From Anger to Action: Mobilizing Students for Change

Sitting on the bus to Washington DC, Linda was furious. She and I shared a seat on the coach that left promptly at 6am from the B’nai Jeshurun parking lot. Traveling south with hundreds of other buses, we headed for the March for Women’s Lives on April 25th. Her high school daughter had promised to come with us and then had elected to sleep-in that morning. Linda’s anger and dismay was not so much about the broken promise as it was about her daughter’s not sharing her urgency and her belief that this was worth getting out of bed for. It was time to stand up and be counted and she was not there.

Working for justice, however one defines it (and we don’t all agree), nearly always means arousing from lethargy, looking beyond the familiar and comfortable, eschewing hand-wringing and helplessness, and feeling not empathy, but the “fire in the belly” that impels to action and keeps us awake and aware.

One year, the exit interviews from the multiple CPE units that we run simultaneously, showed a pattern of students being disgusted and angry about the filthy public restrooms in their hospitals, some serving poor neighborhoods and some world-class by reputation but financially troubled. Just as an unkempt and smelly body is a signal of personal distress, so too these public restrooms were early warning signs—the dead canaries in the coal mines. Within two years, these hospitals were in the newspapers often as they hemorrhaged money and patient dissatisfaction increased.

Since then, our CPE faculty has been trained to supervise “change projects.” A change project teaches students to mobilize their anger and disgust for good purpose. In short, they research the problem, discern who has the power to make change (this is not always obvious), and decide if and how they or others might take action on their findings. The problem of dirty restrooms is small but significant. In a time when competition for patients is fierce, these poor public facilities send a message: unclean, uncaring, unconcerned, understaffed, and unfit. Taking on such a project, and similar others such as poor signage, rude telephone answering, etc., promotes advocacy for visitors and for the institutions we serve as well.

Just as marching at the capitol is a small step toward a very large and difficult goal, so too a change project is a tiny way to address a huge institution’s big problems. The million women who took that small step were noticed. So too are CPE students and chaplains who make a concerted effort to promote change. It all adds up.

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