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Spring-break program steeps students in grassroots organizing
This year's spring break found 41 University of Massachusetts Amherst students willing to can Cancun in favor of something decidedly less frivolous but no less memorable.
This year's spring break found 41 University of Massachusetts Amherst students willing to can Cancun in favor of something decidedly less frivolous but no less memorable: a week of service with grassroots community organizations. At Concerned Citizens for Cape Charles on Virginia's eastern shore, and locally at Springfield's Main Street X Corporation and Holyoke's Nueva Esperanza, students labored and lived alongside their hosts. In the process they learned, as they never could from books alone, how people in poor communities mobilize local knowledge and resources to gain control of their lives and fight poverty and political disenfranchisement.
Spring-break programs at other colleges and universities, and even some at UMass Amherst, involve similar exercises in altruism. Few, however, demand as much of students before, during, and after. All 41 participants had to sign up for "Grassroots Community Development," a 4-credit, semester-long Anthropology honors course taught by Professor Art Keene. It calls for them to do a good deal of studying and preparation prior to their volunteer work and thorough analysis and assessment afterward.
As if that weren't proof enough of their seriousness of purpose, the students also had to formally agree to go wherever they were assigned, to have no say in who went with them, to sleep in sleeping bags on community center floors, to eat whatever food their hosts provided, and to drink no alcohol. They even paid modest fees up to $170 for the privilege of doing several days of physical labor: building parks, renovating buildings, tearing down condemned housing, creating a community garden, picking up trash, and working with the young and the elderly.
The payoffs, though, were rich. The students saw just how powerfully grassroots organizations can effect social change for the common good. They also enjoyed what Keene calls "a time of intense sharing that blurs the boundaries of who is giving and who is taking, who is teaching and who is learning."
Keene admits that some cynics write off such initiatives as "a kind of poverty tourism." But, he argues, "We only work in communities to which we've been invited. We and our hosts view this relationship as a partnership. The work we do is only part of the story. In sharing our experiences and our energies, all of us students and hosts become teachers and learners. Everyone benefits."