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Organizing 101 Lessons I Wish I’d Learned on Campus 12 Stephen Smith This new leadership movement on college campuses made me who I am. Sort of. Before my first week of freshman classes—even before orientation—and following a long day tilling dirt at a YouthBUILD site alongside my soon-to-be classmates, I found myself huddled in a homeless shelter basement discussing the merits of Monsignor Ivan Illich’s famous 1969 speech to do-gooding students entitled “To Hell With Good Intentions.” In it, Illich lambasts a crowd of college kids about to embark on a service trip to Mexico. He chides them for their vanity, hypocrisy , and ineffectiveness. We bright-eyed eighteen-year-olds asked ourselves: Can outsiders really make a difference in a foreign land? Is community service more about doing good or appearing to do good? If I really want to change the world, is there an alternative to service? I was in heaven. Born in Charleston, West Virginia and raised in Plano, Texas, I had never heard of Illich and had no idea that there were other people my age who also cared about these things and wanted to ask big questions. The studentled preorientation program that had brought us together was called the Freshman Urban Program, or fup. We called ourselves Fuppies. Heaven. A week later, a fellow Fuppie and I were starting a citywide service group called basic. Two weeks after that, I was running for student government and trying to negotiate my way into Marshall Ganz’s Introduction to Community Organizing course. For the next four years, for every hour in class, I spent two hours doing volunteer work. Service days. Tutoring and mentoring programs, such as peace Games. Harvard aids Coalition. Hosting the national Campus Outreach Opportunity League (cool) Conference. The Coalition Against Sexual Violence and a campus education group called Peer Relations and Date Rape Education (prdre). I spent my summers working at a family shelter back home in Dallas. But there was a problem. With each new project and each new fight, I kept coming back to Illich’s reprimands and my own stomach-churning realizations. organizing 101 235 What were we really accomplishing? Who am I doing this for? How can we make a more equal world if the charge is led by all these do-gooding people of privilege, like me? For three weeks during my junior year, I got a taste of an alternative. During those twenty-one days I lived with about twenty-five other students in the University President’s office protesting the below-poverty wages Harvard paid its service workers. Those three weeks were the result of three years of work. We collected workers’ stories, researched our issue back and forth, and built a coalition of students , faculty, community members, and even alumni. We went through all the proper channels, but one by one, meeting by meeting, we were told that workers actually had it pretty good and that nothing could be done. We disagreed. And we kept fighting, with protests, teach-ins, and so forth, until finally, we decided to do something that might get us kicked out of school. And it worked. By my senior year, we had won a “living wage” of $11.35 plus benefits. After graduation, I was able to take advantage of a school-sponsored public service fellowship that allowed me to travel to Botswana and learn how people there were responding to the aids pandemic. I wanted to see how another culture reacted to its problems. What I found was more of the same: Illich’s do-gooding outsiders with big money and big hearts and big ideas—each with a ready explanation of why their work was different and more partnership-oriented than all other development work—working in fits and starts to fight the virus. Like so many other experiences from college, Botswana reminded me of my own privilege and left me thinking there must be a better way. There was. When I returned to the United States, I took the advice of a fellow student who had become a community organizer and attended the Industrial Areas Foundation’s weeklong national training in Arizona. Founded by Saul Alinsky, the Industrial Areas Foundation (iaf) is the nation’s largest network of citizen power organizations. It was an iaf organization (called build) that won the first living wage campaign in Baltimore. Another (East Brooklyn Congregations) built 4,000 homes to help revitalize New York. The...

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