April 22, 2019
By Cayla Clement
Multicultural Student Affairs (MSA) has announced a new pilot program to connect students with communities in Chicago through neighborhood excursions. Aaron Golding, an assistant director in MSA, said the idea for the program started with the idea of what does it mean to get students off-campus and into communities around the city of Chicago.
“We had this idea of what does it look like to be in support of a community that is experiencing gentrification or lack of investment from the city of Chicago,” Golding said. “We wanted to created opportunities for authentic and reciprocal experiences that didn’t feel like we were helicoptering in and then leaving.”
The “MSA Excursions” Series is in partnership with local nonprofits and the Asian American Studies Program. It is a two week program with two weekend excursions where students will analyze hoe community spaces can support a sense of shared cultural identity. In May, students will Paseo Boricua in Humboldt Park, where there is a strong Puerto Rican community identity, and the Argyle district. It will include a teach in with a Northwestern faculty member who is connected to Argyle, a neighborhood in Uptown with large Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Thai immigrant populations. The excursions will include meeting with the community organizations Africaribe and Division Street Business Development Association.
While Golding acknowledge that it is difficult to create a reciprocal relationship in two short weekend, he hopes that the program will teach students how to continue to connect with these communities through allyship and how activism can honor a neighborhood’s history and identity.
“Chicago is just next door,” Golding said. “I’ve found Chicago to be a really interesting way to examine how power and oppression, race and racism has played. These opportunities can shed more light on that happening as students begin to evaluate one’s place in a community in their career.”