Grassroots Community Organizing
Anthropology 380 + 397S, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Application for Spring 2025 - DUE NOVEMBER 15th, 2024
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Here is a lot of info about GCO! It's also all on the application form.
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​Welcome to Grassroots Community Organizing! GCO is a five-credit Anthropology course held each the spring semester that includes an Alternative Spring Break trip to learn from and work with experienced community organizers. The course focuses on how people in marginalized communities build power to change the policies and structures that affect them, and how people build community and organize across lines of difference. Throughout the semester, we learn from and work alongside grassroots organizers working toward social, economic, racial, and environmental justice. In the past eight years the class has worked with the Alliance to Develop Power in Springfield, MA; Virginia Organizing in Danville, North Hampton Road, and Fredericksburg, Virginia; City Life Vida Urbana in Boston, MA; Solidarity and Green Economy Alliance in Worcester, MA; Alternatives for Community and Environment in Roxbury, MA; Maine People’s Alliance in Portland, ME; the Pioneer Valley Project in Springfield, MA; Ex-Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement in Worcester, MA; WE ACT for Environmental Justice in Harlem, NY; Independent Drivers Guild in Brooklyn, NY; the Granite State Organizing Project in Manchester, NH; Families for Justice as Healing in Boston, MA; Chinese Progressive Association in Boston, MA; and Massachusetts Against Solitary Confinement.
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​This course is facilitated by a small team of student facilitators who have engaged in an intensive year- long training process. Facilitators of GCO 2025 will be coached and supported by a team of trainers, including the Director of UACT (UMass Anthropology professor Jen Sandler) and UMass Anthropology graduate students Char Nim, Terrell James, Urgyen Joshi, and Priya Dalal-Whalen.​
Facilitation by peers makes the class community a uniquely challenging and empowering space where students are able to build collective knowledge and community in a rigorous but not faculty-led space. We learn from one another, from a diverse range of authors, and from our community and campus partners who are experienced community organizers. This learning is collective, unusually challenging, and often -- dare we say -- transformative. The power of this experience of learning and using knowledge differently is why diverse student leaders work so hard to make GCO happen for a new group of students each year!
​GCO is open to students from all five colleges, at all levels, from first year undergraduate students through graduate students*. Admission to GCO requires that you complete this application. We will use this application to get a sense of why you are interested in taking this course and what experiences you have had that bears on the course content and methodology. We aim to use the application process to create classes of diverse students who are open to the particular kind of experience this class offers, and who are ready to engage ethically and respectfully with the community organizations and leaders who we will learn from and work with.
​We want to be clear that it is quite challenging to learn in such a different way than is usual within a university context. The course readings and the weekly written reflections require a large time commitment, and there are several requirements throughout the course that, whoever you are and wherever you’re coming from, will push you beyond your comfort zone.
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There are usually more applicants than spots in this class. We are not looking for the people who know the most, or who write the most eloquently. We’re looking for the people who are ready and open to learning, contributing, and engaging fully in this process of building community and skills with others, across challenging and complicated lines of difference. A committee comprised of UACT student leaders and trainers will review all applications. Decisions will be made before December 5th. Admitted students will secure their spot by submitting a $100 deposit on their course fee and picking up a packet of materials. They will then be enrolled by our department.
UACT, the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation, is the organization that runs GCO. We develop advanced, powerful social justice skills among people who navigate worlds of difference, always aiming to support more relational organizing, organizations, and movements that are designed and led by marginalized folks. Students who have taken GCO are encouraged to continue with UACT as part of the leadership of this academic-political-participatory organization that operates within (and works in communities beyond) the UMass Amherst Department of Anthropology. About fifteen student leaders, a dozen or so alumni, organizers from about six community partner groups, and several faculty members currently lead and/or advise the direction of UACT.
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GCO is a particular type of “engaged anthropology.” There is no other class like GCO on this campus, nor do we know of one quite like it anywhere else in the country. We hope this sounds like the class for you this year, and we look forward to reading your application!​
*Graduate students who are admitted participate on an equal basis with undergrads in all aspects of GCO, plus three separate grad meetings and a longer final paper. Grad students in GCO 2025 will register for the course as ANTHRO 696G (4 credit independent study) with Prof. Jen Sandler.
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Interested? Check out the Narrative Questions so that you know what's on the application.
Already read all the things? Great!