Social Action Groups addressing Class and Classism
Classism
You may notice that there are no groups on Dickinson's campus that deal directly with issues of class and/or classism. However, you should note that many official and un-official social action groups do in fact confront issues of class and classism in an indirect way. For example, the newly formed Dickinson group English As A Second Language offers English classes as a free service to Spanish speaking adults and youth who, due to our socio-economic society, are in lower economic classes. There are also numerous clubs and organizations that plan food drives throughout the year that give food to those who cannot afford it. These groups of people are invariably in lower classes. Alpha Phi Omega, for example works weekly with the local Project Share to help distribute food to those people of Carlisle who are in need. Delta Nu and APO work together to help support the services provided to the homeless and potentially homeless at Safe Harbor. Other groups who offer help or services to those in the lower classes are Big/Little, Circle K, Habitat for Humanity, Alternate Spring Break, America Reads, Dreamcatchers and Expanding Horizons.
Furthermore, groups like Sustained Dialogue engage in discussions that oftentimes start out racial and end up being about class and/or classism. However, there is an apparent lack of social action groups dedicated to this topic. To hear what students said about this discrepency see here.
Projects
Although there are no official groups dedicated to class/classism on the campus, members of the dickinson community have been doing social action in this realm for quite some time. For example, in 2002 Andrea Tipton started a VISTA program on campus that aimed to help Carlisle residents gain access to the government services they need to rise out of poverty. VISTA, a division of AmeriCorps, stands for Volunteers In Service To America. Her program helped Carlile residents gain access to food, medical care, and adequate public transportation. In 2004, the college raised almost $4,000 for the purchase of non-hybrid drought resistant seeds to help poor farmers in Quirimbas National Park in northern Mozambique. That same year, the six-day Hunger2Hope event to fight world hunger raised about $7,000 for World Vision, which fights hunger and poverty worldwide. Also, in January 2005, Chuck Barone, a current economics professor wrote Radical Political Economy: A Concise Introduction which gives students new ways of viewing and analysing our classist economy.
To view any one of these articles, go to The Campus News Extra and search the keyword 'poverty'.
To see national anti-classist movements go to this page.
This page by Goldie Pyka and Elizabeth Snyder
