Challenges of Practicing and Honing Leadership Skills through Cross-Cultural Service Learning

Combining Cross-Cultural Service Learning Project With Undergraduate Leadership Course

A chance encounter on an Austrian train in 2014 between a U.S. leadership professor and the Director of the Kinderdorf Kronhalde of the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf (a state-funded children’s home in Bregenz, the capital of the Austrian province of Vorarlberg) was the starting point. This coincidental meeting on a night train from Bregenz to Vienna led to an invitation for the U.S. professor (and leadership students on a 5-week study abroad program) to visit the Kinderdorf Kronhalde in June of 2014. This experience planted the seed that would eventually grow into the idea of a cross-cultural service learning project to be carried out by the next group of undergraduate U.S. leadership students in 2015. And, as a cross-cultural service learning project, it was designed to benefit residents of the Kinderdorf Kronhalde and the U.S. leadership students.

The cornerstones of the Kinderdorf Kronhalde were laid by a local Austrian priest as the ashes of World War II were settling. As a medic for the German Army on the Western Front, Father Hugo Kleinbrod, an ordained priest from Vorarlberg, promised himself that after the war, he would set up a children’s home to serve all of the children whose dying fathers he helped to care for. The home was desperately needed as, by the end of the war, there were tens of thousands of war orphans all around Austria, and no place to house and care for them. Thus, Father Hugo Kleinbrod established in 1951 the Verein Kinderdorf Vorarlberg (Children’s Home of Vorarlberg Association), which would become the precursor to the Vorarlberger Kinderdorf (Children’s Home of Vorarlberg), the umbrella organization under which the Kinderdorf Kronhalde in Bregenz – and the subject of this project – currently falls.