I didn’t step foot into Evanston until spring of freshman year, and even then, it was probably only because I heard there was a good restaurant downtown. But could you blame me?
Didn’t we agree that our city was a joke? Didn’t we all just prefer to tell our friends from home that we went to school in Chicago? We didn’t need Evanston, and Evanston certainly didn’t need us.
Something happened though, quite unexpectedly, that changed my thinking; I joined a student group that forced me to start thinking about “town and gown” and giving back to the community. But before I absolutely had to care, why exactly was it so easy for me and countless other Northwestern students to not recognize both what our community needed and had to offer?
As freshmen, we were bombarded with opportunities to get to know our community, be it through service or leisure. Dorm leaders would organize service trips, dozens of booths at activity fairs would offer ways to explore, and the administration set aside numerous weekends for service-learning. I got involved with some of these efforts as an underclassman looking to pad his resume, but only when it was convenient.
One seemingly unrelated group I joined, primarily to complete a Northwestern rite of passage, was Dance Marathon. For my first two years, DM was an annual opportunity to pat my own back, especially with the Evanston Community Foundation (ECF) receiving a portion of the fundraising. But this appreciation of Evanston was fleeting, as I simply forgot about it until the next marathon, and then the next one. The 362 days of the year I wasn’t dancing continuously, I didn’t care about community.
I didn’t have a choice but to change that when I landed on the DM executive board my senior year. With ECF as our partner, I started off by doing things like waving their banner, sometimes literally, only because I had to. And as head of public relations at DM, I found myself defending our community initiatives and ECF partnership to local publications that questioned them. When I asked myself these same questions, I was surprised by what I learned.
With every ECF workshop, meeting and information session I was involved with, I saw organization’s I had never heard of, based in parts of Evanston I didn’t know existed. And all of these organizations existed to meet needs I didn’t know the community had. Some of these groups sought to empower youth, others tried to nurse dwindling arts programs and many provided basic human needs to families that needed them.
The more I worked with ECF, I saw Evanston as more than just the venue of my college experience. Whereas before it was just the name of the city that hosted Northwestern’s campus, Evanston, for the first time, felt like a real place. It was a place where people raised their families, it was a place where people did business, and it was a place that let college students do the whole college thing.
Evanston finally felt like my community. And because the city became a part of me, I felt responsible for doing all that I could do to see it thrive. For me, that meant putting my heart and soul into working with ECF to make DM as successful as it could be. It still didn’t take away from the fact that I only realized this after I was forced to do so, which I concede was shameful, but these realizations at least happened.
On the morning after DM, my dad told me over breakfast that he was proud of us for not just fighting pediatric cancer (the main benefactor of DM 2012 proceeds), but for helping our community. Brought up and educated in less-than-wealthy parts of India, he never had the opportunity to give back the way he wanted to, and the way his community desperately needed him to. But that's not the case at Northwestern.
At Northwestern we can be a valuable part of our greater community, and we have the means to see it succeed. It’s easy to be dissatisfied with a city that closes down our dive-bars or tries to kick us out of our “brothels.” It’s easy to think that the city owes its existence to an institution like Northwestern. And it’s easy to not realize that despite this, we have a gem of a community that needs us. It doesn’t just need us to patronize its shops, clean up its parks, or feed its homeless. It needs us to realize we are community members that have something to offer, and then to offer just that. Many students don’t need this lesson, but I certainly did.
While I and many others will disembark to new communities in the days and weeks to come, we may not have the DMs or other forces to push us to try to do good — we’ll have only ourselves. It's our responsibility to seek out the challenges of our communities that our Northwestern degrees can help us overcome. It may not be convenient, and it certainly may not be obvious, but addressing these challenges is something we are more than equipped to do.