Month: September 2017

VSEC Reflections

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For my post this week I thought I’d talk a little more in depth about the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition and how it connects to the communities we’re studying. Our class discussions feel important to me because of their relevance to the challenges VSEC faces with its own community.

VSEC is a statewide group of youth activists who mobilize around climate justice. Throughout the year, the Coalition has a house where four to six full-time organizers live and work together. For the past two summers, we’ve hosted a Summer Organizing Program at the house with around twelve people each year. These people put a tremendous amount of work into relational work, direct action organizing, and outreach. Here is VSEC’s theory behind collective living:

Volunteer organizing and collective movement living has been at the heart of social change as far back as our tradition of organizing goes. For the civil rights movement, churches and Freedom Houses spread throughout the Deep South supported young organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The ability to live and work together grew the nonviolent movement of sit-ins and moral confrontation that forced the segregated system to its end and won a right to vote for the Black community. Gandhi’s Ashram housed the commitment of the Indian Independence movement and launched the Great Salt March. Collective movement centers have served as incubators for resistance and sparks for building the new world we are fighting for. Collective living provides our foundation of trust, unity, and commitment to each other, as we build social movements rooted in the love of people.

I have not been a full member of the Summer Organizing Program or lived at the house for an extended period of time, but I definitely consider myself a part of the community. The house is a home I know I can return to; the people who live there are my family, the people I trust most deeply. I would strongly consider living there after I graduate. So the effort toward collective living is one that feels very near to my heart, and I want to understand how such a community can be sustained long-term.

-Sarah

Reflections: Our Community

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Our community for this course is unique in that it is decentralized from any one campus. We are able to maintain order through digital connection, so far mostly through Zoom calls, email, hypothes.is, and Slack. We meet on Mondays and Wednesdays for an hour and fifteen minutes and discuss progress on readings and our projects. This is the structure or framework within which it is possible to have a community.

In terms of feeling a sense of “community” within the group, group dynamics are important to consider. I still feel like I don’t really know the students from other campuses. I know their names but have not connected with them on a personal level. This would be true for “in-person” classmates in a large lecture class. As an English major, though, I’m used to discussion-based classes in which I get a strong sense of the personalities of classmates.

On the other hand, Maureen and I are close friends. We were roommates last semester. I feel a strong connection with her, and part of my motivation for the class comes from wanting to build a strong project with her. This is maybe what brings the strongest sense of community to the course for me.

I’m glad Dr. Schleef is physically present at UMW. Otherwise I think it would be easy to feel detached from the course. There’s a sense of accountability from having a UMW professor teaching the course, a knowledge that my performance and input will be remembered past the end of the semester. These are my reflections on our community so far.

-Sarah

Week 2 Reflection

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What type of community do I want to study, and how? What have I learned so far?

Reading about various intentional communities in Virginia with Maureen has made me reflect a lot on what I value about the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition. Our coalition has a consciousness around creating a space that challenges the prevailing social norms of individualism and competition. Not just for fun and unity, this is a deeply challenging political endeavor. There’s a lot of pain and difficulty that comes with unlearning and relearning the way we relate to one another. Members must constantly strive for honesty, harmony, and self-improvement.

I think that in many ways, most if not all intentional communities are undertaking this sort of work. I would like to study a group that is conscious of the political nature of such a task and shapes their decisions and structure around it. Maureen and I also discussed possibly studying an urban group, since we are less familiar with how these might function. We definitely want to study a community that we can visit here in Virginia.

When we decide on a community to study, one thing I would like to look at is the group’s conflict resolution structure. This work seems really important in such constant group spaces, and I can probably learn a lot from how seasoned community members handle and process day-to-day conflict.