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mherst College prides itself on providing an educational experience that molds students into leaders who will “give light to the world.” Such an experience requires a vibrant culture of engagement. We are very lucky to have access and support to a wide range of direct community service and advocacy and the opportunity to interact with some of the most renowned experts in the world. And yet, our community service seems strangely reactionary.
To correct the failings of the education system, we tutor; to reduce homelessness, we build houses; to shed light on the injustices in Darfur and Palestine, we protest. These types of community engagement are important, indispensable even, yet if this is the extent of our participation in the world, we validate the notion that students can only serve as foot soldiers in social movements. Let’s be clear, there is nothing wrong with being a foot soldier. In fact, this unheralded and underappreciated work is what drives most of social change. But, there is no reason why students cannot be the leaders and visionaries of these movements. Besides tutoring, students can work with local school boards to reform the education system. Besides going on Habitat for Humanity spring break trips, students can work with city halls to create policy that will prevent homelessness. Besides protesting the injustices in Darfur and Palestine, students can give recommendations to bring fair and just settlement to these conflicts. Making this a reality is the work of the Roosevelt Institute.
Few of us would think our final papers or our essays are policy-making material. Fewer still would believe we are qualified to even write policy. The reality is we are constantly researching, producing new ideas, criticizing old ones and finding answers. A critical approach and a liberal arts education guarantee that. We might not know it and we probably don’t follow all of the guidelines, but we write policy everyday. The Roosevelt Institute seeks to tap into these ideas, and combine it with expert preparation and policy writing skills to have direct impact on the big problems of our society.
Crafting policy might not to be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of activism. For many, activism is still what optimistic youth do to try and change the world before they “settle down.” But as Sarah Laskow—a founder of the Roosevelt Institute Chapter at Yale—says: “This is not our parent’s campus activism […] We’d rather shine our shoes than dread our hair. We’d rather speak alongside our political leaders than shout out rhetoric from campus quads. We’d rather write policy papers than compose protest songs. The political elders have used us for our bodies and our energies. Now we want to offer them our minds.” We feel The Roosevelt Institute can fill a crucial niche here at Amherst. Through public policy training and work that promotes innovative and concrete solutions, we seek to transform and energize activism on campus.
Our mission is to make student activism more intelligent, more legitimate to policy makers and more effective through fact-based policy solutions. The Roosevelt Institute will be the avenue for students to be active players in all parts of the policy process—writing, advocating and implementing.
To achieve our mission, we have three tasks. The first is self-education. As students, we recognize the value of a good education, and a well-educated population of activists is one of the most valuable resources of a democratic society. By starting to think now about how our values connect the issues we care about, we are laying the intellectual foundation for a generation of informed, articulate advocates.
Our second task is relevant and unique research. In order to effectively propose solutions for the problems the world faces today, we must fully understand their nature. The college gives us access to a vast array of resources to assist in this effort. Students conduct original research here every day. The Institute seeks to collect these resources, pooling the efforts of interested students. With our vision in mind and the facts in hand, we can develop unique proposals for a stronger world.
These proposals are the ultimate goal, for they will shape the America we want. Therefore, our third task is to give our fellows the tools they need to understand and participate in the political process, so they can implement their ideas. The Roosevelt Institute will help students write their policy ideas and connect them with the appropriate stakeholders. The Institute serves to plug students into the national political framework, giving them a voice to call for reform. Finally, as a student think tank, the Roosevelt Institute aims to be a resource for Amherst College student organizations and work with the existing activist community to explore issues of common interests and address solutions to those problems together.
In his inaugural address, President Obama called for a “new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.” Thus, in this new era of responsibility, let us become a generation of different citizens. Let us become a generation who not only gives their energy, emotion and bodies to the that will improve and advance society, but citizens who develop the vision and ideas that form the movement.