The Story
Student Activism on a Smaller Scale
I’m almost blown into Aroma’s as I scurry down Prince George Street towards Matthew Whaley Elementary School. The students and residents look oddly smug peeking out from their cozy booths and tables, but I soldier on.
I have a mission: I have almost gotten to Chapter 5 in The Haunting of Third Grade. While I, thankfully, have personally progressed to a reading level beyond such classic fare, my third-grade friend Bailee is struggling.
And at 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, neither of us particularly wants to be there, but we keep working, and I’m convinced her sentences are smoother and her voice a little more confident.
Like nearly 300 other students from the College, I take a couple hours each week to tutor with the College Partnership for Kids, one of the many on-campus groups that reaches out to the Williamsburg area through programs with local schools, care centers and other organizations.
Though it’s not very glamorous and sometimes downright frustrating, tutoring allows me to escape the massive surrounding horde of 18 to 22 year olds sometimes called college and to get to know the community outside the borders of Old Campus.
Tutoring provides instant gratification: seeing my student’s face as we finish a math worksheet delivers a feeling of refreshing accomplishment, especially when most of my milestones in college fall along the lines of doing half my government reading or not falling asleep while writing a paper in Swem.
On one of those days when everything seems to fall short, tutoring is a timely reminder that life goes on outside of college, and that at least someone (even if they’re nine) thinks I’m cool.
Of course, I didn’t start out with such extracurricular wisdom. During the freshman year activities fair, I thought big: pretty soon I was getting e-mails from organizations from Students Helping Honduras to Students for Belize Education.
Honestly, it was difficult to differentiate among the groups, whom, while all noble and well-organized, seemed hard to be invested in when I still couldn’t get from Dupont to the Caf.
To a confused and often lost freshman, so many student groups seemed to focus on a global scope that just made me feel more lost. When trying to fix every problem in the world, a feeling of panic tended to replace any sense of progress in me.
Of course, college is where you go to simultaneously save the world and realize your own inadequacy, so I suppose these groups have the right idea, but the cynic in me still questions their true effectiveness.
Slowly, I began to encounter smaller, more locally centered organizations.
They may have less exciting titles, but these groups prove that one person can make a difference in the place perhaps hardest to change: home.
CPK, for example, recognizes that countless students in the Williamsburg school system need help. Several other groups take this smaller-scale approach, and the benefits of such action are tangible.
The Virginia Organizing Project, one of the newer groups on campus, is a textbook example of the grassroots approach. A statewide organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia, VOP operates as a non-partisan, progressive, voter registration and local-issue awareness group. The William and Mary chapter, which is completely student-driven, was started this year by Addie Alexander (’11) and Lenore Dukes (’10) as an extension of the larger organization.
The group focused on voter mobilization and registration up until the Nov. 4 election, canvassing in the Williamsburg area, distributing voter reminders and calling undecided voters with information about polling places and times in the area. On election day, VOP members gave Williamsburg locals rides to the polls and provided information about identification and common problems.
Other organizations find success in this student-driven, College-centered approach. The Tidewater Labor Support Committee, founded in 1977 by a group of William and Mary graduate students, works to advance labor issues in the region and on campus itself. According to their information leaflet, the TLSC works to support low-wage workers at the College within a direct-action framework.
Numerous other groups, from One in Four to Health Outreach Peer Educators (H.O.P.E.), keep the focus on helping the College community itself, with great success.
My goal is not to discourage or decry globally-focused student groups, as I think any form of positive activism is a much-needed drop of hope in a world that is increasingly scary, apathetic or, as my American Lit professor used to say, “going to hell in a hand-basket.”
However, I think that smaller-scale and grassroots student organizations deserve a moment of thanks and recognition for tackling the problems we walk past every day. College may be a fleeting time of irresponsibility, perhaps the only time when going streaking or drinking at 8 in the morning may be acceptable (thanks, Blowout!); however, those few hours a week when a third-grader with a wide smile turns a new page or when an old-time resident thanks me for asking him about local issues are priceless.
Williamsburg may not be glamorous, but it’s home.
Alexa McClanahan is a staff columnist for The DSJ. Her views do not necessarily represent those of the entire staff.
This piece originally appeared in the December 2008 issue issue of The DoG Street Journal.