By Morgan Kinney & Danika Burgess Brown, CCL Staff
Students in the 2019-20 Capstone Course for the Certificate in Civic Leadership met the challenge of transitioning to remote class but still completing community-based projects they had been planning all year by maintaining communication and relationships with community partners and reflecting on crisis transformation opportunities at the semester’s end. The Capstone is the culminating course and “Create Change” level program of the Certificate in Civic Leadership. Through this course students in their junior and senior years collaborate with community partners to design projects that enhance the organization’s capacity to serve their mission. These projects range from data collection and research projects to curriculum or advocacy designing and direct service work, allowing each student to capitalize on their skills, strengths, and academic/career interests.
As March arrived, bringing the COVID-19 pandemic to the U.S. and the semester to remote delivery, the 12 Capstone students were in the middle of their projects. Gabrielle Humphrey (college ‘20) was combing through HISD budgets seeking clarity on the funding of school police, Shubhangi Mehra (college, ‘20) was spending several hours a week at Legacy Community Health analyzing data, and Annum Sadana (College, ‘20) was planning on-campus trainings to build awareness of sexual violence in the South Asian community. While some of these specific actions became impossible and the contexts surrounding all of them were drastically altered, the motivations driving the Capstone 2020 cohort and the partnerships they had fostered since fall 2019 were steadfast.
Consistent and critical reflection, individually and as a cohort, on their progress and intentional partnership development positioned the 2020 Capstone students to adapt nimbly to their new circumstances with their partners’ missions and shared goals at the forefront. While instructors and students alike faltered, regained their footing, and pushed forward, the central tenet of critical hope guided the group. This notion of a critical lens to hope demands an intentional envisioning of and actionable work towards a better future. As described by Jacobs (2005), the inherently interdependent nature of such hope “acts as a way of anchoring the individual to the social even when not in the physical presence of others.” The cohort ascribed to this approach by continuing weekly meetings to lean into their existing community for problem-solving, accountability, motivation, and of course, critical hope.
Another shared experience across the cohort was a sense of renewed immediacy of the topics that their projects covered. With an intersectional lens the capstone students immediately found the pandemic a source of further motivation to address the social inequities they set out to impact the previous fall. Salonee Shah (college, ’20), for example, had focused on educational equity through a partnership with Baker Ripley and a project focused on building resources for young English language learners. For Salonee, the pandemic meant an exacerbation of existing inequities in the education system. Areebah Ahmad (College, ’21) was working with the Houston Food Bank on enhancing training for medical professionals for their food prescription program in order to combat food insecurity. She saw first-hand the priorities of the food bank rapidly adapt to meeting the immediate needs of the Houston community as the economic impact of the pandemic caused a sharp spike in food insecurity.
While many of the COVID-related changes to Capstone students’ projects posed challenges, the renewed urgency of the social issues at hand combined with critical hope also meant new opportunities for creative project implementation. Swiftly making the priorities of her community partner her own, Carly Frieders (college, ’20) reoriented her efforts with the Texas Organizing Project to focus on supporting their phone banking campaign to release people who were incarcerated in high-risk facilities as the pandemic threatened to spread rapidly amongst an already vulnerable population. Several students adapted their final presentations of results or their implementation of training developed over the course of the semester to online formats, including Annum Sadana, who held a virtual training reaching 40 participants in lieu of the on campus plans she had originally developed.
Resiliency, critical hope, and mission-centric action characterized the hard work of the 2020 Capstone cohort. We hope you will join us in congratulating them on a job well done by checking out their Spring Showcase page for a more detailed look at their work alongside reflections on the experience.