Student Life

Getting Personal
A student organization taps into classmates’ life stories to raise awareness about global issues and helps spark student activism on campus.

By Lindsay Beller

When she was six years old, Flora Lujana ’09 and her mother and cousins fled the civil war in their native Sudan for Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Water was scarce in the hot and dry climate and limited food rations and disease contributed to the difficult living conditions. Fights often broke out and school consisted of children teaching other children what they knew. But it was safer than the home she left behind in southern Sudan, where she dodged land mines and bombs by jumping in holes dug in the ground.
  
Within the year, Lujana and her family left the camp and reunited with her father, Peter, in Nairobi. He had finished school in Uganda and taken a job with a Sudanese aid organization, which required him to travel back to his native country — a dangerous undertaking that resulted in his capture and brief detainment by the Sudanese government before his subsequent release in 2001.

As her father continued to go back and forth to help with rebuilding efforts, he filled Lujana in on the grim situation in Sudan. Although a peace agreement was reached to end the civil war, a humanitarian crisis had emerged in Darfur, an impoverished area in western Sudan, where a government-backed militia has killed an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Sudanese and driven millions more from their homes in what the U.S. government has called genocide.
  
Lujana wants to raise awareness about the genocide in Darfur and hopes to inspire others to take action. Although she grew up in Kenya, ties to her homeland run deep. “My mom always told me, ‘You’re not Kenyan, you’re Sudanese,’” Lujana says. “I still feel a connection and that’s why I’m interested in this issue.”
  
That’s also why, on November 12, 2006, Lujana agreed to share her gripping life story to a packed auditorium of students and faculty. She spoke at the invitation of Students Educating Students (SES), a student organization that formed in 2005 to educate students about social justice and human rights issues through the personal stories of Lake Forest classmates.
 
SES believes that “putting a familiar face to a particular crisis/global issue is essential to getting more support and eventually helping to find a solution,” according to its mission statement. President Kevin Smith ’07 recruited four students this year to share their personal stories on topics that also included human rights in Zimbabwe, cancer, and racism.
 
Their presentations have not only filled auditoriums on campus, they have led to a renewed sense that students are becoming more engaged with global issues. Ethan Helm ’07, who delivered an SES presentation on his teenage battle against cancer, raised more than $18,300 for Invisible Children (IC), an organization that assists Ugandan children who were kidnapped and forced to serve in the rebel militia. As of the end of the school year, Lake Forest College was the second highest fundraiser out of all high school and college IC chapters around the country. Elizabeth Milligan ’08 started a campus chapter of STAND, an anti-genocide group, and helped organize a protest at the Chinese embassy in Chicago to put more pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the violence in Darfur. A group of students planted bright orange flags on campus to protest the Iraq war. A coalition of groups, including SES, STAND, International Student Organization, and Amnesty International, sponsored a night of presentations and petition signing for several causes.
 
“In recent history there hasn’t been a demonstrated activism on campus,” says Rob Flot, associate dean of students and director of the Office of Intercultural Relations. “What SES has inspired is a resurgence of student activism on campus.”  
 
A Mission to Educate
When Smith heard about the Darfur genocide, he felt compelled to do something about it. It was the fall of 2005. Smith decided to approach professors to ask if he could have five minutes at the beginning of their classes to discuss the situation with students. “I felt the campus didn’t know what was going on in Darfur,” says Smith, who ultimately talked to 22 classes throughout the year. “My job was to tell them about it and let them make their own decisions.”
  
But after awhile, he still felt like he wasn’t doing enough to raise awareness. “I was attending various human rights meetings,” Smith says. “We had a lot of interest but we weren’t effective in educating students about the issues. I wondered, ‘How can we get students interested in learning about these issues?’”
  
The answer came at an Amnesty International meeting. While a group of students had gathered for a letter writing campaign, Smith felt they had little idea of the issue they were writing letters for and decided to ask Reuben Sanyika ’09, a math major from Harare, Zimbabwe, to talk about his country.
  
For about 10 minutes, Sanyika talked about President Robert Mugabe and how his government decided to destroy all “illegal” structures during the winter months. “A lot of people were left homeless without an option,” Sanyika recalls. “I saw a lot of destroyed houses. I know some people who were displaced. My cousin had to find another place to live. I lived in that period and saw what was happening.”
  
When students asked him questions for more than an hour after his talk ended, Smith knew they were on to something. “I knew this was something special,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘We have to do this. It’s not about the organization, it’s about these people.’”
  
At the next meeting, he asked Sanyika if he could expand his presentation for a larger audience. He also approached Betty Jane Schultz Hollender Professor of Economics Carolyn Tuttle, who specializes in issues of child labor and women in the workforce. “I reserved the room and signed up as their faculty advisor and off Kevin went,” says Tuttle, who became the advisor. “He planned the presentations and spread the word to get students to attend. The whole idea became an instant success as the turnout was outstanding with every seat taken in the auditorium.”
 
In the weeks prior to each presentation, Smith, a business and communications major, used techniques that he learned in a sports marketing internship that he had held the previous year. He started a grassroots promotional campaign that included regular e-mails to students and faculty, door-to-door visits, and flyer distribution. He worked with each presenter and held practice sessions ahead of time. He also sent follow-up thank you notes to all the volunteers and faculty who helped in any way. “You couldn’t not be aware of an SES event,” Flot says. “No other organization publicized in the way that he did.”
 
