Although Gamble Auditorium was sparsely populated on Monday evening, the four women who participated in the panel on women and community organizing in the Pioneer Valley, organized by the Community Based Learning program, still had wonderful insights to share with Mount Holyoke students interested in volunteering in the Valley. The small audience may have been disappointing for the CBL, but it made for an intimate experience.

Discussing issues of social, environmental and economic justice and the connections between all three, the women related their personal journeys and victories by addressing all three instead of simply reiterating common statements about such injustices for the audience. Their experiences differed greatly. Two speakers were mothers who were at one point on welfare, and all the women had for a long time been engaged in community organizing to some extent. One was a graduate of the State University of New York system (SUNY), another, an immigrant from Puerto Rico.

Michaelann Bewsee, who has worked with Arise for Social Justice, an anti-oppression organization, for about 20 years and is a long-time resident of Springfield, MA., opened by citing all of the circumstances that should have prevented her from attending the event. She mentioned how her best friend will be getting high-risk surgery on Tuesday because of his lack of access to first-response health care that could have prevented the need for such a dangerous procedure. On that evening, other representatives from Arise were in court battling against the proposals to create a new construction and demolition waste incinerator in the city of Springfield. The proposed incinerator is of particular concern for Bewsee and her colleagues because, as she pointed out on Monday, it could have major health repercussions for the community of Springfield. “Poor people don’t have a lot of time to think about trees getting cut down by the Quabbin [Reservoir],” she said, as a generalization, “but they have a lot of time to think about an incinerator in Springfield giving their children asthma.”

“Everyone who walks in our door or hangs out long enough becomes a seed of political activism in their own community. This becomes a current of community organizing,” Bewsee said, describing the process as having a ripple effect. Arise had to give up their office space for some time, however, to sponsor a family homeless shelter. She posed a question related to the individuals they had helped in their converted space: “Why are the shelters full if there are abandoned, bordered up houses around the city?”

Virgenmina Perez, a long-time volunteer for Neighbor to Neighbor, a Massachusetts organization that assists people find stable and affordable housing, spoke during the panel in Spanish, and Lena Entin, a fellow volunteer in Holyoke and another panelist, translated animatedly. She also worked as an organizer for Deval Patrick’s gubernatorial campaign, canvassing to register voters. Perez said that she does this work to obtain and spread the “power to open our voices without fear.”

After translating for Perez, Etin spoke about her work with Neighbor to Neighbor, after learning about community organization in El Salvador and as a college student. When the SUNY that she attended planned to cut financial aid, she and fellow students organized the shut-down of a university building, where they slept for days, rallying and demanding the cuts be stopped. They were successful.

“Organizing is when you see injustice and just can’t bear it,” she stated.

The last speaker, Marie Cuerda, attended Smith College while receiving aid through welfare, and, immediately after graduating, was hired by the organization. While agreeing with Entin that short-term aid is not going to solve long-term problems in the same ways that systemic change can, and conceding that providing legal services to relieve problems is not enough, she emphasized the importance of these short-term actions, nonetheless.

Cuerda told the audience about providing food to immigrant agricultural communities and spoke to the irony of their need for food. In a good summation of the panelists’ shared sentiment of hearing a personal call to action to realize social justice in their communities, Cuerda said “I find something fundamentally wrong with farm workers being hungry.”