Ginsberg Center E-Newsletter
February 2009
Back to Basics
Senior Madeline Stano helps develop a new Project Community course on the basics of human rights, from theory to the front lines
Madeline Stano has helped a program that teaches urban youth to build boats in Philadelphia. She's worked restoring houses in rural West Virginia. Closer to home, she's mowed the lawns of local senior citizens.
The University of Michigan senior can't pinpoint a moment in time that shaped her interest in human rights. Instead, she said, it was her environment, especially her years at Roeper School, an independent day school in Bloomfield Hills, that pointed her in that direction.
Stano, who graduates this spring as a sociology major, wasn't satisfied just to learn about human rights during her time at the University of Michigan. She wanted to teach it. A new Project Community section on human rights was introduced this semester.
When Stano arrived on campus nearly four years ago, it was natural that she sought out ways to become involved in the community. "I felt compelled and called to serve," she said.
She signed up for an Alternative Spring Break at a domestic violence site in Minneapolis during her freshman year. That was the beginning of a college career that would eventually include work in the student organization Human Rights Through Education (HRTE), the Ginsberg Center's Student Advisory Board, and spring breaks working in the community, including time at the Philadelphia Wooden Boat Factory and at the Appalachian South Folklife Center. She's participated in Community Plunge, worked with Meals on Wheels, and worked with Cambodian refugees in Chicago.
But Stano's parting gift to the university is the new Project Community course she helped develop on human rights, offered this semester for the first time as a Project Community/Sociology 389 section. "Human rights is an obtuse and abstract concept," Stano said. "It's not something that's easy for people to connect to. We wanted to shed a little light on human rights work and offer the opportunity to participate in it."
Stano spent a semester working on the curriculum, which addresses human rights and other social justice movements and how they overlap. The course looks at national and international human rights efforts and how they are interpreted by government, action organizations, and artists.
Students also select from one of three community options that puts them on the front lines of human rights work: Peace Action of Michigan, a Ferndale-based organization that works on nuclear disarmament; Freedom House, a Detroit group that offers legal and social services (including housing) to refugees seeking asylum; and Detroit's Focus:HOPE, which offers a huge menu of services including urban human rights advocacy.
Stano saw a sign of hope for human rights when she made the 42-hour round trip train ride to Washington D.C. last month to be at the Inauguration. "It was wonderful to hear someone in the highest position we have to offer talk explicitly about rejecting the false choice between safety and ideals. It was all really powerful, especially hearing older people talking about the civil rights history of the 1960s and 1970s. I just had to be there."