Spring Break Campus Bridging Initiative, Day Four
Thursday’s session of the spring break CBI program was sunny and very windy which added to the energy of the day, which would be needed as we had three sessions lined up for us. Our first session was all about bridge building which also entailed community asset mapping. I loved this activity. I first began by mapping the beautiful Winona, the sun shining in the window really put me in the mindset of imagining Winona in the summer, the best time of year. I imagined the places I frequent in town, where I come together with people, and where I feel community most intensely and as I imagined, my asset map became more and more filled. Once my ideas began to trail off, I snuck a peak at all the other maps around me, some people working in teams from the same community and a few people also individually mapping their communities. It was interesting what was important to others in their community and what others didn’t put on their map that I had put on mine. Many maps had green spaces, local coffee shops, libraries, and other places that exist in almost every town, but has become a pivotal part of their town, nonetheless. Others had completely unique spaces or spaces not commonly thought of as community spaces that expanded my conceptions of what a commons could be. When we began to present our maps, the towns stopped being unfamiliar and I started to recognize how others value their spaces to the same degree and for the same reasons I value my own spaces.
After a yummy lunch, our next session focused on Democracy and Citizenship which led into conversations about vending machine and barn-raising government. These concepts weren’t new to me, but I greatly enjoyed the different perspectives on how to be a co-creator as a citizen. Civic engagement can be daunting and disorienting, even as someone with a great deal of civic experience. Beyond voting, many people lack understanding of how to make small community changes that will create a community by and for the community. This opportunity to dissect what it really means to co-create our communities not just in this session, but throughout the whole week was reassuring in my hope for the future and allowed me to assess my own understanding of community power.
The last session of the day discussed Conflict and Polarization; this session was quite frankly a challenge to me at first. We discussed the six principles of nonviolence from Martin Luther King in small groups going through them one by one. If this session was on the first day, I think it would have gone much differently in the sense that when people have greatly different perspectives, I get defensive of mine. However, after a week of trying to unlearn that to promote more bridging behavior I fought that feeling and really tried to listen to my peers. At first, I found myself over stating my opinions and protecting my beliefs but once I started to hear what others were saying I found that the opinions themselves weren’t much different from each other, just the way we communicated them was. The conversation at that moment stopped being about who was right and who was wrong, but how all these perspectives could come together to create a much deeper understanding of our communities than I would have ever conceptualized on my own. I am truly thankful for the activity and my overall learnings from the week, this was a phenomenal example of committed, engaged students coming together in a meaningful way.
