Alethea Global Cooperative
My practicum with Alethea Global Cooperative provide a deeper understanding of human rights and social justice and the intersections of climate action for greener international mobility programs. This cooperative reoriented how I understand the relationship between institutions and responsibility. Alethea’s mandate is rooted in the concept of aletheia which means truth and disclosure, and it is from this framing that shapes everything. Climate justice, in this context, is not a technical exercise or a policy checkbox, but rather it is an ethical obligation, inseparable from equity, transparency, and accountability within international education systems.
The work itself was varied and substantive. I conducted an environmental scan of a post-secondary institution for which Alethea was developing a training program, researching historical and background information that required me to actively examine and set aside my own assumptions, which it was a practice that proved as instructive as the research itself. I also contributed to inclusive language reform within organizational documents, introducing replacement of “stakeholder” with “interest holder” became a small but meaningful example of how decolonial practice lives in the details, not only grand gestures. The team’s immediate adoption of that shift reaffirmed something I had learned in the classroom but needed to see in action was that inclusive practice, when it is genuine, does not resist correction but rather it welcomes it.
The most significant contribution of my practicum was being invited to help develop online course content for Alethea’s Climate Justice and Internationalization in Higher Education online course, involving the full Alethea team. My focus was on decolonization, Indigenization, and the structural impacts of capitalism on climate. This required examining how colonization disrupted traditional sustainable practices, how developed nations have historically consumed a disproportionate share of natural resources, and why wealthy, high-emitting countries bear a particular responsibility to support greener transitions in formerly colonized and developing nations. Completing the Carbon Literacy Project certification alongside this work provided the foundational understanding to assist my analysis with care and respect.
The coursework, particularly Decolonization and Responsibility and Indigenous Ways of Knowing shouldered my practicum experience where theory found its application, and the application sent me back to theory with better questions. That reciprocity is where the real learning lived.
Completing the required 128 practicum hours, and continuing to contribute beyond scope of the practicum is not incidental, because something I have come to understand about this work is that sustained engagement is itself a practice of accountability. You cannot develop a genuine understanding of social justice as systemic and relational without extending beyond compliance to include responsibility for future generations and the global consequences of institutional decisions to then disengage the moment the requirement is met. The practicum taught me that, and the work along with the team, asked me to stay, and I did.
Source:
Alethea Global Cooperative. (n.d.). Alethea Global: A sustainability consulting worker cooperative. https://alethea.global