Kalamazoo College has announced the ten finalists for its 2015 Global Prize for Transformative Social Justice Leadership, a juried competition hosted by the College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. Finalists will present during a Prize Weekend, Oct. 9-11, and one project will receive a $25,000 prize. Below is one in a series of profiles on the ten finalists.

We invite individuals who are familiar with this project to use our Community Input form to comment on its “grassrootedness” and transformative leadership practices. Input received before September 8 will be submitted to our jurors. Please see videos submitted by each finalist, as well as our rubric and other information about the Global Prize here.

Bavubuka Foundation

A Ugandan organization working to empower youth in the east African nation is using several elements of modern, popular arts and culture to reunite younger generations with their pasts.

For ten years, the Bavubuka Foundation has been exposing youth to music and the arts as a way to transform lives and unify diverse communities. The organization does this by reconnecting young leaders to their authentic indigenous roots and developing their understanding of the value of their culture and heritage.

“Many in the younger generations have left the villages and the countryside for the cities, and in the process have become disconnected from their heritage,” says Silas Balabyekkubo, aka, ‘Babaluku,’ founder and executive director of the foundation.

“Modern culture has uprooted the old ways. But we are turning that on its head, using modern culture as a vehicle to enable youth to get back in touch with their roots and express the newfound pride they have in their indigenous communities and pasts.”

Uganda has one of the world’s largest youth populations, many of whom have minimal resources and few platforms to be heard.

The foundation, which takes its name from the Luganda word for ‘youth,’ provides spaces, education and opportunities for youth to express their indigenous heritage in several ways. Their expression takes the form of storytelling through music, photography, journalism, dance, fashion, sustainable agriculture, and entrepreneurship.

The most popular form of expression is urban hip-hop, with the country becoming a wellspring of young emcees utilizing a type of rap called “Lugha Flow,” Swahili for ‘language’, to vocalize community issues and solutions, celebrate the wisdom of their elders and encourage the preservation of native languages.

“Regardless of what it is, the message from the youth is the same: that the truth of my past comes from my land, my culture and my language,” says Babaluku. “Youth are recognizing that, even though they may not live in their indigenous communities, they take the wisdom of their elders with them. They don’t disregard where they came from just because times have changed.”

The movement has seen a merging between old and young, an acceptance between the generations as they share an appreciation for a shared cultural experience and identity, the traditional both respected and remade within new, progressive art forms, Babaluku says.

“We are seeing kids doing some really inspiring work, and in the case of music, using indigenous hip-hop as a tool to tap into untapped leadership potential. “Theirs is a new, authentic voice that is being used to advocate for solutions, while breaking tribalism and other stereotypes, through the passion of hip-hop and other arts. The message is reconnection, restoration, healing and awakening to their authentic, true selves. It’s spreading everywhere. We are galvanizing multitudes because of the appeal of the arts.”

Kalamazoo College has announced the ten finalists for its 2015 Global Prize for Transformative Social Justice Leadership, a juried competition hosted by the College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. Finalists will present during a Prize Weekend, Oct. 9-11, and one project will receive a $25,000 prize. Below is one in a series of profiles on the ten finalists.

We invite individuals who are familiar with this project to use our Community Input form to comment on its “grassrootedness” and transformative leadership practices. Input received before September 8 will be submitted to our jurors. Please see videos submitted by each finalist, as well as our rubric and other information about the Global Prize here.

Black on Both Sides

The foster care system in the United States has a darker side to the benevolent image it tries to portray to the public, according to one social justice organization trying to demolish foster care altogether.

What hides in the shadows of this child care and rearing model is a kind of unofficial pipeline to the prison industrial complex, says Charity Tolliver, founder of Black on Both Sides, a project working to build a new generation of Black organizers towards the abolition of the foster care and prison systems.

Studies have shown that 80 percent of the prison population had spent time in the foster care system when they were younger, Tolliver says.

“That is not just surprising, it’s indicative of a messed up system,” she says. “It’s a dysfunctional system for those it’s supposed to serve.”

The majority of foster care children are removed from their biological homes for neglect – which really means poverty, Tolliver says. But instead of providing additional resources to struggling families to keep children with their parents, benefits – WIC, food stamps, and other assistance measures – are being cut, while at the same time, foster families are being paid to care for these kids.

“It’s hypocritical,” Tolliver says.

These young, mostly Black youth are taken away from their mothers, who are negatively stereotyped as abusive, loud, oversexed and unruly, set into the foster care system, where they are more likely to wind-up immersed in the juvenile justice system and, eventually, the prison system at-large, she says. This model eerily resembles the slavery-era practice of slave masters removing children from their mothers, treating the mothers merely as aspects of production and their children as commodities, she adds.

“It’s got less to do with money and more to do with disposable black bodies and create places to put them, to confine them in a post-slavery, neo-liberal society,” Tolliver says. “This pipeline, starting when a person is young, ensures a policy of sequestration of disposable, black bodies from the rest of society, while the increasingly for-profit foster care and prison industrial complex is able to increase profitability with a steady stream of new inmates.”

