This isn’t everyday storytelling. This is a passion project. It took years of planning, weeks of reporting, and a constant desire to amplify the voices we believe need to be heard. Thank you for hearing them.

In 2016 Professor Scott Winter pitched this project to me: He planned to take journalism students abroad for an immersive and social justice-focused journalism experience and he wanted to make a magazine to serve as a vehicle for sharing the stories and experiences associated with the trip. I knew that our design program had to be a part of it. The first year we had modest expectations about how everything would go and the quality of student work in such a new landscape, but I was floored by how special the project became, in both product and student experience.

Ask any student who’s been on the Textura trip and you’ll quickly hear about how life-changing this experience was for them. We take a wide range of students from all kinds of backgrounds and all different levels of previous world-travel experience. From day one, Textura trips are a growing and stretching experience. We meet with students for months before our trip, when we begin interacting and getting to know strangers on the other side of the world. This class is built on collaboration and relationship: with our team, with the college-age local students who join us in-country, with our hosts, our in-country support staff and our story subjects. These relationships fuel the project and drive us to pursue excellence in the stories we tell, the photos and videos we create, the spreads we design. Our students get to see what it looks like and how it feels to pour out their creative and storytelling passions to make something that is bigger and more important than themselves. We work late into the nights, conduct numerous critiques after we return, invest hours and hours into editing words, video, photos, and visuals to get this right—to do these stories justice. 

This work costs money. In order to tell these kinds of stories in the future, we need support. With your donations, we can fund the following:

• The cost of the trip: Our students are already making financial sacrifices to attend Bethel. We are committed to keeping the cost of this trip as low as possible for our students and could use financial support to ensure that this trip will cost less than $3,000 per student. We would also be thrilled to have the opportunity to provide scholarships that would allow passionate students to experience Textura regardless of financial circumstances.

• The materials: We create a high-quality 120-plus-page magazine, a fully functioning website, short documentary videos, and a photography exhibition: all of these initiatives cost money to produce. But publishing them in their best form does the most justice to subjects’ stories and gets our storytellers hired.

• For our international partners: We are flooded with generosity from our hosts and local partners during Textura trips, and we would be thrilled to be able to fly some of these individuals to Bethel for our launch party and/or be able to send back files or print copies of the magazine in local languages.

We love this project. We’ve got big dreams for its future and its ability to transform people in God’s kingdom, and that would only be possible with some of your help.

Contact Bethel.edu/giving to help support Textura. Place the word “Textura” in the memo box to help tell the next story.

So grateful, 

Jessie Henderson,
Associate Professor of Graphic Design, Department of Art + Graphic Design

Questions or comments?
We’d love to hear from you!

This beautiful digitally-printed magazine features 88 pages of original stories and photography created by Bethel University students in collaboration with Indian partners. Proceeds go directly back into this, and future projects.

You can also donate directly to the project and help make it possible for more students to participate. Visit the link below and type “Textura Project” in the giving comments.