Student Spotlight
As a child growing up in suburban Detroit, Danielle Bober loved the city. "It was where you would go to have fun: for sports teams, for going out to dinner," she said. "I loved the people of Detroit and their unique spirit."
So it wasn't a surprise that she attended the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning as a graduate student to focus on Detroit. "I liked the U-M program because there was so much interaction with Detroit," she said.
Now, Bober's work in Detroit, much of it centered on addressing vacant housing, has won her accolades, from the U-M to His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama. On the threshold of her graduation in April, the recognition began: she won the Rosalie Ginsberg Award for Outstanding Community Impact and later found out she was a recipient of the Compassion in Action Award from Jewel Heart, the Buddhist learning center in Ann Arbor, and would be recognized by the Dalai Lama during his visit to Ann Arbor.
As an AmeriCorps student last summer, Bober worked with Focus: Hope in Detroit, looking at the neighborhood that bordered the organization's campus, which straddles the City and Highland Park. She wrote a master plan and a land use plan for the area that included sustainable and affordable housing, a commercial strip, and a network of linked parks. She did a photo survey for the area and gathered historical photographs, documenting the decline of the neighborhood when the Lodge Freeway was built. She did numerous other jobs, from writing a community newsletter to helping out at a summer program. Implementation of most of her ideas is on hold because of the bruising economy. "But it gave Focus: Hope new ideas," she said.
But her work with Detroit didn't end there. In January, Bober began working with the Detroit Vacant Properties Campaign (DVPC), a new effort to turn vacant land into assets, from livable homes to parks to urban gardens. For part of that effort, Bober led two cleanup events, eventually cleaning up five vacant houses and boarding up three more. The houses had been home to squatters. "It was nice to start to change neighborhoods," she said.
Bober also did the Herculean task of collecting data on 50 vacant houses: how they had come to be vacant, who owned them, and strategies for dealing with them. Simply tracking down ownership was huge. "Detroit doesn"t have a central data base, so it's difficult to get information," she said. "And when you get it, it's often unreliable." Bober just completed the first version of that report. And she will be able to continue. She just landed a job with DVPC.
Her efforts led to sharing the stage with the Dalai Lama in the spring. After his keynote address, Bober and the two other award winners were called to the stage. The Dalai Lama presented her with the award and a white silk scarf, called a kata, which is a Tibetan custom of greeting. "I was incredibly nervous," Bober said. But as she stood next to him, her nervousness faded. "He had a calm presence, which is what you would expect," she said. "He got really up close and looked me right in the eye. He told me I was young and to keep up my passion. It was amazing."
Aria Everts never thought of herself as a radical person. She's pint-size and soft spoken, and a favorite of her teachers in high school. Yet, there she was last year, handcuffed and arrested after participating in a sit-in at the University of Michigan's administration building to call attention to sweatshop labor and university apparel.
For her work and passion with bringing attention to global working conditions, Everts has won recent recognition: She was named one of 10 Students of the Year by the Michigan Daily this spring.
Growing up in northern Michigan, Everts had little exposure to unions and the labor movement. But when she heard about the anti-sweatshop movement when she was a teenager, Everts knew she had found her calling. She began learning about globalization, labor exploitation, and the international labor movement.
Everts figured she could change the garment industry from the inside and enrolled at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Chicago. She was wrong, she said. The school's focus was on design and merchandising and not on the labor aspect of fashion. "I was a little out of place," Everts said. "I thought there would be a little more awareness. I knew I needed to end up doing something that was going to make a difference."
After earning an associate's degree in Chicago, she transferred to U-M. By the second week of classes, Everts had discovered SOLE, Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality. She knew she had found the right place.
Everts has been engaged in the community through her work with labor rights. She's reached out to other campus organizations to spread the word on worker exploitation and started the Fair Tees Project, where student organizations are asked to purchase their T-shirts from a fair trade women's cooperative in Nicaragua. She's worked on building local labor solidarity, such as supporting graduate student work stoppage, and co-sponsored the film "The Motherhood Manifesto." SOLE is also looking for ways to support mothers in Ann Arbor.
Everts knows first-hand about bad jobs, although she's quick to say her experiences pale compared to sweatshop labor. She's worked cleaning cottages and in retail, streaming clothing for hours at a time, ending up with a wrist injury. "I can relate to having no power over what you do, having no control on a daily basis," Everts said.
Everts, an honors sociology major and peace and justice minor, wants the University to consider restructuring the Labor Standards and Human Resources Committee to give it more clout. She also wants the University to sign on to the Designated Supplier Program, where universities around the country are joining forces to identify fair labor manufacturers of licensed collegiate apparel.
