Last summer, a group of Berkeley students braved an unfamiliar place to help community organizations in North Carolina educate and register voters. Most of the students were black women who had only encountered the South through courses, books, or family histories. While visiting a former slave plantation, Mariah Fairley ’16 beheld a magnolia tree that had been planted where a whipping post once stood.
“Having the time to reflect on the grounds allowed me to let go,” she says. “Even though lives were lost and generations of hurt still exist, it gave me hope that better days can and will come.”
That trip was one of many programs offered through Berkeley’s Public Service Center (PSC) — and Fairley’s experience epitomizes a common student sentiment: That engaging in service connects us to shared experiences and to universal truths much larger than ourselves. This year, the PSC is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Although its focus and name have changed over the years (formerly the Office of Community Projects and Cal Corps), it has always been a pathway toward creating a more just and equitable world. Today, more than 5,000 students contribute to 250 organizations each year — a growing number as students continue to seize the call to serve through the PSC, their studies, and other experiential opportunities.
In this story, we introduce you to 12 students, faculty, and alumni who are giving back. While our nation’s air is charged with emotions, we hope they will inspire you to plant trees of hope — or recognize the beauty you already create in the communities you serve. As Fairley says, “Out of the ugliness of slavery, a beautiful magnolia tree lies, strong and noble. As a human race, we are capable of so much more.”
For more stories, visit publicservice.berkeley.edu/50th-anniversary.
Earthquake leads to a new calling
On Sept. 19, while studying for a midterm, Juan Medina-Echeverria ’17 checked the news and saw people frantically digging for children after a deadly earthquake shook Mexico City. Something shook him, too — and he flew there the next day to help.
Medina-Echeverria, a public health major and bilingual nurse, spent the first day supporting doctors in the Red Cross tents. But he realized relief wasn’t reaching smaller towns and quickly joined a group of volunteers headed to the state of Morelos.
They visited four towns in one day, and the situation was far worse. In Tetelcingo, about 1,000 people were living in tents, and the town lacked clean water, bathrooms, food, and doctors.
“Four days after the quake, I was the first person to provide medical help. I’d brought supplies from home to check people’s vital signs and did wound care,” he says. “For example, people had hurt their feet walking barefoot on the gravel … They’d lost everything.”
Medina-Echeverria witnessed people from all walks of life commit great acts of kindness, and he learned that the citizens of Mexico “come together as one to help each other out.” Yet the trip had an even more profound effect on his future.
“I found a new calling, and that’s humanitarian work in times of natural disaster,” he says. “You don’t talk about billing patients … You just help. I love that part.”
Medina-Echeverria has already put his newfound love to work — by providing medical help to Sonoma County residents displaced by the wildfires in October.
Math tutors push past the numbers
Victoria Cendejas ’17 says no one helped her with her SAT, applications, or other college preparations in high school. She only applied to Berkeley because it sounded prestigious. Today, she’s determined to give young teens what she didn’t have.
To say Cendejas is busy is an understatement. She is pursuing degrees in legal studies and cognitive science, plays on the women’s rugby team, and has participated in neuroscience research. She is also deeply involved in community service — a powerful force in cultivating her talents and future.
Cendejas is the coordinator for Bridging Berkeley, a math mentoring program run through the Public Service Center that pairs Berkeley students with local middle-school youth, especially those who may become first-generation college students like Cendejas. She says Cal mentors do more than just help with homework.
“We’re role models. We tell them about our Cal experience,” she says. “We ask them how they’re doing. If they’re upset, we ask them why. We try to become constant figures in their lives, so they can depend on us for advice.”
Working with her peer mentors is just as rewarding. Cendejas recalls when a mentor nearly cried because a young girl she had helped got an A and effusively expressed her gratitude. “Wow. That just warmed my heart,” says Cendejas.
The mentors’ ultimate goal is showing the young students the world is at their feet. “But if they can’t see it, they can’t reach out and grab it,” Cendejas says. “I want them to know it’s there.”
Bearing witness from afar
For an intrepid group of UC Berkeley students, tracking Twitter trends and watching online videos aren’t idle procrastination. They’re matters of life, death, and justice.
