As the spring semester winds down and summer beckons, the newly initiated members of the Students’ Association (SA) have gotten to work preparing for the fall. With that, we wish them luck.
But in the meantime, it’s crucial that the student body continues to get involved in campus activism in a way that doesn’t necessarily involve holding an official position within SA. There are areas of campus life that you can be involved in more effectively than through the trudging legislative process.
First and foremost among those, and also the most directly related to SA, is to volunteer on one of the various committees. You can help by benchmarking SA projects against similar efforts at other schools. This can be done through being a legislative aid for a committee member, or even applying to be an executive director for one of the committees. Another option is to apply to be an executive aid for SA.
Simply making appointments with people in SA and articulating your point of view can make an impact. They can put you in contact with the right administrators for your issue.
But there are many other leadership opportunities outside of SA. One of the most prominent is the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. The Institute offers programs, like where students can go on Alternative Spring Break or volunteer in off-campus volunteer efforts. They offer the Gandhi Service Fellowship Program, which attempts to show students through a year-long internship how social justice and nonviolence can interact.
Another place of involvement is the Rochester Center for Community Leadership (RCCL). RCCL has a program that combine taking academic classes with real-life leadership work called Citation for Achievement in College Leadership. This citation can be added onto your transcript, and all you need to do is to take a class that focuses on preparing students for leadership, and then following up with a practical application of the what was learned in the class in a leadership program.
Causing a positive change on our campus is certainly not an easy task, but with perseverance and a little bit of creativity it can be done. All that’s needed is the will to do so.