I hail from a small town in Ohio, the epicenter of the Midwest, where fall arrives each year right on time. Since I’ve moved to New Orleans, I experience a yearly pang of homesickness brought on by the changing of the leaves in my home state and the relentless heat and humidity I encounter here, even through October. It’s as if I can hear Louisiana saying, “Fall, who?” But this year is a bit different for me. Although the trees in my backyard are still a brilliant shade of green and my sweaters still reside under my bed, I’m experiencing a season of change unlike any I’ve seen before.
To say that this atmosphere of change stems largely from my work at Taylor would be an understatement. I came to Taylor straight from two years of working as a Desk Services Coordinator in residence halls here at Tulane. Somehow, sitting behind a desk watching students enter, exit, and lock themselves out of their dorms didn’t leave me feeling fulfilled, so at the end of last year I applied for and received a Changemaker Student Fellow position. Walking into Taylor for the first time felt a bit like entering a wonderland. A wall of windows overlooking a glorious oak tree, a fertile quad, and students going from class to class had replaced my view of the front door of Monroe. Looking back, I think an appropriate phrase to describe this moment stems from the Hunger Games’ famous starting cry, “Let the games begin!”
“Let the change begin!”
The scenery, however, was only the beginning. The work I do at Taylor centers around Changemaker Institute (CI), a free 7-week student-run social venture incubator program for undergraduate and graduate students at Tulane. Alongside two other Changemaker Fellows I facilitate the program in a variety of ways. Depending on the day this may mean placing catering orders, reaching out to distinguished members of the New Orleans social entrepreneurship community, or conducting classroom visits and information sessions on what it is that CI does and what CI has accomplished. However, our largest task by far has been revamping the CI curriculum.
That a program with a substantial budget and taking place in an area of such importance to the Tulane community is handled mainly by students is quite rare and, in my opinion, a testament to the Taylor Staff and mission. But the beauty of this doesn’t just lie within its progressiveness. From the first day that the CI fellows sat down together to begin work on the Institute, we knew we had the agency and authority to change the program to best fit the needs of our peers, and change it we did. We began by revisiting the vernacular of the program to reflect the space we wanted to create- a space for collaboration and the exchange of knowledge and ideas; yet dissimilar to the classrooms we spend our weeks in. This saw the replacement of words like “speakers” with “innovators”, “icebreakers” with “energizers”, and “required readings” with “primers”. An entire overhaul of the curriculum stemming from past participant feedback coupled with extensive thought put into the structure of our program enabled us to create the space we believe is needed on campus: a space for passionate people to come together and enact positive change. That we three students have the ability to alter a program significantly in order to fit the needs of our community is incredible to me.
Overall, to work towards enabling my peers to enact change every week is truly a privilege, and has awakened in me what I shall sappily call “a change of heart”. A self proclaimed skeptic and realist, I have often doubted whether or not I can make a difference. Is what I am doing having a positive impact? Will it actually affect anything? Why bother when there is so much wrong with the world already? Working within a space where people emphatically counter those doubts, persist through difficulties, and give their all to make our world a better place has shifted my perspective from “why bother” to “why not?” So, although the leaves may not have fallen yet and I still haven’t consumed anything “pumpkin spice”, I wouldn’t change a thing about my southern, shorts-wearing, 80-degree season of change.
By Lilly Bacon, Changemaker Taylor Fellow