Please note: this blog entry is a continuation from an earlier entry by Alumna Eirene Chen.
Two years and many changes later, I am still in San Francisco and loving it! Soon I would like to return overseas and continue my work in refugee affairs and post-conflict community development, hopefully with more maturity than I had the last time I went. In the meantime, I am learning more about the legendary peacebuilding and human potential movements that have emerged from northern California over the past forty years. I’m fortunate to be able to learn from a diverse and outstanding array of SF-based visionaries. And it has been very healing to explore my Asian-American heritage in an affirming and supportive environment.
Part II, Before and Beyond Boyce: Reflections from A PIM Alum (continued)
I’ve also enjoyed sharing about the PIM program as a volunteer SIT recruiter at the annual Craigslist Foundation Non-Profit Boot Camp and Idealist graduate school fairs. The Bay Area and SIT are both very community-oriented places, and the SIT booth invariably draws quite a crowd at these recruiting events. And just as a number of East Coasters wonder about “the Californian way of life,” many Bay Area natives also harbor well-polished fantasies about what it would be like to attend graduate school on the East Coast (by which they usually mean the cities of the NE seaboard, not the south, and generally speaking, not rural New England, either). Dyed-in-the-wool northern Californians are frequently concerned about New England winters and the comparative lack of ethnic diversity in Vermont! However, many PIM alumni are also from California, and if you too are Californian and reading this, do feel free to ask the Admissions team to connect you to a Cali native who can help you get real sense of what you’d be experiencing at SIT.
PIM alumni who choose to focus on post-conflict development are active at all levels of the international development multi-verse in virtually every country on the planet, in the global North as well as in the global South. Some anchor themselves in grassroots national NGOs or in international NGOs, and others are educators, legal advocates, social entrepreneurs, public health specialists or foreign service officers in bilateral and UN organizations. For prospective PIM students who are interested in working as inter-communal peacebuilders or managers of community revitalization initiatives in post-war societies, SIT will introduce you to a global network of seasoned peacebuilding practitioners, many of whom have survived unimaginable atrocities and who bring considerable wisdom to bear on the challenges of healing and re-invigorating societies amidst armed conflict.
Practically speaking, the reintegration of displaced persons into their communities of origin in the aftermath of violent conflict is a specific professional sector within the international humanitarian field, and, as with any other industry, it has its own sociopolitical history, institutional actors, governing principles and operational protocol. SIT’s approach to training future practitioners in this field is broad, interdisciplinary and more generalist than particularist. However, because reintegration activities often take place at the intersection of relief and longer-term development trajectories, the perspectives you gain at SIT are very useful, because they provide an introduction to guiding principles while encouraging you to apply the principles and adjust accordingly based on community feedback.
It is difficult for people displaced by natural or human-made disasters to successfully reintegrate into their former communities unless they are able to begin collaboratively creating a shared, inclusive and equitable vision of what the new society will be like for each member of that community. Towards this end, both the PIM program and the Bay Area not only provide concrete skills training in exploring these questions, but, in some ways they themselves are ongoing experiments in creating pluralistic micro-utopias, whether as a decentralized graduate learning community of under five hundred people or a full-blown polis of over seven million. And, as many of you know, it is much easier to talk about a vision than to live it out consistently in one’s everyday life. As with the Bay Area, the PIM ideal of an intentional intercultural learning community is not without its contradictions!
PIM is not perfect, nor are its ethos, size, tuition rates, teaching style and campus culture the best fit for every student’s needs. You alone must decide in your heart of hearts whether or not it will facilitate the kind of learning and skills development that you are currently exploring. Yet, PIM does provide a space of active and responsive inquiry that is not so easy to find at more conceptual or policy-oriented institutions. It presents a unique framework for reflective inquiry and practice in global social change. And it is singular among North American field-based graduate programs in that it serves as a bridge between communities of practice, linking traditional social science research, development assistance and policymaking entities with a global network of grassroots civil society institutions, and with people whose lives such research purports to improve. As a student, you will be able to meet people from all of the above circles, and some of them will become your friends for life.
Higher education processes frequently deny the existence of deeply entrenched social divisions and instead continue to reinforce existing inequalities. A participatory, intentional and inclusive educational program which is open to self-critique and change can gradually facilitate lasting personal and social transformation – but only if this is what the people in such a learning community want to create. Having experienced many different kinds of classrooms as a student, teacher, community development worker and administrator, I am glad to say that at the very least, the PIM program at SIT exists as a social space to continue creating, in the words of the late Reverend King, “a way where there was no way before.” Making a program like this work for everyone can be messy, and it’s not always pretty. But it’s worth a try.
About the Author:
Eirene Chen is a PIM/CT 63, currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area as a freelance writer, community mediator and consultant to peacebuilding and community development NGOs.
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