The Human Rights Investigations Lab of the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law scrutinizes social media and other internet sources to document and verify instances of war crimes and violent acts. Launched one year ago, the world’s first university-based lab to deploy the technique of open source investigation was the brainchild of Amnesty International. Similar labs have since been started at the universities of Toronto, Essex, and Pretoria.
“It’s really cool to do work that has actual impact on things that are happening in the world. ”—Karin Goh ’17
Forty-two students (from all levels and 14 majors) signed on in the initial term and 62 students joined last spring to investigate suspected rights violations in several countries, including Syria, Sudan, and Myanmar. Challenged by the sheer volume of video and other potential evidence, expert journalists and human rights researchers train the students in the skills for this vital work so that they can contribute accurate information to nongovernmental reports, news organizations, and potentially to courts. By harnessing the evidentiary value of the internet, the lab hopes to efficiently and effectively expose abuses around the world.
This charge was a perfect fit for Karin Goh ’17, a computer science major and human rights interdisciplinary minor. She joined the team compiling video evidence of the Myanmar military’s oppression of Rohingya refugees. Says Goh, “It’s an accessible way for students to address human rights atrocities and help hold people accountable for what’s happening.”
Opening doors to education and empowerment
As a first-generation teenager growing up in a low-income Los Angeles neighborhood, Calixtho Lopes ’18 almost became a statistic. Thanks to the foresight of his mother and an education program that kept his head above water, Lopes not only escaped the debilitating cycle of poverty, crime, and incarceration, he is also teaching others to swim.
Now a senior, Lopes coordinates Teach in Prison, a student-led program that connects Cal students with incarcerated men at San Quentin State Prison who want to take the GED and make a life outside of prison.
“When I walk in and see the men, eager to learn despite their circumstances, they remind me of my uncle, my grandfather, my peers who didn’t make it,” says Lopes, who has twice received a scholarship from the Peter E. Haas Public Service Leaders program for his commitment to off-campus service. “I can’t help but think, ‘That could have been me, but here I am now at Berkeley.’”
Lopes is engaged in equity and social justice programs through the Public Service Center, including Central Americans for Empowerment (CAFÉ), an organization he cofounded to build community for Central American students and residents. But the lead sail guiding his work forward is Teach in Prison.
“For those who fell through the cracks of our public school system like I almost did, I want to ensure we have a system of education in place that will help prepare them for a path to success. I believe in the power of education.”
An eye for aid
In a town on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, locals and others from outlying communities form long lines for a free eye clinic staffed by a fearless crew of Berkeley optometry students. From young to old, each person receives a thorough vision exam — perhaps their first ever.
While Berkeley students have been providing eye care to underserved people since the 1920s, their focus on international communities sharpened in 1989 when they started the campus chapter of Voluntary Optometric Services to Humanity (VOSH). Since then, students have helped thousands of people in Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, Kenya, and Vietnam.
Up to 20 doctors-in-training visit Nicaragua each January, along with students from other schools, supervising optometrists, and translators. During this year’s trip to San Juan del Sur, says VOSH President Michelle Holmes ’20, they cared for nearly 4,500 patients — more than 1,000 per day. In addition to assessing eye health and checking for glaucoma, the students advised patients about the importance of wearing sunglasses and hats.
Yvonne Yip ’19, who joined VOSH’s mission to Jamaica last summer, says her team examined about 1,500 patients for visual acuity, eye pressure, and retinal diseases. Volunteer ophthalmologists were ready to conduct on-the-spot cataract surgery or other urgent care, and each patient left with a donated pair of sunglasses and eyeglasses. Yip says, “It felt very rewarding to help people who really needed the help.”
Holmes and Yip foresee volunteering with VOSH as professional optometrists. Says Holmes, “It’s a unique opportunity to see the impact you can have in this career.”
The road from illiteracy to service
As political activists in the 1960s and 70s, the parents of Esteem Brumfield ’18 lived off the radar and on the run. While they did not send him to school, he realized at age 8, when he could not read the letters his mother sent him from prison, that he wanted an education more than anything.
It wasn’t until Brumfield was 21 that he started community college and learned how to write. Less than two years later he was teaching English in India — and has not stopped giving back since.