Amy Runyon ’09 attended some of the events. “These presentations show us there are a number of problems in the world that we need to fix,” Runyon says. “Even though we’re in this small community, there’s something greater we can do. If you’re in the audience and you hear them talk about how it has touched their lives, you can’t ignore something like that.” Smith says the presentations drew a variety of students, from international students to football players. “We wanted to get a wider range of students, not just the 25 students who showed up at the Amnesty International meeting,” he says.

Millennials Rising
In many ways, Smith and the students involved with SES exemplify the “Millennial” generation, says Christopher Waugh, assistant dean for Leadership and Community Involvement. He points to the book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Random House, 2000) by Neil Howe and William Strauss, who define the generation of individuals born in or after 1982 as cooperative team players who accept authority, follow rules, and are watched over by parents. Many high schools also either mandated or encouraged community service. “They are smart,” the authors write. “They believe in the future and see themselves on the cutting edge. They believe they will change things.
  
“Millennials don’t just take a stand, they build hands-on organizations to get things done.”
  
Waugh describes the current crop of Lake Forest students as “serious, responsible, and civic minded” and estimates 60 to 70 percent of students are involved in more than 100 student organizations — the highest ever — on campus. Many groups are chapters of national or international organizations and devoted to community service, fundraising projects, and activism, including about a dozen “awareness” groups, such as Habitat for Humanity, Students for Women’s Awareness Network, and PRIDE Lake Forest. “Students like to form their own groups,” Waugh says. But with average membership at about three people per organization, it can be challenging for students to successfully garner interest in and attention to their cause.
 
But it wasn’t always this way. Tuttle, who has taught at the College since 1984, noticed little student activism and awareness of the global world until about four years ago, when “students only seemed to protest when the drinking policy was changed.” But then a student named Andy Eisen ’05 of Students against Sweatshops led an effort to collect enough signatures at the College to oust Starbucks in favor of fair trade coffee at the coffee shop in Stuart Commons. He also organized and participated in boycotts and protests of Nike and The Gap for their use of sweatshops, which helped set the stage for SES. “More recently SES came along, which drew the interest of students who are concerned with what is happening outside of the confines of Lake Forest College, including Darfur, AIDS, prison abuse, and child labor in Latin America, China, and India,” Tuttle says.
 
She attributes the success of SES to the personal testimonies delivered by students with first-hand knowledge of the issues. “The information was provided in a very open and voluntary manner so instead of feeling defensive, the students who attended learned about what was going on and how serious many of the situations were,” she says. “I believe having students share their experiences is a great way to reach today’s generation.”
 
Many students are already used to sharing their personal lives with others. The popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace give students a window into each others lives and a quick way to exchange information. “People are interested in learning about the lives of those they associate with,” Flot says. “When I learn that a peer of mine has a unique life experience, it brings it home.” His office started a similar program called Soup & Stories a year earlier to promote cross-cultural understanding. Presentations took place during lunch and featured talks from a Palestinian student, a wheelchair-bound student living with a disability, and a student whose family immigrated to the United States, among others.
 
While SES could have easily brought in outside speakers — as dozens if not hundreds come to campus each year — Flot notes the approach is “a personal way to address issues of social justice. I think the informality of the presentations and the familiarity of the presenters led to the success of the group.”
 
Small Steps
Students who are involved wonder whether or not their efforts are really making a difference. “What is my presentation going to do? Not much,” Lujana admits. “But with so many people taking small steps like this, it will help.”
  
Her presentation caught the attention of middle school students at Elm Place Middle School in Highland Park, who had started their own initiative to collect 400,000 paper dolls as a way to personalize the number of people killed in Darfur (at press time, they had collected 60,000 with plans to continue the project next year).
  
The project was stalling when one of the student organizers heard about Lujana’s presentation and invited her to talk at their school. “We wanted to rally support,” recalls Keren Reichler, an eighth grader who headed up the initiative with a group of other students. “We wanted a personal story about Darfur and what’s going on there.”
  
Reichler says Lujana’s presentation hit home. “She presented it as something we could relate to. She said that while we get three meals day, she only got one...You could feel when we left that people knew about it and it wasn’t us just saying it over and over again during the morning announcements.
  
“She gave a face to it,” adds Reichler. “People knew that was Flora’s story.”
 
Her story also touched Justin Messmore ’10, who will take over SES next year with Rob Flot Jr. ’09. Messmore says he came to Lake Forest from a high school in East Peoria that “wasn’t culturally diverse and that’s been a big part of my education at Lake Forest College.” He started attending SES events and got hooked. “Flora’s presentation brought me to tears,” he says. “I knew it was something to be a part of.”
 
Lindsay Beller is editor of Spectrum.

ACTIVISTS AMONG US

THE STUDENT Elizabeth Milligan ’08 THE CAUSE  Students Anti-Genocide Coalition (STAND), an organization that seeks to prevent genocide through education, advocacy, and fundraising. WHAT SHE'S DONE Started a STAND chapter on campus and organized various activities that included inviting a missionary who worked in Darfur to speak on campus, holding an interfaith memorial service for victims of genocide, and lobbying Congressman Mark Kirk to sign a letter that calls for diplomatic pressure on the Chinese government to intervene in Darfur. WHY SHE DOES IT  Inspired through her synagogue to prevent genocide, she interned at the Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience in Washington, D.C., for a semester.  WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS  Elizabeth will serve as the high school programming coordinator for STAND National next year, working to develop programming and materials for the high school STAND chapters in the United States.