On Tuesday night at 8 p.m., in a basement-level classroom in ICC, the three-year-old effort of a dedicated core of Georgetown students to bring awareness to genocide in Darfur pressed on.

The event boasted none of the publicity or excitement of a Red Square rally or an international fast. But even the night’s modest program packed the classroom so tightly with interested students that many sat on the floor.

They watched a documentary featuring grisly images of Sudanese who had been murdered in the violence. They listened to two speakers, including Niemat Ahmadi, an outspoken critic of the Sudanese government, who was forced to flee her homeland after two assassination attempts.

Reading in a soft voice from prepared remarks as the audience hung on her every word, Ahmadi recalled walking down a street she believed to be safe in the summer of 2002 when, out of nowhere, a masked man grabbed her headscarf and began to choke her. It was only after the assailant’s mask fell, exposing his face, that he loosened his grip and ran.

“Every day I lived in fear, and every day I thought I would die,” Ahmadi said.

The event, “Voices from Darfur,” was co-sponsored by Georgetown’s chapters of the NAACP and the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, the student group that began at Georgetown in 2004 and spawned a national movement.

And while it took a far lower profile than much of the previous activism that launched STAND into the national spotlight in 2005, the event proved a fitting reflection of where STAND finds itself as it enters its fourth year of existence: The hype has waned, the cause lives on.

‘Fighting the Latest Battle’

The origins of STAND, now a national student movement with burgeoning global aspirations, might be traced to July 2004, when Nate Wright (COL ’06), about to enter his junior year at Georgetown, attended a speech by Macram Max Gassis, a Sudanese bishop and human-rights activist. The speech inspired Wright to band together with a few dozen other students to take action.

The following month, Wright and his friends formed Students Taking Action Now: Darfur. The rapid upward trajectory that the group followed from that point took much of the university, and even some of the group’s own members, by surprise. Mere months after the group formed at Georgetown, chapters began sprouting up at colleges and universities across the country, each tapping into empathy and frustration on their campuses.

But it was in 2005 that STAND’s explosive rise to prominence reached its pinnacle and the group found its footing on a national stage. In April, Wright traveled to the Darfur region of neighboring Chad to witness conditions there. His trip became the basis of a documentary that aired on MTV and MTV-U, the network that sponsored the trip.

Then in May, Georgetown STAND won a $40,000 grant from Reebok to fund further expansion in a national competition. And in October, tens of thousands of people around the world gave up food and luxuries for one day as part of an International Solidarity Fast led by Georgetown’s chapter.

Alysia Bone (COL ’08) still remembers how that early excitement surrounding STAND drew her into the group as a freshman. In some ways, she says, the enthusiasm remains. The group’s listserv still boasts over 1,000 members, and the core of a few dozen committed leaders still move the group forward.

But something else is missing — or perhaps, it’s changed.

“People want to be fighting the latest battle,” Bone says.

As human rights groups and non-governmental organizations around the world struggle to keep attention on the Darfur crisis, STAND’s leaders have confronted their own struggle to remain relevant on the Hilltop even after the massive hype surrounding the group’s formation has dissipated.

Marybeth Acac (COL ’09), another of the group’s leaders, says that many members realized last year that they would not be able to hold the attention of the average Georgetown student as easily as they had in the past.

“It was sort of a fad,” she says. She added that the complexity of the strife in Sudan — based on a tangle of overlapping ethnic and political tensions — adds to the difficulty of educating students about the cause. “You can’t just ‘Save Darfur,’” Acac says.

And one change took a very specific toll on Georgetown’s STAND chapter, when Wright and other students who had been instrumental to the group’s formation graduated. Bone compares their departure to a basketball team losing players. The year following his graduation was a “recuperation period,” she says.

Though Wright and other STAND alumni remain involved in the national organization and occasionally offer advice to leaders at Georgetown, Acac says that losing the group’s founders forced the group to refocus. “We kind of lost that sort of guidance,” she says.

The students who founded STAND could have done more to prepare the group for the transition, Wright says. He notes that the group did not begin updating its contact lists until his final semester at Georgetown, which he says was too late. But he says that the new generation of leaders did a “fairly remarkable job” of carrying the group forward, even as the group inevitably faced some fatigue among an activism-weary campus at Georgetown.

“It’s a challenge to find new success,” he says.

A Renewed Mission

To adjust to a changed environment, STAND — both at Georgetown and around the nation — reshaped its traditional mission while strengthening the organization on which the group had built its original success.

While still drawing attention to the ongoing violence in the region, leaders of Georgetown’s STAND have begun scheduling events that focus on Sudanese life and culture.

“There’s more than just death in Darfur,” Acac says.

In the spring, Georgetown’s STAND sponsored the first-ever Darfur Feast, a festival of culture, food and dance. They plan to reprise the event this spring. And Emmanuel Jal, a child soldier from Darfur who is now a rap artist, is confirmed to give a lecture on campus this month, Bone says.

The group of leaders at the head of Georgetown’s STAND remains roughly the same size that it was before, Bone says, but has less experience than the organization’s original leaders.

Wright, who is studying in Galway, Ireland, on a Mitchell scholarship, says that the infusion of new ideas helps to strengthen Georgetown’s STAND. Although he is hesitant to step on the toes of the new generation of leadership, he says that he still offers advice informally. At the same time, he is working to broaden the reach of the national organization, and hopes to start chapters at European universities while he is on scholarship.

He adds that he has worked with leaders of the national STAND to put together a thorough alumni network that will keep veterans of the organization involved.

The grant from MTV played a crucial role in expanding STAND, he says. Although the Georgetown chapter had originally proposed to spend the money on a national “adopt-a-camp” program in which American communities sponsored refugee camps in Sudan, the use of the funds shifted over time.

Georgetown’s STAND used a portion of the money to fund a school in Darfur, and in assisting other chapters in sponsoring their own schools. Other funds went to the national group to revamp its Web site and to begin an annual national conference of STAND chapters.

“We were trying to take what was a relatively large network and create a national infrastructure,” Wright says of the grant.

Roughly $20,000 of the original grant remains to be spent on future projects, Bone says.

Standing Firm

As STAND looks to the future, its leaders agree that the group’s mission is twofold: make plans to ensure the group’s success in the long term, while hoping that that success might come in the short term.

“You’d hope that we wouldn’t have to exist,” Wright says. Even so, he says the group would still play a vital role in rebuilding the region after bringing the violence in Sudan to a close. And he hopes that the network he’s helped to build can be used to confront other cases of human rights abuses around the world. In 2005, the group changed its name to the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, though it preserved the original acronym.

The challenge remains stark. But Andrew Natsios (CAS ’71), a Georgetown professor and the Bush administration’s special envoy to Darfur, says that groups like STAND fomented a current in the American political system that held promise for ending the violence.

“It’s sort of like a snowball moving down a mountain,” Natsios says. “It keeps going once you start it.”

Although activist groups frequently criticize the Bush administration and other governments for inaction in the region, Natsios says that he has had a productive relationship with STAND, and frequently participates in their on-campus events. He adds that the administration’s strategy has already yielded some prominent signs. In August, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution approving a large multinational peacekeeping force in the region.

And back on the campus where the national student movement started, leaders are focused on the coming year. This year’s national STAND conference will be in Washington, D.C., at the end of the month, and Bone and Acac expect 400 students to attend, and attendees will stay with students at Georgetown.

Bone hopes the group can ultimately drum up support by presenting the Sudanese as people, and not victims.

“You can’t say ‘no’ to people suffering,” she says.