“It's a basic skill that has affected everything else in my life,” says Sarna Salzman '96, executive director of SEEDS, a nonprofit organization that connects ecology, education, and design to help communities make smart decisions about their future.
Wait a minute! A community organizer who earned her degree in anthropolo
gy attributes one of her most important undergraduate learning experiences to a music experience?
“[Associate Professor of Music and Choir Director] Jim Turner helped me learn to use the potential of my breath; it's been indispensable,” confirms Salzman.
In fact, combine that lesson with a theatre background, stir in some ceramic arts, and you have the beginnings of a recipe for the ability to develop and deepen human relationships—the bread and butter of Salzman's success in paradigm shifting.
Anthropology has been vital to that success. It has confirmed her belief that individuals are fascinating. It has made her a good listener, which, in turn, has strengthened her ability to speak in the “language” of various groups, all of whom come from a place they consider normal and legitimate. Anthropology also “helps me understand the difference between what's biologically and what's culturally ingrained,” explains Salzman. “Understanding that difference makes it possible to see ‘outside the box' and engage communities in the process of doing things differently” –the first step in a paradigm shift. And doing things differently is done in the name of developing a community that Salzman would feel good about retiring into (fortunately, we would too).
That kind of community involves SEEDS in issues such as wastewater treatment, green building and infrastructure development, greenhouse gas emission analysis, and local food sources enhancement.
So her Kalamazoo College anthropology degree continues to be vital to her professional life today. But her professional success also is due to the extras that the liberal arts experience at “K” tossed in.
For example, working for the College's catering operation! “A random job that led me, after graduation, to food-service work at the McMurdo Station in the Antarctic,” says Salzman, and, after that, several other food-related jobs and experiences that enhanced what Salzman calls “kitchen relationships” and “potluck culture'— vital skills for developing communities that enhance the lives of human beings.
For Salzman, if one pillar of “K” excellence is kitchen dynamics, the other is exploration. She came to college unsure of her major (in fact, intending to major in philosophy), but supporting such uncertainty with the pursuit of passion is the purpose of a place like “K,” she says. “Who wouldn't choose the liberal arts?” she wonders.
“I chose 'K' because it would stretch me to explore places in the world I wouldn't have chosen on my own without support. The College provided that support.”
So off she went to the Philadelphia Urban Studies Program (one term in her sophomore year), the College's study abroad program in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya (two terms in her junior year), and an ethnography Senior Individualized Project in Belize (one term in her senior year).
The Antarctic (thanks, again, to that campus catering job) and New Zealand followed, and then a year to carefully study and select a graduate program (University of California-Davis). That was a year well spent, according to Salzman, who earned a Master's degree in community development, focusing in particular on the dynamic relationship between place and culture.
Today, in addition to directing SEEDS' Traverse City, Michigan, office, she is a member of the Kalamazoo College Sustainability Guild. Or, maybe, in some sense, a member of all the College's charter guilds because she considers sustainability to be inextricably connected to health, business, and peace and justice.
Salzman knew that “K” would push her places she might not explore on her own—like Philadelphia, Kenya, Belize—and then, once she got in the habit—the Antarctic, New Zealand, UCal-Davis, and, today, LIFE work in both senses of that word: lifelong and living!
Perhaps that is the ultimate breathing lesson.
