Brandeis University -- Possibilities for Change in American Communities

Possibilities for Change in American Communities is a two-course sequence offered at Brandeis University for the first time in Spring and Fall, 2001 with a travel component during Summer, 2001. The course, organized and run by Assistant Professor David Cunningham and doctoral students Barbara Browning and Cheryl Kingma, will combine in-class study with a 30-day trip around the eastern half of the United States on a sleeper bus. The travel component will allow students to actively engage with individuals and organizations attempting to change established ways of viewing the world, and to experience first-hand the neighborhoods and communities that have been altered through their efforts. We seek to integrate the social justice and social change components found in many Brandeis courses with direct exposure to those who actively seek to make tangible change in their communities. These individuals will include various participants in the Civil Rights and Women's Movements, community organizers and activists, scholars, writers, artists, and musicians. We expect this to be an unforgettable learning experience for all involved, and, through each student's long-term efforts, we foresee a lasting impact on community-outreach activities at Brandeis.

The main goal of Possibilities for Change in American Communities is to provide students with the tools to improve communities through hands-on experience with a wide range of ongoing social change efforts. To this end, the program itself is designed to do two things.

First, it focuses on how communities are organized, since efforts to change existing conditions require a clear understanding of how and why these conditions originate and sustain over time. During the summer, we will visit a wide range of community types, from large urban areas (New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis) to 'typical' suburbs (Levittown, PA, Columbia, MD, Celebration, FL), to sparsely populated rural communities (Princeville, NC, Angola, LA, and Holmes County, MS -- the poorest county in the US). These communities were selected to represent the diversity of the American experience, but also to meet our second goal: to provide an opportunity to engage in community-organizing work.

Along these lines, we plan to spend several days working in Princeville, NC, which was settled by newly freed slaves shortly after the Civil War. African-Americans were allowed to settle on this particular plot of land, with its infertile soil and frequent floods, as it was commonly known as the least-desirable location in the area. In 1999, the community was devastated by Hurricane Floyd, which flooded the area for weeks and caused the vast majority of the community's homes and buildings to be damaged beyond repair. While it was widely assumed that the community would be abandoned thereafter, residents have undertaken an ambitious effort to rebuild the town from the ground up. We will work with the United Methodist Flood Relief Center to assist in this rebuilding effort. Similarly, we will work with prison reform groups near the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, build houses with Habitat for Humanity in Georgia, and fight for affordable housing policy with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia.

Effective social change efforts must begin with a clear understanding of how and why earlier movements for change have succeeded. To this end, a significant portion of our trip through the Deep South will be focused on the Civil Rights Movement. We plan to meet with current and past Civil Rights workers, as well as spend time in key sites such as Birmingham, Montgomery, and Holmes County. Much of the students' work this spring has involved learning about the Civil Rights Movement, and this in-class learning will be supplemented by visits to the Carter Center for Non-Violent Change in Atlanta and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. As with all of the stops on our trip, a wide range of speakers will share their current and past experiences with us.

We strongly believe that this course will be an exceptional experience for the students, as well as make a lasting positive impact on the intellectual climate at Brandeis generally. Leaving the classroom to directly engage the very subjects of our inquiry will allow for a richer understanding of community organization as well as individual and collective efforts to achieve significant social change.

(updated May, 2001)