On Being An Expert Citizen

This past Thursday, we had Dr. Don Stenta (stenta.1@osu.edu) speak to the trip leaders. In addition to developing leadership courses and a minor in leadership for the University, Dr. Stenta also has an appointment within the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. He talked with us (not at us, which is always nice) about the "link between leadership in service."

His main message was that just doing service is contributing to the status quo. Those who volunteer, especially college students, hae to do more work to understand and changed the social problems of our country. This involves understanding politics and how policy is made; I think this is something that college students avoid doing because we already have so much on our plate. We can barely handle o-chem, so on top of that, many of us don't want to put the effort into understand the complicated framework behind government policy. However, as Dr. Stenta emphasized, this is what's essential to truly helping: we have the resources out there to solve problems, but do we have the priorities? The question he posed was "Why is it okay to pay a football coach 3 million dollars? How many homes would that build? How many meals would that serve?" Dr. Stenta points to the fact that we lack the knowledge about how the system works to explain why our priorities are so out of whack.

We watched this youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwVVu54z5ys) about the American Civil Literacy test, and then took a civic engagement quiz, to begin to understand out own connection to American policy and political activism (which has a radical connotation, but can be as simple as wearing a button to support a certain candidate). All the trip leaders also recieved a list of ideas to increase civil and electorial activity, which is what we're going to focus on after the trip. What conversations/actions can occur AFTER the trip that make this more than just a one-shot service opportunity?

20 days until we leave for Camp Heartland!