This past week being a part of CAUSE’s CLA orientation has been a complete whirlwind of new information and new people, in the most rewarding possible way. Spending the better part of the past 3 years doing online class and working in-person at a very limited capacity, participating in orientation week was my first real opportunity to meet new people since the pandemic started. And more than that, I had spent the past 4 years studying philosophy, thinking about the ways things should be, the ways people should ideally act in a society, the duties we should have to each other as fellow citizens. That is to say, I spent the past 4 years a little removed from the practical methods needed to actually make change in our communities. Each new day of orientation, I felt I made some progress towards developing a more pragmatic understanding of how civic-minded individuals can make real differences for the AAPI community.
From the class sessions at the retreat, to the networking session, to Godfrey Plata’s talk on campaigning, at every step I felt more and more hopeful that we would be given the tools we need to be successful in making change going forward. At the beginning of the retreat when Steve talked about the cycle of socialization, we were introduced to a necessary framework by which to view how problems like racism, sexism etc. perpetuate themselves in our society. We were forced to confront this problem that can seem overwhelming and inevitable, but not without a sense of hopefulness and optimism for the future. We learned that we have in ourselves, in the connections we make with our fellow CLA interns, the power and potential to right some of these longstanding wrongs.
I was also deeply inspired by Godfrey Plata’s presentation on how to think about creating systems-level change within our communities. More specifically, he emphasized the importance of looking to our own unique experiences of injustice and to use those as a foundation for understanding the broader underlying societal problems. By having us ground our convictions in our own experiences in that way, he empowered us to find strength in our own observations and perceptions. I thought back to my own experiences, working at a middle school where the students struggled due to a combination of a lack of resources and socioeconomic problems and began to think about the specific policies that perpetuated many of my young students’ struggles. Moreover, listening to Godfrey Plata talk about the many difficulties involved in the campaigning process - obtaining funding and direct voter engagement among many others - unexpectedly reinvigorated my faith in our political system. Though the process is daunting, it now seems more tractable than before and I hope to put some of what we learned to use as we work to create our own mock campaign.
Ultimately, though I began the week a little apprehensive and unsure of my role, I leave orientation with the understanding that throughout the remainder of the program, we will be given the information and resources we will need to act on our common values even after the summer ends.