Nate Beach
Senior Creates Bible Web Site
December 5, 2007

A Bible research Web site created by a Calvin senior is reaching a worldwide audience.

Calvin senior Nathan Beach, a 21-year old computer science major from Ann Arbor, Mich., receives more than 1.3 million page views per month on his site, www.ChristNotes.org. A quarter of those come from people living outside the U.S. in places such as South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and more than a hundred other countries.

“I love the fact that it’s a way for me to bless people all over the world—people I’ve never met and probably never will meet,” said Beach, who began building Christ Notes when he was in the eighth grade as a way to learn about Web sites.

“I was fascinated by the Internet, and the idea that I could publish my work in such a way that anyone in the world could access it,” he said. “In this case, I wanted to create a Web site that did something useful and would benefit others, and a Bible Web site was perfect for that.”

Ashley Luse
Senior Travels to Uganda on Behalf of Amaranth
2010

Calvin senior Ashley Luse was determined to visit Uganda where the Lord’s Resistance Army has spent more than 20 years terrorizing the citizenry. Within a matter of weeks, the 22-year-old honors business and mathematics/economics major had raised her own travel expenses and talked a friend into accompanying her.

Luse made her African journey in February 2010 on behalf of amaranth, an herb containing large amounts of both protein and lysine that thrives in harsh growing conditions. Those qualities make amaranth an ideal staple crop for the global south. Milled or popped amaranth, which has an even higher nutritional value than the raw form of the herb, is sold in health food stores in the U.S. and elsewhere. That makes it a potential cash crop for farmers in the global south: countries such as Uganda.

There is one problem with that scenario, said Luse: “There really is not a market for amaranth in Uganda yet,” she confessed. “The version of amaranth that is native to Uganda is considered a weed.” Determined to create a market, she partnered with the Uganda Amaranth Project, an effort of Partners Worldwide, a Christian non-profit that works to eliminate poverty through job-creation initiatives.

“The Uganda Amaranth Project has three goals,” Luse said: “to build or create a market for the grain amaranth in Uganda, to generate income for local farmers and entrepreneurs, and to provide a food source that will help fight against malnutrition.”

Luse spent two weeks in the Mbale District of Uganda, meeting people and trying to assess how amaranth would fit into their businesses and their everyday lives.

“I tapped into the anthropology side of market research and conducted what we call in-context interviews,” she said. “I would be invited into homes of local Ugandans and would spend the day with them. I’d get up at 5 a.m., and the family would be getting ready for school, and the woman would be getting breakfast, and I would be peeling plantains and potatoes right beside her—or helping to clean right beside her.”

Luse also worked to improve the customer base of the Mannu Bakery, a purveyor of amaranth flour in Mbale. She visited Ugandan entrepreneurs. She visited grocery store owners. She visited The AIDS Support Organization (TASO), to persuade the staff there to mix amaranth with the porridge they serve clients on clinic days. (The high level of lysine in amaranth is a boost to the immune system, making the herb a good food for those with HIV/AIDS.) Luse even met the mayor of Mbale—who claimed she had market tested popped amaranth on the fish in her fish pond at home.

“The first step to creating a good marketing plan is to understand the market … ,” Luse said of her many efforts. “What better way to do that, to accomplish that, than to actually involve yourself in their lives?”

Now that she is home, Luse is using her Uganda experience as the basis for her senior honors thesis in business. She has participated at the recent Global Health and Innovation conference at Yale University. And she has been invited to join the Uganda Amaranth Project. Luse has taken a job with First Trust Portfolios in Chicago, where she hopes to work in capital markets.

Eric Beach
Junior Completes White House Internship
2006

Eric Beach, a Calvin junior spent the spring 2006 semester working as an intern in the nation’s most famous white house. Now Eric Beach, a 20-year old native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is regularly asked how much the real West Wing resembles its television counterpart. “I can’t say because I never watched The West Wing,” he says laughing. “I think I’m going to have to watch it.” Approximately 100 interns are chosen each spring, summer and fall for the White House Internship Program. The interns, who serve without pay, work in a White House office, attend lectures, volunteer at special events, participate in tours and contribute to a community service project in the Washington, D.C. area. Beach, a business and communications major, spent January through May working for the White House on an analysis of social service spending.