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Building a Healthy Activist Life
Three respected, longtime activists sat at a table in Starr King’s Fireside Room the evening of March 5 and delivered to the audience a primer on how to survive and thrive a demanding call to social justice work.
Sponsored by SKSM’s Master of Arts in Religious Leadership for Social Change (MASC) program, the event featured Amie Fishman, a member of the Catalyst Project and an anti-racist, anti-imperialist organizer who has spent years working on prison rights. She was joined by Dr. Charlie Garfield, the internationally-recognized founder of Shanti, the first American volunteer-based community AIDS organization, who serves as Clinical Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, and Linda Wells, a lifelong Unitarian Universlist and campaign organizer for ForestEthics, an international environmental non-profit that creates industrial market leverage to protect endangered forests.
“Religious leadership for social change students often talk about their fear of burning out as activists and the struggle for a sustainable lifestyle in this field,” said the Rev. Dr. Gabriella Lettini, Starr King’s Reinhardt Director of Studies in Public Ministry and Associate Professor of Theological Ethics, who organized the event in her role as director of the school’s MASC program.
In response to student questions about how one helps save the world and survive, Fishman, Garfield and Wells described how many large non-profits function like corporations, and, much like their for-profit counterparts, can lose touch with the human beings who work there. Challenge these organizations, encouraged the panel, to make sure they don’t deplete their staff with long hours and heavy demands.
A typical pitfall, they said, is the “urgency syndrome.” Because social justice issues are so pressing, many activists don’t know how to turn off their response, even temporarily, to recharge.
“Unless you learn you can only do what’s within your limits and find a balanced work style,” Lettini explained, “you’ll burn out. As our panel said, you must be able to distinguish the level of urgency.”
Dr. Garfield said the extreme sign of burnout is compassion fatigue, when even highly motivated activists can no longer generate empathy for others. That deficit, he said, comes from failing to nurture oneself first.
In the spirit of self-nurturing, Lettini hopes to bring in another panel of activists next fall.
“One of our panel members thought this burnout topic was among the most important in activism,” Lettini said, “and that Starr King was on the cutting edge with its effort to address the sustainability issue.”
Mark Armen’s work with special education students, in which he has combined his MASC internship with teaching at a middle school, earned him an award of excellence from his school district at a March 8 public ceremony.
The “You Make a Difference” award is the special education equivalent of “Teacher of the Year” in the West Contra Costa County School District, across the bay from San Francisco, where Armen teaches 12- to 13-year-olds with a variety of neurological, cognitive and emotional challenges that range from autism to the lasting effects of heroin and crack exposure in the womb. He calls his classroom “one of many front lines” in the world.
“It’s a daily challenge simply to bring the kids to a cognitive place where they’re receptive to the delivery of academic content,” said Armen, who has taught for 17 years. “Yet, I don’t carry the sense that they’re ‘handicapped” or ‘impaired’ in any way. They’re my kids, my family. I love them.”
Armen found the classroom an ideal environment to practice his own calling to social justice, which he defines as a relationship with his students beyond terminology and based on a positive interchange between people.
“This work is a mode of ministry, he said. “Yet, I don’t want to think of it that way. To call it ‘ministry’ or a form of ‘activism’ is to simply add yet another unnecessary layer onto the act of simply being with people in a way that is life giving and life receiving.
“I do this work because I love teaching. The flow of life between us in the classroom is truly a form of worship. Often, something quite mysterious is exchanged between all of us, and it isn't because of any one of us. The nature of that ‘something’ is extremely difficult to articulate. Much of my work isn't simply the delivery of academic content, but, I hope, a form of mentoring. It’s a good way to be in the world, and I consider this authentic work.”
Armen is currently working on a proposal to set up a charter school for special education students in the West Contra Costa district. Called the “Sangha Project,” the program would be based on an ashram model and focus on building a learning community. Armen hopes the school would also feature a working garden and social justice projects that would allow students to reach out and contribute to the greater community in which they live.