Although this issue hits poor white and Latino families, it impacts – indeed, targets – the Black community especially hard. Take New Mexico for example. Blacks make up 1 percent of that state’s population, but represent 5 percent of the foster care cases, Tolliver says. In Arizona, where blacks comprise 3 percent of the population, they make up 10 to 12 percent of the foster care population. Finally, in Illinois, where the organization is based, blacks make up 16 percent of the population but 54 percent of children in foster care and 32 percent of Chicago’s population but 95 percent of new foster care cases in the city.

The project highlights the voices and experiences of Black youth who have experienced both the foster care system and the juvenile or adult justice system, while launching a direct action organizing campaign to address the root causes of the foster care to prison pipeline.

Blacks on Both Sides pushed for a foster care bill of rights for foster kids in Illinois, which has passed through the state’s Senate and House, as well as a restorative justice model to deal with non-violent issues in a foster home, like arguments, stealing money or running away, problems where law enforcement is routinely called. Studies show that a foster child who is arrested – even for these minor offenses – is 15 percent more likely to wind up in prison, Tolliver says. The organization is looking to move nationwide with its restorative justice efforts and push for a national bill of rights for foster kids.

“We all know that children are best kept with their parents,” she says. “All of our work is focused on righting these injustices and reuniting families, where kids are their healthiest.”

 

Kalamazoo College has announced the ten finalists for its 2015 Global Prize for Transformative Social Justice Leadership, a juried competition hosted by the College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. Finalists will present during a Prize Weekend, Oct. 9-11, and one project will receive a $25,000 prize. Below is one in a series of profiles on the ten finalists.

We invite individuals who are familiar with this project to use our Community Input form to comment on its “grassrootedness” and transformative leadership practices. Input received before September 8 will be submitted to our jurors. Please see videos submitted by each finalist, as well as our rubric and other information about the Global Prize here.

Association of Injured Workers & Ex-Workers of General Motors Colmotores (ASOTRECOL)

For four years, a small but committed group of injured auto workers fired from the GM Colmotores assembly plant in Bogota, Colombia have been living in a tent encampment outside the U.S. embassy, drawing attention to the plight of employees there in a nation that has few worker protections. They suffer nerve damage and spinal, hand or shoulder injuries sustained in a factory with poor working conditions.

Over the years, the men in The Association of Injured Workers & Ex-Workers of General Motors Colmotores (ASOTRECOL) have gone on several hunger strikes, some sewing their mouths shut with needle and thread, to protest GM’s inhumane treatment of workers at the plant. Plant managers would fudge workers’ medical records and injury claims in order to keep insurance premiums as low as possible and increase profits, Hammer said. Some hunger strikers endured several months on just a liquid diet.

“At the core of all this is the question of the sacred right to dignified work,” said Frank Hammer, a lead organizer with the ASOTRECOL Solidarity Network. “That’s how the Association’s leader, Jorge Parra, explains their struggle.”

Colombia ranks as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for labor organizers, Hammer said, a nation where only 4 percent of the working population is a member of a trade union. In the early 1990s, the unionized population was four times that.

When a contingent of UAW and GM officials traveled to the plant in 2012, union inspectors said the safety standards at the plant were comparable to those in United States factories in the 1970s. GM promised to install modern machinery and ensure more transparency in the handling of injury claims in response to the ex-workers’ protest. But the UAW leadership never fully engaged with the protesting ex-workers, who had, as one of their demands, the right to form a union, Hammer said.

“The workers wanted their jobs back, or in lieu of that, to receive disability payments for their injuries, he said. The company declined both requests, offering limited severance payments instead.

Still, the improvements at the plant were seen as a victory to the men. GM has also stopped firing injured workers, placing them instead on other jobs they can do. Their commitment to their cause has inspired injured workers from other industrial sectors to join with them in solidarity, including workers from Colombia’s construction and oil drilling sectors, and Coca-Cola bottling operations. ASOTRECOL member Parra traveled to Detroit in 2012 to meet with UAW officials, and while he did not get the support he was looking for, rank-and-file union members and community activists showered ASOTRECOL with support, raising $10,000 for their efforts.

At the moment, about a half-dozen or so ASOTRECOL members and supporters are still living in the tents, still fully engrossed in their fight for worker rights and protections. And as corporations become more multinational, the need for cooperation between workers across borders has never been greater, Hammer said.

“That’s one of the biggest messages of the inspirational struggle of these men,” Hammer said.

“The broader objective being to build solidarity between workers employed by the same companies in different countries who experience the same mistreatment. The companies are becoming more global; we have to as well.”

 

Kalamazoo College has announced the ten finalists for its 2015 Global Prize for Transformative Social Justice Leadership, a juried competition hosted by the College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. Finalists will present during a Prize Weekend, Oct. 9-11, and one project will receive a $25,000 prize. Below is one in a series of profiles on the ten finalists.

We invite individuals who are familiar with this project to use our Community Input form to comment on its “grassrootedness” and transformative leadership practices. Input received before September 8 will be submitted to our jurors. Please see videos submitted by each finalist, as well as our rubric and other information about the Global Prize here.