“I want to see people do better in life,” he says. “That’s my dream for myself, my dream for my community, my dream for my country.”
At Berkeley, Brumfield is involved with Alternative Breaks, a program that enables students to explore social justice issues through hands-on service trips. He first visited New Orleans to work with community gardening and voting rights organizations. This winter he’s leading a trip to South Los Angeles, where the students will examine health and healthcare access for immigrants and other groups.
Academically, the political science and rhetoric major is researching the relationship between poor health and the risk of incarceration — another reflection of his personal experience. Brumfield witnessed the “unforgiving” ways his brother, who has schizophrenia, was treated by the criminal justice system.
Combined, these experiences weave together parts of Brumfield’s past. “Berkeley does a great job of reminding you who you are,” he says. “Don’t lose proximity to the problems you grew up in, and don’t lose sight of your community so that you can make a difference.”
Engineering for the public good
Engineering professor Khalid Kadir M.S. ’02, Ph.D. ’10 was touring the Richmond Greenway — a formerly abandoned railroad property being transformed into a beautiful public space — when an aha moment stopped him in his tracks. The local guide leading Kadir and his students was paraphrasing the theories of a French philosopher about who has the right to design and use a city. Yet the young resident had never encountered these theories and was instead drawing from his own lived experiences.
“It pushed me to want to engage with people outside of Cal and link the two together, to get students outside of the classroom and into communities,” says Kadir.
Kadir is the only engineering professor teaching a course for American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES), a university-wide program that enables students to work with community partners on real-world projects. In Richmond, Kadir’s students have helped to construct rain gardens and design potential rooftop solar sites, among other projects. The course, “Engineering, the Environment, and Society,” has also given students the opportunity to analyze air quality in West Oakland and document nitrate contamination in drinking water in the Central Valley.
Kadir’s approach is unique. Problems in engineering are commonly defined in technical terms, yet these projects are deeply social at their roots. His ACES course also allows students to bring complex, long-term projects to completion — challenging given the time constraints of a demanding curriculum.
Kadir says this gets at the heart of Berkeley’s mission: “We’re doing something important instead of just doing something interesting.”
The power of performance to make change
One night a group of black women draped in lacy white layers processed through Oakland’s streets to bring attention to the sex trafficking of local young girls. Another week, about 150 women visited a secret location where they were cared for and invited to rest. Another night involved dance, art installations, and a ritual in a vacant lot to call out the city’s most notorious evictors.
These episodes are part of a multi-year, multi-site performance series called House/Full of BlackWomen, cocreated by Amara Tabor-Smith, a Berkeley dance instructor and artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. While each episode has its own theme and cast, collectively they reveal the challenges facing black women and girls in Oakland. Unlike typical performances, in which a story unfolds on stage, Tabor-Smith’s performances bring participatory ritual to the surface.
“It’s an opportunity to transform what is happening,” she says. Rather than reinforce stereotypes of black women, Tabor-Smith’s work “insists on our right to well-being, to have a home, to have our bodies protected.”
To create each episode, the cast draws upon their own cultural folklore and spiritual traditions, as well as ongoing dialogues with local residents and organizations. Yet the stories are also personal, says Tabor-Smith. “At least four women in House/Full have been evicted.”
The more Tabor-Smith dives into the issues she is connected to, the deeper the need to use performance as a pathway to change. “Ritual is a practice to evoke, affirm, bring into existence, to create healing and balance. We have the power to do that.”
Opening the pages to a more just world
The daughter of booksellers, Nicola McClung M.A. ’09, Ph.D. ’12 now instills a love of reading in her children. Seeking books for her daughter Oona, she was struck by the lack of diversity in characters or circumstances. “I was looking for books that reflected a world that I wanted to see, and there were very few out there,” McClung recalls.
She set out to change that. With her friend Arturo Cortéz, a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education, McClung started Xóchitl Justice Press to promote a just and equitable society through educational non-fiction books for young children.
Most of Xóchitl’s authors are second- through eighth-graders from underserved Bay Area communities who’ve been empowered to write what they know. That can mean how-to advice for such essential kid skills as tying shoes, skateboarding, the art of water balloons, friendship, and eating nachos. It can also mean stories about their family or neighborhood.
