Agents of Change Part 1, September 17, 2020
50 Years Later, How We Coped with the Challenge to Be the Change
When we were freshmen, women and men were allowed in each others’ dorm rooms unchaperoned for two hours a week each way, on a midweek afternoon—with the door cracked. By the time we were seniors we had coed dorms. In loco parentis died on our watch.
Arguably, the Class of ’71 was on campus during the greatest period of social unrest in our lifetimes.
—The Vietnam War, draft resistance, and the student strike in 1970
—the upsurge of the Women’s Movement
—anti-racism work (In White America performed in Skinner)
—both Martin Luther King, Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated
—the first Earth Day was celebrated our junior year
For many of us, our college days were a time to burst out from the Father Knows Best cocoon in which we’d been raised and to question everything. And the more we looked, the more apparent it was that there was inequality and injustice all around.
Many of us felt inspired to go out and make a difference in the world. But how? After the ritual mortar board toss in June, 1971, we dispersed. To be sure, not everyone felt the call to be a social change agent, but for those of us for whom that bell rang, these two hours will be a chance to hear the stories of how we incorporated social change work into our lives—amidst making a living, raising family, and other pursuits. There was no road map. We had to make it up.
This session is an opportunity to find out first-hand the individual journeys our classmates took, started off by stories from:
Yvonne Jones
Peg Kehrer
Charlie Quimby
Moderator Laird Schaub
Speakers
Yvonne Jones is a Director in GAO’s Strategic Issues team. Prior to joining the Government Accountability Office in 2003, she was employed at the World Bank where she led the implementation and evaluation of economic development projects in the education, commercial debt reduction and finance sectors.
Peg Kehrer, shown here with her environmentalist son at the Point Wilson Light, is a woman of mystery with no detectable Internet footprint. Even her email comes from another account. This is likely a sign that Peg is the most accomplished social change artist of the bunch.
Charlie Quimby had a spangled career as a critic, corporate middle manager, entrepreneur and early retiree thanks to capitalism. He then started over as a social critic, non-profit supporter, community volunteer, novelist, and political activist. Even his hair and frown are protected speech.
Laird Schaub served as Executive Secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), publisher of Resilience magazine, and was a cofounder of Sandhill Farm, an egalitarian community in Missouri. He is currently a facilitation trainer and process consultant, and authors a blog that can be read at communityandconsensus.blogspot.com.
Agents of Change Part 2, October 1, 2020
Being Social Change Agents Today
Eerily, the social upheaval in the nation today is starting to look a lot like what we experienced during our years as undergraduates:
—divisive political atmosphere (remember the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968?)
—the pandemic (remember the upheaval of the draft lottery?)
—the attention on systemic racism following George Floyd’s murder (Soul on Ice was published in 1968)
—temperatures reaching 100 degrees in the Siberian Arctic (the 1969 Cuyahoga Rive fire dramatized pollution)
Although we’re all now card-carrying septuagenarians, we’re not dead and there’s still work to do. Although we’re mostly retired, and may no longer have the stamina we once did, if we still have fire in the belly, what are we inspired to do? Where are our points of leverage in a culture that reveres the young and warehouses the old? What support do we need to keep our oar in the water and how will we find it?
We’ll explore these questions together during this two-hour session.
How to Join
Find information on how to join these Zoom programs.
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Still need help? Contact Laurel Thompson at 866-208-3889 or 50threunion@carleton.edu.