by Dilara Yarbrough
“We have three teachers of color that are tenured, or depending on how you count, four. That’s a shocking number to me,” said Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites (CARW) member Rick Coriell ‘04. CARW initiated the Grinnell Alliance Project (GAP) so that students in social justice groups could converge to fight institutional inequality at and outside of Grinnell College.
“The original purpose of the Grinnell Alliance Project was to figure out how we could best work together … with various student groups that were concerned with social justice,” said Student Organization of Latino/as (SOL) Public Relations Officer Adam Aguirre ‘06. Representatives from eight campus groups tentatively plan to meet once a month to assist each other with ongoing social justice projects.
Student activists have yet to decide the first goal of the GAP. At their Feb. 9 meeting, activists discussed the possibilities of hosting an anti-oppression training or a film festival as well as putting together a guidebook for student activists and petitioning to reinstate the student activities fund, which was excluded from this year’s budget.
Previously, student groups received funding for guest speakers and events through the student activities fund. “The student activity fund is something that falls under the financial rubric of Student Affairs,” said Melanie Yazzie ‘04, Student Affairs liaison for the Student Government Association (SGA). “They eliminated it this year because of the mental health expenditures. … Thousands of dollars have been lost and so we’re all feeling this crunch in SGA because student groups are asking for way too much money that we can’t afford.” Yazzie said a reintroduction of the student activities fund would “alleviate financial tensions and let student groups do what they need to do on campus and off campus.”
Aguirre said that getting the student activities fund back is “definitely an issue that we are all concerned with because its something that affects us all,” but emphasized that student groups did not form the alliance solely for financial reasons. “We want to see how we can improve all of our situations at the college so we know we can use each other as resources as well as more efficiently use the college’s resources,” said Aguirre.
In order to help activists currently at Grinnell, as well as future generations of activists, Concerned Black Students (CBS) spokesperson Ned Levy ‘04 suggested the GAP create “a ‘best practices’ manual or user guide for all the different groups.” In this type of manual, “everyone shares what works and what doesn’t work, and gives case studies and different scenarios that will affect us, so that way the people who come after us will emulate that or take it and add onto it,” said Levy.
“I’m hoping to develop a stronger base of groups who are working toward common goals and effectively communicate their interest in those common goals,” said Levy. “When people try to shoulder the burden alone or one group tries to do it all, when there’s two or three other groups that could be helping out … it can just collapse.”
The meeting to plan GAP “was the first time that a lot of student groups and leaders of student groups had ever been in the same room together,” said JustSex Co-Chair Allison Barrett ‘04.
After many fruitless attempts to facilitate dialogue between student groups concerned with issues of social justice, “GAP has been a project that’s a long time coming,” said Yazzie. “When I used to work a lot with multicultural student groups a couple of years ago, this was like the dream, to have all the student groups come together face to face in a forum and discuss what was going on, discuss social justice issues, and we tried to get it to happen but nobody would cooperate.”
“All of us have these groups that have five to ten people in them and we put on these events that have like 20 to 30 people come to them and its always the same people every time, Barrett said. “Sometimes student groups feel like they’re preaching to the choir. I know JustSex and other groups have had a real desire to put on more programs and do more events that are more coalition-based … so that we’re reaching people that we wouldn’t otherwise reach and also getting people that are traditionally involved in our groups to get out there and get past just our issue.”
Barrett expressed hope that GAP could more effectively organize activities to benefit the campus community. “To have all student groups come together and do a broad-based anti-oppression training would be amazing,” she said.
Anti-oppression training aims “to create a greater critical mass on students that are interested” in issues of social justice, Coriell said. “I think there is a critical mass but they’re all broken up into little pockets that don’t always make those connections that are then able to move on to bigger projects.”
CARW member Jane Hereth ‘06 said she hoped that existing groups could share in a campus-wide dialogue about social activism in the “spirit of groups being able to work together.”
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