30 students committed to becoming Community Change Agents at the Social Justice Summit on Feb 21 and 22.

The annual event was hosted by the Student Activity Center for the thirteenth time and focuses on increasing students’ awareness of issues of inclusions.

In a ten-hour training session, students of all majors and years learned, shared and reflected on personal stories on race, gender, socioeconomic class and sexual orientation and enhanced the skills of creating an open, equitable and just society.

“[The topics] we address are really important topics but we often times avoid them because people can get hurt or upset,” said guest presenter, Vijay Pendakur, director of the Office of Multicultural Student Success at DePaul University.

To be able to address these issues during the summit, Pendakur wanted to create a place where people could share their experiences in order to first focus on the self, then look at the systems of oppression in situations of race, gender, socioeconomic class and sexual orientation.

“And then at the end, we have an action planning reflection that actually helps each person set some of their goals on how to get invested in change work,” Pendakur said.

For these students, the Social Justice Summit is supposed to be a quick start to do other and further things concerning social justice, Pendakur explained.

Through reflection and discussion in small and large groups, students build the tools to follow their goals and become enhanced bystanders in situations of oppression.

“Today I want you to take some risks. If we don’t take risks, it is very difficult to learn,” Pendakur said.

Isaac Young, senior in agricultural biochemistry and participant in the summit, said that the best but also the hardest exercises were to imagine what is was like to come out with a homosexual orientation.

“Our 30 students today range from undergraduate to Ph.D. students and represent all kinds of majors so there is a really interesting level of discussion going on,” said Kevin Merrill, leadership and service coordinator at the Student Activities Center.

Pendakur said that he was really happy to work with such a diverse group of students. 

The students came to the summit for very different reasons.

“I wanted to try something new,” said Katherine Quandt, freshmen in biology and participant in the summit.

“These issues are really important. When people are not able to live up to their fullest because of systematic oppression, then we all lose out,” said Tasida Barfoot, Ph.D. student in biochemistry.

Young, who was invited by Barfoot to join her, agrees and said that he is especially interested in gender.

At the end of the summit, students formulated their future goals for social justice and in what areas they wanted to engage especially. A lot of them found similar goals they were interested in like gender equality or the fight against human trafficking.

Pendakur said he was really happy with the outcome of the summit. The students were really happy with him as well.

“He was fantastic. He was really receptive and it was easy for everyone to share their experiences,” Young said.

“He always said ‘thank you for sharing’ as well. That was really good too,” Barfoot agreed.