Several authors are prolific; siblings Mustapha and Miatta Bhonopha have each written or co-authored three Xóchitl titles. Says McClung, “A lot of people out there have a story to tell.”
Being an unpaid, low-budget publisher has its challenges — including finding time while being a parent and a professor at University of San Francisco — but McClung is motivated by the desire to get more stories into the hands of more kids.
Tending a new crop of farmers
Severine von Tscharner Fleming ’08 believes America’s food system needs more young farmers with a passion for sustainable agriculture — and every venture she starts aims to grow and support that base.
Fleming founded a nonprofit called Greenhorns while earning her B.S. from the College of Natural Resources, and is the cofounder of the National Young Farmers Coalition, among other organizations. All told, they serve 80,000 people from coast to coast.
Her outreach ranges from old-fashioned Grange Hall mixers to documentary films, radio programming, guidebooks, social media, and even an open-source “Farm Hack” in which growers share designs for farm equipment, such as a bike-operated thresher.
“If we want to feed the world, small family farms are the way to do it,” says Fleming, whose activism stems from her concern that corporate farming is degrading the land as well as quality of our food. Contributing to the need for a new crop of growers: the average age of the American farmer is 58.
“Many people coming into farming don’t come from a farming background, and some are trying to add a new enterprise or shift practices on the family place,” she says. For this audience, Greenhorns is a clearinghouse of resources and learning opportunities. Its New Farmer’s Almanac, for instance, features essays, archival material, and opinion pieces on current agrarian issues.
In addition, the young farmers coalition has launched a campaign to extend federal student loan forgiveness to beginning farmers. Such legislation, Fleming says, would recognize their public service and encourage them to enter the field.
Using tech to meet basic needs
For many Cal students, Berkeley unleashed a zeal for public service. John Gage ’75 did much to advance that tradition when, in 1967, he helped launch the university’s Community Projects Office, the precursor of today’s Public Service Center. At that time, the All-American swimmer enlisted hundreds of classmates as reading tutors and other kinds of volunteers in underserved schools and local communities.
Gage went on to become a founder of Sun Microsystems, but the call to serve continued to beckon the acclaimed technologist. He recently helped bring a source of clean water and sanitation to Africa’s largest urban slum in the Nairobi neighborhood of Kibera.
Partnering with the Human Needs Project, Gage lent his technical know-how to the construction of the Kibera Town Center, a sophisticated clean-technology facility that also provides job training, banking, and other services. “Basically, we built a 21st-century facility with 19th-century means,” Gage told California magazine. He hopes the town center concept will be replicated in other slums around the world.
High-impact projects are nothing new to Gage. In 1995, he cofounded NetDay, an effort to connect schools globally to the internet. He also has served on scientific advisory panels for the National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, among other leadership posts.
For Gage, public service rewards volunteers and beneficiaries alike. For those who serve, “it’s you receiving a new understanding by involving yourself in a completely different world,” he says. Such learning opportunities, according to Gage, are vital to our success.
A public service champion who knows adversity firsthand
Congresswoman Barbara Lee M.S.W. ’75 was no stranger to hardship when she entered Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare as a single mother of two on welfare.
“I really knew the system from the inside as a recipient,” says the veteran East Bay Democrat. Aspiring to become a psychotherapist for the disadvantaged in the community, Lee never shared her circumstances with her classmates.
Berkeley provided pivotal experiences that shaped Lee’s path. Today, she credits the university for inspiring and equipping her for a life of public service.
During her clinical training, Lee observed a failure to address homelessness, unemployment, and other root causes of the mental health problems plaguing her mostly low-income, African American patients. “I saw how systems were beating people down,” says Lee, who responded by raising funds and opening a mental health center in Berkeley that offered more appropriate services.
Lee also was deeply influenced by a summer internship through Cal in the Capital. Working in Washington, D.C., she learned about the impact of policymaking on the daily lives of the poor and people of color.
An invitation from then-Congressman Ron Dellums M.S.W. ’62 to return to Washington eventually steered Lee into politics. First elected to the state Assembly in 1990, she has served in Congress since 1998. She is an outspoken advocate for the poor and for health, education, and other reforms. Lee was the only member of Congress to oppose the authorization for the use of military force after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.