At a Crossroads: Forest Dwellers of India

Western culture – obsessed with perpetual development, ever-increasing profits and uninterrupted growth – could learn a lot from the forest-dwelling native tribes on the Indian subcontinent, many of whom are unknown even in their own country.

Steeped in this economic paradigm, many tribes have become disconnected from the earth they consider their mother, losing the sensation of soil on their hands, the taste of fresh water, the ability to sense the wind, and what weather it might bring.

“These (indigenous) people wouldn’t even use a hoe on the earth, because they thought they were hurting their mother. They would simply mix their seeds, spread them and see what grew,” said Arunima Sharma, an organizer affiliated with Ekta Parishad, a nonviolent people’s movement that works to build community, self-reliance and power to India’s poorest people.

These indigenous peoples’ way of life is being seriously threatened, with government agencies in India seeking to remove them from the land they’ve taken care of for countless generations. The push to ‘Westernize’ these people – bringing them into the modern economic fold, teaching them different languages, exposing them to the educational system – has meant their way of life is slipping away.

Case in point, Sharma says, is the loss of the knowledge of several plant medicines, because the tribes are losing their languages and becoming smaller. The “At a Crossroads: Forest Dwellers of India” project empowers the dream of tribal communities to grow back forests, converting wastelands into healthy ecosystems, thus returning sustenance, agroforestry-based livelihood, and rootedness to community.

Some tribes, who have taken to living in forests redefined as ‘protected’ by the Indian government, have had their crops destroyed by government officials, Sharma says.

“These people have been called ‘backward’ by the government,” she says. “But in our view, it’s the modern society and its economic models that are unsustainable. Perhaps it’s ironic, but in order to go forward, we must go backward, to sustainable models of development.

In advocating for the autonomy native peoples, Ekta Parishad is revitalizing the relationship of cultural indigeneity and biodiversity by celebrating tribal traditions, supports indigenous education provided by elders to youth, retaining memory, history and culture and deconstructing hierarchy and re-defining progress.

There is a deep, respectful, symbiotic relationship between the native, forest-dwelling people of India and the land they call home. They use all their senses when interacting with their natural world, Sharma says.

“We are creating an opportunity for tribal communities to share their stories with the world, giving visibility to those lost and forgotten,” she says. “We need to question what out notion of progress is, and these native people can teach us a lot. We have a collective case of environmental amnesia, and are in such denial we forgot where we came from. These people may have no idea what life in the modern world is like, and are considered the poorest of the poor, but in many ways they are the ones who show us how to move forward, with love, respect and honor for the home we all share – the Earth.”

 

After the current 2014-15 admission cycle, Kalamazoo College will no longer require ACT or SAT standardized test scores to be part of a prospective student’s application. The change will affect students applying for enrollment in fall 2016.

The change makes K part of a growing trend in higher education called “test optional” admission. More than 800 colleges and universities in the country admit students without regard to test scores, including a substantial number of highly-ranked national liberal arts colleges. Kalamazoo College would be the first elite liberal arts college in Michigan to join the movement.

“Admission to K always has been — and will continue to be — very selective,” says Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Eric Staab. “Admission is determined by various factors that express a student’s qualities and abilities and likelihood to thrive at K,” he added.

According to Staab, these factors include high school grade point average, academic rigor of the high school curriculum, the application essay, participation in co-curricular activities, and letters of recommendation.

“Students may continue to submit test scores as additional information,” said Staab, “but for students applying to enroll at K in 2016, test scores will no longer impact the admission decision.”

Studies show that standardized test scores have little broad predictive value for undergraduate success. A two-year study by Kalamazoo College supports that finding. The study, completed by faculty and staff members serving on K’s Admission and Financial Aid Committee (AFAC), looked at data from the four classes that matriculated to K from 2009 through 2012 for correlations between academic performance at K and the admission factors, including standardized test scores.

According to Staab, high school GPA was the best and most consistent predictor of academic performance at K across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic categories. Scores on standardized tests tend to correlate with family income and may say more about an applicant’s economic advantages — or disadvantages — than about academic potential.

“Given that studies have found a correlation between income and test scores, it seems unfair to use test scores in the admission process,” Staab said.

Staab said he and others at the College expect the test-optional change to have no effect on the quality of students who will constitute future incoming classes. The College will conduct follow-up research to measure the performance of the new test-optional approach, as well as its possible effects on first-year GPA, retention and graduation rate, areas of study, and “first destination” data (a.k.a. employment, graduate school, or other) after graduation.

Kalamazoo College Associate Professor of Biology Ann Fraser, who served as the AFAC study’s principal investigator, said “K’s research suggests that test scores were telling us very little regarding a student’s potential for success at K, and that high school GPA and curriculum rigor were predicting better and perhaps more fairly. We believe the change will attract students who may not do well on standardized tests but who tend to think outside the box. And that prospect can be very exciting for the College.”

Her colleagues on the Kalamazoo College faculty agreed. The test optional change was approved by a large majority of the College’s faculty in November 2014. K joins the growing ranks of test-optional colleges, including Bates, Beloit, Bowdoin, Denison, Earlham, Middlebury, and others. A list of test-optional colleges and links to studies and other information on the test-optional topic may be found at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing website.