Breakout participants learn about public affairs over fall break

The five-year anniversary of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s investigation of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party went unconvicted after killing five people at a political march, sparked 11 undergraduates to journey to Greensboro, N.C., over fall break through the Pace Center’s Breakout program.

This fall, the Pace Center sponsored six student-organized Breakout trips, in which students learned about social problems while performing community service. The other trips focused on the Navajo community in Flagstaff, Ariz.; health care reform in Boston; HIV/AIDS research in Washington; Arab-American immigration in Detroit; and education practices in Houston. Participants on each trip also wrote about their experiences on a shared blog.

Greensboro trip leaders Shirley Gao ’13, Michele Tyler ’12 and nine other students went to Greensboro, Raleigh and Durham, where they learned about the justice system, capital punishment and reconciliation efforts. They also tutored inmates in reentry programs, spoke to a law professor and even met with family members of some of the massacre’s victims now reconciling with the murderers.

Gao explained that she hoped for the trip to combine two interests she developed since coming to the University: a fascination with restorative justice garnered from studying the work of the 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and a question about the morality of the death penalty originally posed in a course on Christian Ethics her freshman year.

“When I Googled ‘truth and reconciliation in the United States,’ only one thing came up, and that was Greensboro, N.C.,” Gao said. She then connected with Tyler, who studies cycles of violence as an anthropology major and tutors inmates in a rehabilitation facility.

Tyler said she saw the trip as an opportunity to share her passion with other students.

“Not many [Princeton students] have an idea what it is like to talk to a criminal, to talk to an inmate, to know what a prison is like,” Tyler said. One of her goals for the trip was to expose Princeton students to “the criminal justice system and how it ties into urban poverty, education and all these other huge systemic issues of American society that many of us just aren’t exposed to on a daily basis,” she added.

The experience was “extremely successful, more so than we even imagined,” Tyler said. “A lot of our community partners delivered in ways that we never expected.” She added that she found the personal interviews particularly moving. “We never anticipated that anyone would be that raw and open with a huge group of random students,” she explained. Both leaders said the trip gave them a more concrete understanding of the criminal justice system.

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On the other side of the country, Peter Florence ’12, Jason Ramirez ’13 and 12 other students worked in both outdoor and office settings, visiting a school and studying issues currently facing Navajo Nation residents. For example, residents are debating signing leases that would allow energy companies to carry out strip-mining to access a coal deposit beneath the reservation’s land.

“We had to be very mindful of trying to present each of the different perspectives and give each enough space and enough time to really be represented on the trip,” Florence said.

Among those the group spoke with was Rex Lee Jim ’86, the vice president of the Navajo Nation.

Veronica Watters ’12, who is president of Native Americans at Princeton, said she enjoyed learning about current issues facing Native American groups. “Seeing the Navajos, who are in some ways more exploited than [my tribe, the Lakota] because of the resources that they have underneath their land” was an enriching experience, Watters said, and “a wake-up call” to an issue that does not receive enough consideration at Princeton.

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“I really think it’s important that we look at other issues going on — especially in the U.S., where we kind of forget that there are people suffering,” she explained. “In the Navajo Nation, there are parts of it that seem like a third-world country, and a lot of people don’t realize that.”

Florence, who had participated in two previous Breakout trips, said that when creating this semester’s trip he was looking for it to explore environmental issues and satisfy three criteria he knew were essential: serving a host community, exposing students to a very different culture and understanding the ramifications of larger issues on people’s daily lives.

One of the greatest strengths of the Breakout program is the chance to “see the face of a pressing issue that actually affects the daily lives of people,” Florence said. “And what I mean by that is not just sitting in a high chair in a classroom talking about the social issues, but actually seeing how it affects people, talking to the people and listening to them and hearing their stories and seeing their struggle.”

Leaders of other trips did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to allowing students to make an impact on communities, the Breakout program also offers students the opportunity to develop their leadership experience, Andrew Nurkin, senior program coordinator at the Pace Center, said in an e-mail.

Student leaders submit their trip proposals to the Pace Center months before the trip date, Nurkin explained, noting that the center looks for “students who have some demonstrated leadership abilities but also the potential to develop into effective public leaders.” He added that the number of proposals has increased steadily since the breakout program began in 2008, and the center does turn down some proposals.

When evaluating participants, the Pace Center looks to assemble a diverse group for each trip, but “the most important thing we look for in a participant is a strong desire to go on a particular trip,” Nurkin said.

Participants said that the Breakout trips allowed them to gain a deeper understanding of the issues at hand.

“At the end of the week, we walked away with an appreciation of the complexity of the issues we had studied,” Ramirez said.

Watters said she believed the strength of the Breakout program lies in its multifaceted nature, explaining, “You’re not just going to do service; you’re not just going to learn. You’re going to do both, and in a sense that makes it a little better to understand things, because you see and you do.”

“When people ask me about the Breakout program, I tell them that I think it’s the best use of my time at Princeton, and I think that that is not an overstatement by any means,” Florence said.