Preamble and Introduction
Words like “bubble” are often used to describe the shielded seclusion in which students live their lives on the Stanford campus. And the words seem appropriate. After all, Stanford has three quarters of a mile long boundary that separates it from civilization, and even that ends in the latte swilling yuppy favored downtown lined with preppy shops that further abuts multimillion dollar homes. For reaching the vast seething humanity, one has to go further – to the nether regions of Palo Alto and cross in to East Palo Alto – a task so mythically treacherous that none will volunteer, except of course to buy the chic necessities from IKEA.
But even in the famously elitist bubble, there are poor and opportunities to interact with different socio-economic strata – the employees. Stanford spends about $3.2 billion to educate its roughly 15,000 students. The figure amounts to roughly $213,000 per person. About half of this money is spent on salary and benefits of the numerous employees who work for this university. The employees range from $15/hr bus drivers or $10 hr/cafeteria workers with no benefits to administrators who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Either way you look at it, we have a substantial breadth of employees with whom students can interact and form partnerships to help some, and learn from others.
The shrinking conversational space
Most transactions involving cross-class interaction are economic interactions – when you buy something, or involving paid service – gardening, or somebody delivering a Pizza. Most of these interactions have been commercialized and bureaucratized – with greeting protocols and thank you protocols – leaving little space for real human to human interaction, exchange of stories etc. In places like India, middle class still knows about the lives of their maids, the neighborhood grocer, etc. and in knowing about their lives they form genuine bonds of empathy that help them look at policy imperatives, and their own lives much differently. I would argue, more trenchantly, that it is in fact through knowing lives of people in other classes that one can build genuine empathy (as opposed to an identity contingent one which wrist band wearing concert attending bobos – in David Brooke’s term – feel towards people in Darfur.) The damning fact of modern life is that even empathy has been implicated in superficial identity issues, and hence people’s empathy lies within the contingencies imposed upon the selling and buying, largely absent of information or care.
Proposal
So my proposal is to create a program on campus that heightens awareness of people towards people from other classes around them with whom they (don’t) interact every day. The idea is to connect students, faculty and professional staff with workers from lower economic strata, for example, cashiers, janitors, construction workers, or drivers, on whose services they rely upon every day. Another related idea would be to create an umbrella program that gives guidance to people toward helping them form hyper-local chapters (that extend to say one building) where they form programs to interact with people or help them in some way. For example computer science students may formulate a program to help teach computers to janitors while social scientist may work with them to improve their literacy skills. Obvious returns to them would include a better understanding of the world, a chance to practice or even learn a foreign language (in places where janitors are fluent in say Spanish or some other language) and myriad of other benefits that accrue from learning about the complexities of living as economic underclass.
Detailed Proposal:
There are three parts to the proposed program –
- Create a website that has the following capabilities -
- Matching students with Employees – The website will allow for students and employees to fill in detailed profiles and will allow them to search for possible “matches” based on their skill set, issues they want to work on, and availability (time).
- The website will allow for two kinds of matching – project by project matching – which will allow for students to sign for say helping an employee with his resume’ or a government form, longer term mentoring or symbiotic matching which will assign a student to an employee for a duration of an academic year.
- The website would feature a blog and wiki to advertise successful ventures and collaborative opportunities.
- Since creating excitement around the program is essential, the program launch will be followed by an advertisement blitz including posters, presentations, and get-to-know sessions.
- The other crucial part of this venture is ‘hardware’ – be it computers/supplies or other things that are needed to make some of this possible. So there would be two parts to the same – one would be a craigslist kind of central clearing house list that will post want and available ads, and the other would be a central fund which students or employees can draw on to make of this happen.
Budget and estimated costs
I deal with the cost attributed to each point of the program individually -
- Building the website would indeed take the most effort and money given that we need a database and other social networking tools. The web design and development would cost initially about $5000 if we hire students within Stanford to help us with it.
- Advertisement and information campaign would be broad and we expect to spend about $2000 on the campaign.
- Hardware fund would consume the rest of the money ($3000).
Timeline
Web development around the site would take around 4-6 months as the website will go through iterative updates. I expect the advertisement campaign to last for a month to provide an adequate window for people to sign up including some viral marketing campaign via Facebook etc. In all, I should be able to launch the initial campaign within 6-7 months at most.