People who know Everts from her hometown were surprised to hear about her arrest, she said. "I was a goody goody growing up, and people from my high school were a little surprised that I had broken a rule. But I was proud of it. I was pleased that I did it."
Robert Gasior has milked goats, worked on an Indian reservation, and repaired a house ransacked by cats. But the University of Michigan senior also has learned that bad luck can create bad times, that there are reasons people live in poverty that go well beyond stereotypes, and there's much to learn away from campus.
For four years, Gasior has spent the end of February on Alternative Spring Break (ASB) projects, working on a sustainable farm in Texas, a community project in West Virginia, an Indian reservation in New Mexico, and with children and adults with disabilities in New Jersey.
While he was going to spend his final spring break as a college student at home, he couldn't let this final opportunity pass: a week before 400 students were scheduled to pack into vans and fan out to 34 service project sites around the country for the 2008 ASB, Gasior decided to join the group headed for Burlington County Cerebral Palsy Association's Githens Center in New Jersey.
As a freshman, a friend introduced Gasior to ASB. He traveled to a farm near Waco, Texas, where he helped build a chicken coop, fix a roof and tend farm animals. The sustainable farming techniques developed and tested at the non-profit farm were exported to Haiti in an effort to improve farming there. "The experience changed my mind about service," Gasior said. "It's more than doing something for someone. It's thinking about how issues affect other people, about addressing root causes rather than just providing a short-term service." By the end of his first ASB trip, he knew he wanted to be a site leader.
As a sophomore, Gasior led an ASB group that focused on rural poverty to a town in southwest West Virginia and the Appalachian South Folklife Center, who connected the students with a homebound woman who had returned from a hospital stay to find her home overrun by her cats. The group cleaned and painted the house, making it livable again. "As a site leader, you break down stereotypes, such as people who are poor must be lazy or uneducated," Gasior remarked. In fact, the woman whose house the group fixed had two college degrees but had been plagued by accidents and health issues.
The next year, Gasior lead a group to a Boys and Girls Club on an Apache reservation in southwest New Mexico. "People come with the mentality that they want to help people for one week," Gasior said. "But what they learn is that they can learn from the community and about root causes." His group worked with children in a Head Start program, were part of an after-school program, and spent time with older adults at a senior center, playing bingo and delivering food. "We had a lot of conversations with the people," he said. "We got a sense of what was going on and the issues the native communities face."
As a senior, Gasior has served as the co-coordinator of education and training on the ASB leadership team, training 80 site leaders in leadership, logistics, and facilitation. As this work wrapped up, he realized he wanted to go on one last ASB trip. Fortunately, there was an opening. He worked with disabled youth and adults, and helped out with maintenance, such as painting a "little room," a special space for autistic children, Gasior said. "I didn't want to miss the experience I get each year of learning about a different community, and learning about myself."
While some students travel thousands of miles to study aboard, Aditi Sagdeo knows there are lessons to be learned and communities to work with right around the corner. The University of Michigan senior, with the help of a Ginsberg Center fellowship, has spent her senior year drafting and promoting a plan where students would live, learn, and volunteer in Detroit for one semester.
The Semester in Detroit students will live in Detroit, take classes at the University's Detroit Center, and connect with a community organization where they will volunteer for 20 hours a week. Startup is expected for Winter 2009 with a target of 25 to 30 students, Sagdeo said.
The idea sprang out of a class project for an Urban and Community Studies class Sagdeo took a year ago. (Rachel Tanner, a fellow student in the class, wrote the proposal for this initiative.) Sagdeo was one of four students who began organizing Semester in Detroit, and the only one who didn't graduate last year. While she eventually recruited 14 other students to help with the organizing this academic year, she figures she spends 15 to 20 hours a week on Semester in Detroit, writing grants, meeting with deans and professors, and working on publicity. That's between taking a full load of classes and applying to medical school. But, she said, she's energized.
"Nothing like this has been done before in Detroit, this total urban immersion program," Sagdeo said. While students have for years volunteered in Detroit, they return to campus to live. "Ours would be an alternative semester away," she said.
As a student in the ethnically and economically diverse Kalamazoo School District, Sagdeo said she saw that community resources such as schools can bolster the community. "I felt connected to my school, especially my elementary school. The kids in my school didn't take private lessons and didn't join private soccer clubs," she said. "But the school gave us so many opportunities, from reading and academic competitions to Little League." Semester in Detroit will allow the University and students to be an asset to the community, she said.
Semester in Detroit will revolve around the Detroit Center, opened in 2005 and located near Wayne State University and close to downtown. Semester in Detroit students will take classes there and housing will be nearby, Sagdeo said. The Center is home to University programs and research efforts and offers academic workspace. With Semester in Detroit, undergraduate classes, likely focusing on urban issues, would be added, Sagdeo said.
