aren’t alternatives.

“In Western society, we’re so used to having a Boy Scout group a Girl Scout group, or a volleyball club,” she said, “but there they don’t really have anything like that, so this gives them more self-empowerment and more self-confidence.”

In Peru, the center Beyond the Surface sponsors works with providing children with an activity after school. The second center is located in South Africa, where Koch said it serves as more of a rehabilitation clinic. Sniffing glue has become a popular drug addiction among the children in the community where the center is located, she said, and the surfing serves as a tool for rehabilitation. The third center, located in India, is dedicated to keeping kids out of violent street gangs. The center tries to get children off the streets by replacing their gang with a home in the life of surfing.

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Georgetown for Haiti, last Friday’s fundraising event for Doctors Without Borders, sounds like a big success. The event, which was co-sponsored by dozens of local businesses and catered by Georgetown favorites like SweetGreen and Rugby, was well-attended—particularly by Georgetown students—and has probably raised between $12,000 and $15,000, according to event organizer Richard Bahar.

It was a very Georgetown University crowd, too. Of the thousand-or-so locals that attended GFH, held in Lululemon, Bahar said that “easily half of them were undergraduates from Georgetown.” Georgetown student Anique Drumright (COL ‘10), a Lululemon employee who helped work the door, said that some students were from GWU, but added that Georgetown DJ duo MecTec provided the music.

And as far as events go, it got pretty solid reviews. Georgetown Dish editor and local resident Beth Solomon thought it was a “really nice mix of young people and an established Georgetown crowd.” Drumright said, “I would just say that the fact that students came, it was amazing gesture that just shows how much they find the situation [in Haiti] important.”

And Bahar was pleased with both the crowd and the take. “One hundred percent of the profits will go to Doctors Without Borders … We got both students and some of the more well-known, high maintenance donors and sponsors,” like Anthony Lanier, who “owns half of M Street,” and Oprah Winfrey’s stylist. “Those are the ones where I had to work the room take them scotch,” he said.

Sounds like a success, right?

Almost—you can’t please everyone, and in this neighborhood, you can always count on one grouch-asaurus to complain about student presence on the georgetownforum listserv:

I attended this event and was VERY disappointed. This was NOT a community gathering in support of Haiti – it was basically a Georgetown frat party with a $10 cover charge and unfetered [sic] access to free booze.
This event should NOT have been called Georgetown for Haiti since it lacked any of the class and style of a Georgetown fundraiser – right down to the DJ – and should have been held directly on the GU campus instead. As my husband said when I called and told him I was leaving, “leave it up to Georgetown students to ruin an event”, though the slightest bit of restriction on the part of the event organizer would have eliminated that.

When I asked her about the criticism, Drumright was surprised. “Do we dance? Do we laugh? Yeah. But I think it was a great community event,” she said. You can read the full screed after the jump, or you can save yourself the headache. You already know what it says.

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Founded in 2009, Jacques-Philippe Piverger’s (MSB ‘99) non-profit organization, Global Syndicate, is still in its infancy. But immediately after he heard about the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, his organization launched The Haiti Project, an ambitious fundraising campaign that will host fundraising events in six major U.S. cities.

But unlike a lot of recent fundraisers, The Haiti Project is not just focused on providing immediate relief effort for Haiti—while it is already raising funds, the first event, which will take place in New York City, is not until May 13. The campaign’s focus is on sustaining long-term development in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation as well as disaster relief.

“The focus [of Global Syndicate] is on economic development, health services, and access to education,” Piverger told the Voice. “We are raising funds for Haiti in those key areas. So far, we have raised a little over $20,000.”

Piverger said the fundraiser in New York City is shaping up well, with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and many New York political figures promising to attend. They have already identified several partners the event will benefit, too—part of the money raised there will go to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

Another Georgetown alumni, Kristin Johnson, sits on the board of Global Syndicate, and several alumni and Georgetown-affiliated people are helping plan the various Haiti Project events, including Marcia Dyson, an affiliate of the Center for Social Justice and the wife of Professor Michael Eric Dyson.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington provoked quite a stir this week when it announced that it would abandon its contracts with the city unless the D.C. Council changed its proposed same-sex marriage bill.  The church says that the bill could force it to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, so they would no longer be able to provide the charitable services they currently offer.

Patrick Deneen (left), an associate professor of Government at Georgetown and director of the Tocqueville Forum, hosted a chat on the Washington Post’s website yesterday to explain and defend the Archdiocese’s decision.

Deneen spent a large part of the chat trying to re-frame the issue as the church being forced into giving up business relations with the city:

I think the basic premise of the Post’s story requires clarification. The premise of today’s story was that the Catholic Church was threatening to cease to provide charitable services if the law legalizing gay marriage is passed. In point of fact, it is the DC government that would cease to license or contract with the Church unless the Church conformed to a definition of marriage that violates its faith tradition.

Without a set of broader legal exemptions allowing for the Church to remain faithful to its definition of marriage, it will cease to be permitted by the City to provide the contracted and licensed services that it has for well over a century. The Church’s fundamental desire in this controversy is to continue its desire and freedom to serve.

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Looking for a change of pace during your summer vacation? Tired of sunny beaches and drinks with tiny umbrellas? Look no further than the Mongol Rally, an adventurous road trip organized by the Mongolian Principle Charity Mercy Corps.

Participants from all over the world pile into tiny cars and drive from London to Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia, for the sake of making a financial contribution to a charity of the participants’ choosing.

Georgetown sophomore, Rich Rinaldi (MSB ‘12) decided to take this trip along with fellow Jersey Boy Alex Insel this summer. Choosing a European-made Ford ‘Ka,’ bought on eBay, the duo drove 8,100 miles through thirteen countries.

The 30-day trip was not without its pitfalls. Rinaldi himself, in fact, crashed the car on the day before the rally was scheduled to start (as is typical of many New Jersey drivers). A friendly British mechanic, however, took the boys into his own home, fed them, and fixed their car so they could start the trip on time.

In Kazakhstan, potholes on the country roads were often bigger than the 1.3 Liter Ford the two relied on. During the final stretch, one of the car’s tires blew out during a snowstorm in the Mongolian mountains, prompting one to wonder why anyone would opt to take this trip in the first place.

“It’s for charity, and it’s for adventure,” Rinaldi explained. The Jersey Boys have raised over $2,000 for the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation, an organization that runs an orphanage outside of Ulaan Baatar, thanks to contributions from friends and local businesses in New Jersey.

If any readers are thinking about trading Caribbean beaches for Eurasian deserts, Rinaldi has some advice: Russian traffic cops will give you ice cream if you bribe them enough and the Super Mash Brothers are the right start to any day of driving over treacherous terrain.