About the immersion course

A Look At Trauma and Community Resilience is a radically new and innovative course being offered to twenty students at CUSSW and Union Theological Seminary from January through May 2007. In-classroom learning will be paired with a week-long immersion experience in New Orleans in March 2007. As social workers, we are committed to working from a resilience and collaborative framework, unearthing the roots of injustice. Students and faculty alike will participate in the process of deconstructing racism[1] in our personal and professional lives to actively challenge racist structures[2]. The immersion component of the course will further CUSSW’s collaborative community connections with people and organizations in New Orleans and the Gulf Region, tracing the commonalities and disparities between communities in New Orleans and New York City dealing with profound social injustices. Unlike much of the “rebuilding” efforts which silence the voices of already disenfranchised, and often poor, communities of color[3], students will learn from community members who are the authorities of their own needs, history, culture, and plans for the future. The aim of the course is to advance social work community practice models driven by and with community members through a social justice, human rights, and strengths perspective.

A Look At Trauma and Community Resilience: Post Katrina Gulf Coast is transformative in its content as well as its developmental process. The team of students and professors who created the course has done so with careful attention to the importance of students’ involvement in their learning. We believe that spear-heading this integrative model places CUSSW at the forefront of innovative curricula. In addition, we hope for this course to promote anti-racist social work practice within CUSSW and in the larger social work community.

A Look At Trauma and Community Resilience: Post Katrina Gulf Coast builds on the important work undertaken by the Poverty Initiative and the Coalition Confronting Racism over the past year. The Poverty Initiative is a collaborative effort of students, faculty, and administrators that aims to integrate issues of poverty, inequality, and injustice into the CUSSW curriculum and community and motivate its members to join in the fight to end poverty. The Poverty Initiative was inspired by student action that followed an immersion course developed primarily at the Union Theological Seminary in January 2006, entitled, “Katrina: Poverty, Race, and Social Work Practice.”[4] The aim of the course was to explore experientially the inequality exposed by Hurricane Katrina and its effect on some of the poorest communities and individuals in the United States. Participants in the course explored poverty and race relations along the Gulf Coast in towns and cities with displaced Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Students were struck by the similarity between the systemic issues highlighted by Hurricane Katrina and the social justice issues with which we struggle as social workers in New York City and across the nation. These realities, however, were too quickly forgotten by the media and, as a result, largely disappeared from public discourse only months later.

Simultaneously, the Coalition Confronting Racism was initiated in the fall of 2005, following the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, by a group of CUSSW students seeking to build anti-racist, intercultural relationships within the School of Social Work and the broader University community. Understanding that we are all intertwined in racist structures of oppression, the Coalition believes that, in particular as social workers, we have an obligation to confront our own prejudices and the institutions that perpetuate racism. The first event hosted by the Coalition was the Intercultural Dialogues, which took place in March 2006 and brought together students from various schools within Columbia University, facilitated by trainers from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, a national anti-racist training and community organizing group. The Intercultural Dialogues Project served as a first step in beginning to network across schools to strategize moving toward a vision of an anti-racist institution.

In the months following Hurricane Katrina, members of both coalitions came together to raise awareness about the communities devastated by the Hurricane, racism, and socioeconomic injustice through presentations, journal articles, displays of artwork and photography, and public forums at Columbia University and New York City[5]. We began this academic year with a school-wide event marking the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which drew community members of the surrounding community, antiracist organizers, and survivors of the Hurricane[6]. Now, with more than a year’s perspective, we are undertaking the critical responsibility to continue these conversations and inspire others to participate in dialogue and to take action.

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[1] Students and faculty work from the analysis of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond as defined in their Undoing Racism workshop: http://www.pisab.org/about-us/

[2] For an example of how one social worker has addressed her white privilege in her post-Katrina work, see Molly McClure’s article: http://www.robertsilvey.com/notes/2006/01/solidarity_not_.html

[3] Many reports have documented that the plans for “rebuilding” New Orleans blatantly disregard the perspectives and needs of current residents and people who have been displaced, in particular those who live in poverty and are of color. For example, see: http://racetorebuild.thecsi.org; http://www.nytimes.com/ packages/html/weekinreview/20061119_OURO_FEATURE/index.html; http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3374480.html

[4] For more information about the Poverty Initiative at the Union Theological Seminary, see: http://www.povertyinitiative.org/)

[5] By the end of 2006, sixteen months after the hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, hundreds of thousands of Americans traumatized by the storm have not regained access to the most basic of services. The Brookings Institution Katrina Index for December 2006 reports that only 49% of all public schools in the city of New Orleans had been reopened. Only 49% of public transportation routes are functioning and no improvements have been made in the past twelve months. Since April 2006, the percentages of former customers who have gas and electricity, 41% and 60% respectively, have remained unchanged. Thousands of people remain unable to return home, in some cases their houses having been destroyed or condemned – in particular the conditions in communities of color with large Black populations remain unlivable (see http://racetorebuild.thecsi.org). Women and children were also particularly hard hit and a disproportionate number have not returned to New Orleans (see http://www.wfnet.org/donate/katrinarelief.php). For more information, see: http://www.katrinainfonet.net/.

[6] Speakers included Ronald Chisom, Executive Director and Co-founder of The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond; Dr. Kimberley Richards, Organizer and Trainer at The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond; Onaje Mu’id, human rights activist and Clinical Associate Director at Reality House, New York; Jerome Smith, Founder of Tambourine & Fan, New Orleans; Rachel Luft, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Orleans.