Students use spring break to serve others
More than 80 UMass Amherst students will spend this week in rural Virginia assisting two separate local organizations with community-designed projects serving low-income, largely African American communities.
The Virginia effort is part of a long-standing curricular alternative spring break sponsored by the Anthropology Department’s UMass Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT).
The students are taking part in an intensive honors seminar titled Grassroots Community Development (GCD). GCD, now in its 13th year, relies extensively on peer-to-peer teaching and learning. Students spend the first half of the term studying the method and theory of grassroots community development, and then spend spring break in poor communities working with a grassroots organization.
A smaller group of GCD alumni will be spending their spring break working with Nuestras Raices, an urban farming organization in Holyoke; and a group of 11 anthropology students from the department’s Anthropology Caucus will spend spring break in Jonestown, Miss., in a co-curricular collaboration with the Jonestown Community Development Resource Center.
“We endeavor to give the community a serious week full of labor,” said Art Keene, faculty director of the program. “But what we give can’t compare with the education that we receive while we are there, which is simply incomparable with a classroom education alone.”
While in the community, the students work long days, typically sleep on the floors of churches or community centers and often do without running water, said Keene, adding that “they get to help communities with ongoing projects while learning first-hand how communities lacking resources mobilize to combat poverty and political disenfranchisement.”
The students often work with community youth, Keene noted, sharing stories from their own lives and serving as role models for young people who may not see education as a viable option in their lives. When they return to campus, the students spend the remainder of the term evaluating the way the methods and theories they explored in the classroom, played out in the real world.
UACT maintains partnerships with organizations in Virigina, Mississippi and in Holyoke, Mass. This year, the main GCD class will work with The New Road Community Development Group (NRCDG) of Exmore, Va., and Concerned Citizens for Cape Charles in Cape Charles, Va. The students working in Virginia will engage in a variety of projects including demolition, community clean up, collecting oral history and working with local youth.
“We have been privileged to work with these organizations that have modeled vision, strength and tenacity over the years in order to bring a better life to their communities,” he said. “Some of their struggles have been truly heroic and have inspired us to remember the many things that a group of committed citizens can accomplish.”
He added that program participants were honored to be in New Road when the first water mains were installed after a 10-year struggle on the part of the NRCDG to bring running water to the community.
More Information
UMass Alliance for Community Transformation
March 15, 2010.
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