Award winning essay for the 2001 Campus Organization Award: Contribution to Campus Life in the area of Racial Reconciliation, U.C.Davis

Racial Reconciliation is a topic that has become a more heated topic here at U.C. Davis in the last year. At a campus where there are different ethnicities and cultures, there also is a considerable amount of misunderstanding and confusion about each other and our backgrounds. The minorities especially fall victim to white privilege and find themselves oppressed not only by their fellow students here on campus, but also by campus and societal systems and policies.

Over the past years, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) has recognized that minorities do feel out of place here at U.C. Davis and in most cases many do feel oppressed by the system. There has been a realization that things on this campus need to change and that we at IVCF, whose member consisted primarily of White Americans and a handful of Asian Americans, had to be the ones who were reaching out to the minorities because they would not be coming to us. God himself says, "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?" (Bible, New International Version)

In the last year, the members of IVCF have been focusing on racial reconciliation or rather reaching out to underrepresented groups on the U.C. Davis campus. We have been reaching out to minorities of several different ethnic groups such as: Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Filipinos. We have developed ministries, programs, and events that reach out to the minorities on campus. We have seen our fellowship diversify in membership especially with Asian Americans and African Americans. We have been committed to reconciliation on the U.C. Davis campus.

IVCF has several ministries on campus that are designed to reach out to minorities on campus. These ministries are used to integrate members of the fellowship into the lives of the minorities on the U.C. Davis Campus. The ministries include: Black Campus Ministries (BCM) which reaches out to African Americans, La Fe which reaches out to the Latino/Hispanic community on campus, and Kapwa which reaches out to Filipinos on campus, and the Service team which assists in events hosted by the aforementioned ministries.

BCM, La Fe, and Kapwa reach out to students who live either on or off campus. Both BCM and La Fe have started on and off campus ministries that are thriving. Minorities are able to come and feel welcome to meetings and everyone, especially the majority culture, are learning how to befriend students who are different than them. BCM has a unique ministry off campus in which Black, White, and Asian students meet together for fun, fellowship, prayer, and support. They work through areas of reconciliation together and are learning to love one another's cultures.

The Service Team has helped out in all the above ministries. The Service Team has been able to serve a variety of ministries and help out with events. For La Fe, they brought the food for a picnic and have brought goodies to Tercero's A Building on campus which houses Latinos and Hispanics. For BCM, they hosted a BBQ at a member's house off campus. The Service Team has done a lot more than has been mentioned and has learned how to be active participants in showing kindness to minorities.

IVCF has sponsored a number of events over the past year that have focused on racial reconciliation for which there is not be mentioned here. Things became more distinct during Spring Quarter 2000 when speakers at our Friday night fellowship meetings began to challenge the members in the area of racial reconciliation. We started having smaller semi-regular meetings that was open to anyone from campus so that people could voice personal experiences, fears, barriers, etc about the issue of racial reconciliation. We also hosted a Spring Conference in 2000 in which we were able to hear from students from different ethnic groups and what they were going through. That quarter we experienced the birth pains of reconciling to one another and what it meant to love one another. It was a difficult time, but it was good. The following summer we hosted a week-long event in inner city Oakland in which students from our fellowship were able serve and gain first hand experience about the poverty and oppression in the inner city. Also, since Spring 2000 we have had bi-quarterly Asian Family Nights where the Asian Americans in IVCF could come together to celebrate their culture, understand their identity, and support one another in the process of finding their own voice in society. We also host quarterly Black Student BBQs for the same purpose. Along the way there have been several conferences that we have sent students to that deal with reconciliation and identity including an Asian American Conference and a Black Student Conference. IVCF is also concerned with having students think about racial tensions throughout the world, and so we sent 60 students from U.C. Davis to Illinois in December 2000 to attend a world mission conference called Urbana. This conference gave students a global perspective on race and oppression. We now continue to strive for racial reconciliation, but now we do it as a family. We take time during our Friday fellowship meetings to pray for our different ministries and the different ethnic groups in our fellowship.

Not only is there a forum to talk about issues and learn about them, but there is a place for reconciliation and forgiveness. This is a place to be different with one another and move on from the old ways of oppression and silence, and it is becoming a place where we can look out for one another as a family. The difference between how IVCF has decided to go about racial reconciliation and how other organizations go about it is significant. Many other organizations and events focus on the problems, but they get stuck in a rut with it and do not seem to make headway. We recognized that if there is no reconciliation and desire to live in unity, then there is no movement to solve the problems. Talking about the problems can only go so far, but what is needed is the desire to have new and healthy relationships with one another where we care for one another.

There are multiple ways that our desire in IVCF to reach our to minorities on the U.C. Davis campus has affected our members and other students. Our fellowship has become more integrated over the year. We used to be a primarily white fellowship with about 15 % Asian Americans, and now we are about 45 % White, 10 % African American, 35 % Asian American, 4 % Filipino, and 6 % Latinos.

When we first began taking racial reconciliation seriously, there were many members in our fellowship who did not understand why it was important and even a portion of students who didn't want to get involved in it. From this, we amazingly transitioned to a place where most everyone knows the importance of it, and wants to live it out. People are taking steps to become a family because we realized that it is worthless to just sit and talk about our problems. We need to act on it. Hence, there were many fellowship meetings and conferences where we truly tried to reconcile with one another and work out our differences. There were many tears and a lot of hurt that we had to work through, but now we can say that we are definitely on the road of learning what it is like to live together and be a family. As IVCF continues to reach out to everyone on the campus, we are able to reach more and more minorities as our ministry is expanding.