USA: Cambridge - Navigating the Waters of University Activism and Making an Impact

The first few weeks of college, you are bombarded with brochures and stickers as student organizations lure you with food ranging from greasy dumplings to red velvet cupcakes. In return, you are expected to write down your contact information and attend information sessions. As I shopped through the activities fair, I realized the assumption that I would merely continue my high school activism and service was a silly one. Without my realizing, community service had become a major and necessary part of my highschool life: I was a GCC Leader for two years; I was the president of the Youth United Steering Committee of the Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles; and I gave recorder lessons at the Leroy Haynes Center, a residential community for boys with learning, psychological, and behavioral challenges. I could not imagine my life without activism and public service. 

As I began joining different groups on campus, I noticed several things. Unlike high school, there was a community of activists: the social justice community at Harvard, with its diverse range of causes and admirably militant drive, fearlessly advocated against social, political, and economic oppression of people both in and beyond the campus. Moreover, I realized, through taking college classes and speaking with fellow student activists, that there was a specific language of campus activism. Rooted in the social justice canons that students learned about in class, “social justice” and “activism” replaced the high school term of “community service”, and introduced “oppression,” “privilege,” and “systemic” to describe social inequalities. Some identify these aspects as potentially alienating factors, but I found it to be empowering that there was such a professionalized community of activists on campus.

Throughout the year, as I navigated from one organization to another, I became involved with three groups. The Phillips Brooks House Association is a student-run umbrella organization for social change in Harvard. I volunteered with one of its afternoon tutoring programs called the Roxbury Youth Initiative Term (RYIT) that provides academic enrichment and exposure to social justice ideas to underserved youth between ages of 8 and 12 in Roxbury, MA. I was initially drawn to the program because of its social justice aspect: RYIT was not just an afternoon tutoring program—it believed that the youth we tutor today will grow up to become active agents of social change and that it was important to expose them to social justice issues. When I became Program Director in the spring term, we dedicated each month to a topic, and each volunteer would construct a curriculum for that month. Since March was International Women’s History Month, I was involved with designing gender curriculum for March. In an activity called “GenderBust,” the kids formed a circle with their chairs; on a piece of paper, they wrote down what they thought girls were allowed to do and threw them inside the circle and, on another piece of paper, they wrote what they thought girls were not allowed to do and threw them outside of the circle. Then, we formed a bigger circle outside where the kids read their notes about what girls cannot do and threw them back inside the circle if they thought girls were able to do what was written on the note. Following stereotype busting was “She-roes in History” where the kids learned about remarkable women in history, from Susan B. Anthony and Joan of Arc to Malalai Joya and Nina Simone. By the end, we emphasized the importance of girls and boys working together and played teamwork building games. Throughout the semester, the volunteers questioned the efficacy of teaching social justice to eight-year-olds. But, on the last day of the program, the kids recalled the various social justice activities and, as volunteers, it was a validation of the importance of learning about equality and the relationship we had fostered with our kids.

RYIT provided a concrete opportunity to make a difference in local communities, but finding an outlet for my feminist passion was rather difficult at first. I have always identified very strongly as a feminist, with a firm conviction that human rights meant the rights of all people disenfranchised by class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. I cannot speak for other campus feminist activism, but I felt that the feminist community’s focus was rather national - while topics, such as reproductive justice, were ubiquitous.  Reproductive justice in the United States was nothing like reproductive justice in, say, Cambodia. A few of my friends and I, who wanted to approach gender equality in the framework of human rights, while respecting cultural relativism, decided to start our own group called the International Women’s Rights Collective (IWRC). While we are currently an unofficial student organization, IWRC has organized a screening of Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter, a film about genital cutting in Mali. We co-sponsored an event with the International Socialist Organization called, “A Case for Withdrawal in Afghanistan,” with Noam Chomsky and Malalai Joya as our speakers. We also co-sponsored a film screening about sex trafficking in Nepal with the Young Humanitarians. Social issues are often compartmentalized so that gender equality becomes a “woman’s issue”, race equality is referred to as a “[insert ethnicity here] question,” and sexual orientation is dismissed as “gay stuff.”  IWRC’s goal is to extend the constituents of our mission so that we as Harvard students advocate for the rights of women as equal human beings.

Looking back at my first year, I can point to the community of student activists as one of the main reasons why I had such a wonderful first year experience. They were so welcoming, so passionate, and so inspirational. I was very fortunate to find such a community early on in my college career and felt inspired enough to create a group on my own. While I am no longer continuing the activities in which I had participated in high school, I am still living by GCC’s motto of Awareness + Action = Impact in a way that makes sense for me as a first year college student. Through IWRC, I am spreading Awareness about gender equality while I commit to Action through RYIT with hopes of creating Impact.