Spring has come to Berkeley, with all the lovely flowers blooming this season. It seems the same with the students with whom I interact. Our newest students are getting into the groove and beginning to see all the possibilities that lie ahead for them while they’re at Starr King. We're about to graduate about 25 students, who are chomping at the bit to get started on the ministries for which they’ve prepared. Some are working on packets, others have made arrangements to enter the next level of training programs, and one is even working on incorporation papers for a Unitarian Universalist elementary school. How’s that for imagination!
Meanwhile, our faculty and staff have been hard at work doing the preparations necessary for developing a strategic plan. Our board will be working on this plan in April, and we hope to involve our grads and supporters in helping us to imagine what Starr King will be like five or six years from now, and how we’re going to get there. Theological education is changing as costs accelerate and technology evolves, so the way we do things here at the school will change some, too. Being educationally innovative is something Starr King has been good at, which is one thing that isn’t going to change. Nor is our goal of providing graduates who will be leaders in our liberal religious movement. A sense of our students' commitment to preparing for this role is one of the things that provides energy in the school – something which we’re never lacking, even when we’ve got problems to solve.
And… I was invited by the UUMA CENTER Committee to meet with them and others concerned about providing resources for the continuing education of ministers and lay leaders of the Unitarian Universalist movement. This is something about which Starr King is deeply concerned. Our soon-to-be-launched “Seminary for the Laity” is an example of our response. You can look for a lot more online and distance learning opportunities from all sorts of different groups within our religious movement in the very near future. This, too, is exciting.
Rev. Dr. Dave Sammons
We may be 103 years old, but we're no old fogies. Starr King now has a page at MySpace.com, one of the phenom social networking sites that links people around the world. And featured on our page is SKSM's first Web video, starring Neal Anderson, M.Div. student. Click to visit, then click again in the "OfInterest" column on the right side to see our brief video of Anderson explaining how SKSM's commitment to countering oppressions and building just and sustainable community solidified his decision to join the school. You can also see the video, titled "Choosing to Bless the World,"on our Website or download it in iTunes by searching under "Starr King School for the Ministry."
The SKSM ECO Steering Committee invites you to reflect on the relationship between sustainable environments and animal rights.
Over-consumption and exploitation are hidden and tolerated for the sake of a quality of life that is neither abundant nor sustainable. This discovery, in turn, means confronting and changing social systems, including economic systems, that perpetuate too banal a sense of the "good life," making it available to too few and causing harm to too many and to the earth.
We invite you to reflect upon the wys that classism has affected our community and our world -- not only economically, but interpersonally, ideologically and theologically as well.
How does global and local capitalism function to perpetuate the oppression of some and maintain the privilege of others? What might a more sustainable economic system look like?
We invite you to consider what actions the school, your congregation or you as an individual might take to address these concerns.
"Homo Syntheticus: Art, Religion, and the Future Human" At 5:30-7 p.m., Thursday, April 5, Branden Thornhill-Miller will present the sixth and final Minns Lecture at SKSM. Thornhill-Miller is a lecturer and Director of Studies in psychology at Hertford and Harris Manchester Colleges, Oxford University, London. He'll discuss how the psychology of religion can make significant contributions to the new kind of self-understanding required by our explosively changing world. This event is free and open to the public.
"Trading Places – Journeys of Transformation" will feature a presentation by the Rev. Erika Orbán, this year's SKSM Balázs scholar, and James Field, a Starr King student who spent six months in a field placement at a Transylvanian Unitarian village. 3:30 p.m., Saturday, April 7. Suggested donation: $25.
Join us for three informal Ableism and Accessibility Workshops to learn practical steps to counter ableism and other oppressions, and make congregations and communities more welcoming and accessible to people with disabilities. The Rev. Devorah Greenstein, SKSM 2003 graduate and Accessibility Associate for the UUA, will facilitate. The workshops are sponsored by Starr King's ECO Steering Committee and will take place 5-7 p.m., April 10, 11 and 12.
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