Plunge into Chicago

Every year, members of the Scholar Leader community select and travel to a city within eight hours of Miami’s campus for about three days in order to complete service, speak with local leaders or organizations, and experience the culture of a city different from Oxford. In other words, community members “plunge” into a new environment in order to build community ties and spread their impact to a region apart from Miami and Oxford.

This year’s Scholar Leader community selected Chicago as its Plunge location. Unlike Plunge trips from the past, this year the community elected to base the trip’s activities on a theme: power and privilege. Therefore, all service and discussions with leaders and organizations were centered on this theme, specifically as it relates to poverty, disability, and ethnicity.

Approximately thirty members including myself boarded a bus on Wednesday, January 5 to head for the “Windy City.” Six hours later we arrived at the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Hostel located on the edge of Millennium Park. After dropping off our belongings and exploring the hostel, we headed out to the Park to see The Bean and tour the Art Institute of Chicago. On this excursion, we also experienced our first encounters with poverty and homelessness on Chicago streets.

Later that day, we returned to the hostel to discuss power and privilege with the organization LIFT, which fights poverty in Chicago by providing those affected with resources and support so that they can begin changing their situations. The harsh realities of poverty in Chicago were made clear to us in this discussion and prepared us well for the service we would do and discussions we would have later in the trip. The discussion also united this year’s community with Miami University graduate, and Scholar Leader alum, Matt Forrest, who now works in Chicago with LIFT.

On Thursday, we all awoke bright and early and headed to China Town for a walking tour connecting our theme of power and privilege with ethnicity. The day continued with a three-hour service opportunity at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. While there, we helped box 880 boxes of food for senior citizens on subsidized living. Each box will feed one person for three to four days. Therefore, Scholar Leaders helped feed almost 900 people through just three hours of service. Following the service, Scholar Leaders participated in a discussion on power and privilege at DePaul University.

Friday was our final full day in the city. It began with a tour of the Access Living building. Access Living is a disability rights organization that aims to get independent living for those with disabilities. The building is built using Universal Design, meaning that it is fully accessible to all. Following the tour, a discussion on power and privilege and how it relates to those with disabilities was held with three members of the Access Living staff.

The afternoon was spent at Shedd Aquarium where we met with another Miami alum who gave us some information on Shedd including its conservation efforts and facts about some of the animals there. Finally, our trip ended with another visit to DePaul to see the Miami University Glee Club perform followed by a trip to Little Italy where we had our final community meal in Chicago.

Plunge showed us that even though we were in a different city, we were still greatly connected to our university. From meeting with Matt Forrest, to watching Miami win the GoDaddy.com Bowl at the hostel, to meeting with a Miami alum at Shedd, to watching the Glee Club perform, we were constantly linking our efforts in Chicago to our university lives. I think I can speak for all Plunge attendees that the trip was both meaningful and rewarding and prepared us for our final semester together as a community.

-Sarah Kipp