Sagdeo was part of the LUCY (Lives of Urban Children and Youth) Initiative where she learned about community organizing and tutored at a Detroit elementary school. Organizing Semester of Detroit brings together the skills she learned, she said. "I feel like something that is so innovative, so creative is a culmination of all my experiences with social justice and community service."
Danielle Buechler has been involved in community service since she was five years old and would help clean up a park in her small hometown in South Dakota. Later, she would volunteer at a children's hospital, perform for the elderly at nursing homes, found a smoking cessation program for youth, be part of a speakers' bureau on the risks of smoking, and lobby for tobacco education funding. And that was before she left high school. Her service work went on to span eight states and three continents, from working in Georgia for Habitat for Humanity to service in Peru and most recently in Ghana.
So when Buechler was hired by an international organization to assess a health education program in Humjibre, Ghana, she viewed it through the lens of community service: she understood that she would drop in, access the programs and return home, leaving no real mark on the community. "I knew I wouldn't be contributing to the model of sustainability," she said. "I would leave them in the same predicament they were in when I came."
A better idea, she reasoned, was to design an adaptable evaluation tool that the community staff in Ghana could use to evaluate their programs. It would not only create a roadmap for the future, but empower the community, Buechler said.
She turned to the Ginsberg Center and was awarded a Ginsberg student fellowship to fund the project. She created a simple tool to evaluate programs that covered mother and child health, teens and sex education, a de-worming clinic, a malaria program, and more. "The tool had to be very flexible to adapt to all the different topics," she said.
As a student in the master's of Public Health program, Buechler had taken a course on evaluation, but never one on international evaluation. The evaluation tool had to be low-tech -- no computers or Internet would be available. After four months of work, she completed the instrument. "It was an accumulation of everything I have ever learned," Buechler said. "It was very colloquial, meant for someone who had never done an evaluation in their life." The tool itself, she said, "was like a flow chart meets a wacky Mad Lib."
She took a colleague with her to Ghana last summer to test the tool. It's become part of the routine, seamlessly evaluating the programs. "We wanted them to be able to say--we don't need you,'" Buechler said. "It's nice to be able to let go."
Buechler's years of service have defined her career path: She's currently enrolled in an intensive, one-year nursing program at U-M to complement her master's degree. After that, she wants to work in chronic pain management in an underserved or urban setting. While she was accepted to medical school after earning her undergraduate degree, she opted for public health. "I decided I'd rather impact at a population level rather than an individual level," she said. "It's the way I see things -- not one person at a time, but whole communities at a time."
As a high school student, Zina Badri volunteered in her community. But a summer vacation with her family in Egypt after her freshman year at the University of Michigan changed how she viewed community service. Along with her family, Zina visited the City of the Dead, a sprawling cemetery where Cairo's poorest live among the tombs and headstones and squalor. An estimated 1 million people live there. "As we pulled into the gate, everyone was running to our van: Little children, an elderly woman whose face was disfigured, someone with no eye. People were pulling at us, kids were crying for money. I shut my eyes, trying to hold the tears back," Zina said. "When you think of Egypt, you think of National Geographic images of pyramids and camels. But here were people sleeping on the streets and alongside mausoleums."
While her family later debated whether it had been wise for Zina's mother to give away money inside the City of the Dead, they agreed it was not a long-term solution. "I came back home and wanted to get really involved. I had always done community service, and got the instant gratification of tutoring a child," Zina, a senior, said. "But when I came back from Egypt, I took a more mature approach. It got me thinking about root causes and social justice. I have this picture about what were once invisible people."
She went right to it, working that summer at the United Way in her hometown of Cleveland. "I wanted to learn more about the administrative side of non-profits and poverty relief," she said. Back at U-M, the pre-med student was involved with Circle K, the student arm of Kiwanis International, and went on to become a member of SERVE's Issues Education and Awareness Team where she is the Urban and Rural Poverty Team coordinator.
Last spring, Zina decided to take it up a notch and started a U-M chapter of NOURISH, a student-run organization started at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that has spread to eight other campuses. "It's about supporting sustainable development and not creating dependency," she said. For instance, UNC's NOURISH raised money to bring the technology and supplies to make peanut shellers to a small village in Uganda where the women who shelled peanuts by hand sustained physical injury from the repetitive motion. Using the UNC model, Zina has organized a series of Hunger Lunches--wholesome but simple lunches (rice, beans and bread) used to raise money and awareness--and hopes to raise $3,600 by the end of the school year. Zina also hopes to enlist other students to plan more fundraising events. She wants the UM chapter of NOURISH to sponsor a program this summer, possibly at a coffee farm in Mexico or a small town in Brazil that is trying to create its own economy.