Around 175 Dartmouth students and community members gathered at the third annual social justice dinner and panel at the Hanover Inn on Thursday. Participants discussed how to juggle sustainability with the problems of privilege over a dinner of stuffed portobello mushrooms and chevre-strewn salad.
Four panelists, Sarah Alexander '14, Rob Schultz, the executive director of C0VER Home Repair, Nikkita McPherson '13 and sustainability director Rosi Kerr, started the evening with their reflections on the intersection of sustainability and social justice.
"We want to further this conversation at Dartmouth with various topics," Remy Franklin '13, a sustainability intern who organized the dinner, said.
Alexander discussed her divergent experiences while attempting to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, and how they changed her views of sustainability.
Alexander spent a semester working on a farm in Chewonki, Maine in high school. She lived on her own in New Delhi last spring.
"I remember driving from the airport to Delhi and my first impression was that this was just as far as I could get from Chewonki," she said.
She said she lived just as sustainably in New Delhi as she had in Maine, though that was not her goal.
"A lot of my sustainable behavior was from necessity," Alexander said. "I really learned not to use anything in excess. I was proud by the end when I could take a shower with only one bucket of water."
Schultz said his work with COVER home repair, which helps restore homes for low-income residents of the Upper Valley, taught him the importance of community.
"We've discovered that in addition to being wonderfully green, it is also a wonderful way for the community to come together," he said. "We're helping people stay in their communities, and we all know that's the strongest place to be."
Schultz said social justice and sustainability are not necessarily separate, as individuals involved in both types of work can learn from those they are trying to help.
"I bet we'd find much more common ground living simply for social justice reasons and living simply for environmentally conscious reasons," he said. "The thrift we aspire to, we may learn from working with people who are culturally very different than us."
Kerr said people who work toward sustainability need to understand that their work may not always be relevant to the people they are trying to help. She told a story about a discussion she had with members of a New Haven, Conn., community concerning a local park, when a man interrupted her to say that the park wasn't going to solve the neighborhood's problems. It would not help him when he had to worry about finding money to heat his home.
The encounter made Kerr reconsider the interactions between sustainability and social justice.
"I have tried to remember that the work that we do has to be relevant," Kerr said. "It has to be relevant not just to you, but to a poor mother in the slums of Lima or a professor or a person living in rural Ohio."
Kerr urged students to find something that makes them passionate about social justice and get involved.
Students who attended the event said they enjoyed the panelists and appreciated the issues raised.
Julia McElhinney '14, who organized the first sustainability and social justice dinner, said the idea of making the conversation more accessible stood out to her. She praised the panel for including speakers from a variety of backgrounds who had "different stories and diverse voices."
Caitlin Zellers '16 said she wanted to learn more about sustainability.
"We can't come in with these already created assumptions about communities," Zellers said. "For some people, it's not about being environmentally conscious but saving their homes or their way of life."
This was the first year that the dinner was held at the Hanover Inn. Previous dinners were held in Collis Common Ground.
McPherson declined to comment.
