MSU’s Engineers Without Borders chapter received the C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Award this week, ranking the student group’s efforts to develop water and sanitation infrastructure at primary schools in East Africa among the foremost university-based outreach efforts in the nation. Considering the competition for the award — including schools with more than three times MSU’s enrollment — that’s a rather big deal for both EWB and our university.

I should disclose my personal involvement with the organization before continuing; as I write, I’m preparing for my fourth trip to Khwisero, the district in western Kenya where we’ve worked since 2004. While it’s perhaps unwise of me to write in this capacity about something with which I’m so intimately involved, EWB’s success carries a profound lesson about our university’s ability to nurture the sort of leadership and service that brought us national recognition this past week.

In contrast to the often abstract nature of our academic existences, EWB’s work is intensely personal, impacting human lives in a powerfully immediate way. It is also immensely difficult.

Aid work — whether conducted by an EWB chapter or the United Nations — is far from the clean-cut world of smiling children depicted in press releases and grant applications. Instead, given the realities of cultural barriers and human fallibility, it is a messy, frustrating process where progress comes sporadically if at all. For instance, it is estimated that 30 percent of the 60-80,000 handpumps installed in sub-Saharan Africa over the past two decades have failed prematurely as a result of inadequate maintenance.

Those of us involved with EWB, especially in leadership roles, make decisions where the health and happiness of hundreds hang in the balance, decisions that are inevitably at times mistakes. Bearing that burden — not only coming to terms with lost opportunities but struggling to make amends and learning from the process — is terribly difficult. I’ve found myself reduced to tears on several occasions.

However, the organization’s essence lies in our student members’ struggle to reconcile our ideals and commitment to the Khwisero community with that horribly demanding reality. This responsibility draws the best out of EWB’s membership, spurring the type of dedication and sacrifice necessary to drive something so hard forward with volunteer effort.

Many of EWB’s members invest upwards of 10 hours a week in group meetings and individual work while taking classes full-time. Travel team members shoulder hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars in travel expenses. For many of us, myself included, our involvement has added an extra year to our educations as we’ve cut our course loads back in an attempt to maintain some semblance of balance.

While those sacrifices — necessary as they are to EWB’s service — are painful, their products: personal and professional growth, powerful camaraderie and deep-seated satisfaction in the organization’s successes are rewarding beyond measure.

Regardless, it’s too rare that our society gives students the sort of responsibility borne by EWB’s members, and too rare that we seek it out for ourselves. But it’s responsibility that sets EWB apart from every other group on our campus, and responsibility that spurs the passion that drives its success at changing lives on both sides of the world.

If our university wants to cultivate that sort of ethic on a broader scale, we have to do more to engage students with things that truly matter. Instead of abstract core classes or hypothetical design projects, we have to provide avenues for students to connect with the world through the sort of full-body contact EWB embodies.

That means finding opportunities where student involvement can make true differences in our community, state and world — and trusting us to rise to the occasion, even and especially where failure has real consequences. We must accept that mistakes — and the act of cleaning up after them — are a necessary part of education. Full-body learning is far from neat.

At an administrative level, our university’s tendency with student leadership is too often focused on providing support to prevent failure. Too often, in the name of consistency or efficiency or risk management — as important as those considerations are — we shift responsibility to professionals without realizing that we’re sacrificing our most powerful educational opportunities in the process. Too often, we neuter what’s ultimately most important.

As students, we have to push back against that when necessary, creating and defending spaces where we can develop our passions without being tangled in safety nets. We have to seek out responsibility, understanding its necessity to our capacity to change ourselves and our world.

That, if nothing else, is what we must learn from EWB’s success.