The Pace Center sponsored four Fall Break Breakout Princeton Civic Action trips this year. Participants worked on immigration issues in Tucson, Ariz., farm-worker rights in rural Florida, children’s healthcare in New York City and urban education in Los Angeles.
To be eligible for the trips, participants went through a competitive application process and were expected to become thoroughly acquainted with the issues they would be working on, Arizona trip co-leader Juan Miguel Ogarrio ’11 said.
“Breakout trips are service trips intended to integrate community interaction with academic knowledge,” he explained. “In order to prepare for [the trip], the whole group meets several times before the trip to have discussions between themselves and professors, watch documentaries and build expectations, which they will either confirm or deny during the trip.”
Ogarrio’s group went to the U.S.-Mexico border to work with two humanitarian organizations that deal with immigration issues: No More Deaths and Humane Borders.
Trip participants helped these organizations by placing water and other supplies at specified points along the border.
These organizations “attempt to prevent the deaths of undocumented immigrants crossing the Arizona border,” Ogarrio said.
Mariko Nakayama ’11, the trip’s other leader, added that the group also met local immigration attorneys and attended a luncheon and symposium on immigration policy held at a law firm in Phoenix.
“There is so much we learned from this trip,” Nakayama said. “The immigration issue is ongoing, complex, multi-faceted and very controversial. Interacting with groups and individuals that play various roles in this issue really helped us break down this complicated problem into a few important parts.”
Anastasia Oldham ’10, one of the co-leaders of the trip to Florida, recalled waking up at 4:30 a.m. to wait with tomato-farm workers in Imolakee, Fla., a community at the edge of the Everglades, for their morning pick-up for work.
“It was a really special time for all of us to spend time with those in the United States who are often forgotten and ignored,” she said in an e-mail.
Oldham added that the friendships and connections made during these trips are also important. “Breakout trips are a type [of] collaborative learning in which we learn from each other as much as from the places and people we interact with in the field,” she said.
Christopher Moses GS, co-leader of the trip to Los Angeles, also found the opportunity enormously rewarding.
“The trip was one of my most intellectually fulfilling experiences since coming to Princeton,” he said. “I’ve never been with a group that could disagree so productively.”
Moses and his group attempted to better understand the root of inequitable access to quality education in large, heterogeneous urban areas. The students met with local politicians and volunteered in elementary schools.
“I was inspired by the elementary [school] students with whom we volunteered,” Moses said. “Their passion, creativity and enthusiasm offered an amazing hope.”
The fourth trip took students to children’s hospitals and social service agencies in New York City. The trip leaders and participants could not be reached for comment.
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