PACT — The Program to Activate Community Talent

In 1965 I started an after-school program in an upper-west side church to tutor black and latinx primary school students. Within a year we had 100+ Columbia and Barnard students working at the center. At the beginning this was little more than a liberal feel-good effort. But early on, Juan Gonzalez, a reporter from the Spectator, Columbia’s student newspaper, came to do a story and was so enthused he quit the paper and joined us. That summer Juan and I took a course with Richard Cloward at the Columbia School of Social Work. Cloward completely burst our do-gooder ethic by explaining that the problem in America’s ghettos was not cultural disadvantage (the prevailing pop phrase), but poverty and powerlessness.  That class was almost certainly the turning point in both our lives. Shortly thereafter, I became a charter-member of Columbia’s SDS chapter and Juan, who took over the center after I graduated, became a leader of the Young Lords, a Latinx version of the Black Panthers.  

This proposal reflects our changing understanding of our role in the community . . .