Instead of spending spring break at the beach or with family, more than 50 students from across the Five Colleges participated in a Grassroots Community Development honors seminar class sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT), passing their break trying to promote awareness of structural inequality while community organizing in Springfield, Boston and Danville, Va.
According to Lily Brown, a student leader of the class, the course hopes to expose students to the tenets of community organizing and give them a place to practice their solutions to the problem of structural inequality – a perceived bias based in terms of social status.
The course “emphasizes a liberatory mode of teaching, a critical pedagogy, in an anti-repressive curriculum in which people can be whole people in the classroom,” said Brown.
The course is divided into two halves. During the first half, students learn the theories of community organizing, which they put into practice during the alternative spring break, according to a University release. The second half of the course is spent evaluating their experiences organizing and empowering communities.
Each group of students worked with their local organization’s representatives to raise awareness about important issues within the community.
In Springfield, students worked with The Alliance to Develop Power, according to the release.
In Boston, they partnered with City Life Vida Urbana, the release states. In efforts to advocate for those whose homes have been foreclosed upon, students went door-to-door canvassing residents, informing them about their foreclosure rights and attempting to forge dialogue on class and social hierarchies with them.
In Virginia, the release states, students worked with a fledgling chapter of Virginia Organizing (VO) in Danville, helping them to recruit members through phone banks.
“It was lots of hard work, but everyone was incredibly diligent, and the push was successful at a community meeting,” said Brown, who worked in Virginia, about the canvassing her group accomplished.
According to the release, Deborah Polin, the UACT director, said conditions were rough for the volunteers, with students often sleeping on floors of community centers. The students worked long hours, she said in the release, culminating in a structured reflection at the end of each day.
However, the trip was “awesome,” said Brown. She added that “it was the epitome of what we’re going for – lots of hard work, but everyone got something out of it. It was a symmetrical [sic] relationship, beneficial for us and our community partner.”
Many of the students that participated in the organizing efforts are planning on extending their efforts with their respective organizations, the release states.
The program, which is sponsored by the Anthropology Department and the Commonwealth Honors College, shifted its focus this year from a development-structured course to one emphasizing empowering communities through organizing, according to the release.
“Organizing is primarily a lot of canvassing and phone banking to actively recruit people,” said Brown. “It emphasizes bringing power to the community so it can take what it needs. Before, the development focus involved building homes and other immediate local services.”
Katie Landeck contributed to this report. Thomas Barnes can be reached at [email protected].
