Jahne Brown was in a rush. She almost always is. Her life, like the lives of other University of Chicago students, consists of trying to keep in line the care balance of school, work, social and what is needed to stay alive. She goes to class, work and the meeting of various clubs and organizations. Another thing she balances is her finances. She, like many other students, is on budget. The equilibrium of her life is delicate; the slightest factor could completely throw her off course. An emergency could throw everything she has worked hard to maintain into complete disarray. She moves through life knowing this, every college student does. It is a terrifying lifestyle that adds stress to what is already a naturally stressful situation. So, when an emergency does happen, what is a student left to do? Who can they call on for help?
Brown, a third-year history major at the University of Chicago, knows the place that her fellow students are in when it comes to stressing about school, work, life and the all-encompassing unknown. It was that intimate understanding that Brown realized was missing from the administration-run emergency services at the university. She realized that the best people to help students were students themselves. Other students would be the only ones who could possibly understand the intricate ways that the stress affects college students. It would take other University of Chicago students to understand the exact type of high intensity stress other students were under. This realization brought to life the Emergency Fund. A student-founded, -funded and -directed organization that gives grants to other student for varying emergencies.
She used her position as a representative on the university's College Council to create the Emergency Fund. The Emergency Fund offers up to $200 in funds to students who find themselves in emergency situations and in need of financial assistance. The money is given without any conditions of repayment. It is essentially a gift from students to each other. It is a show of support and understanding of the circumstances they live under.
“Our slogan, ‘students helping students’ is truly what the Emergency Fund is functioning to do,” said Marlin Figgins, a third-year majoring in Mathematics and co-chair of the Emergency Fund. Figgins believes that by fostering empathy between students through student fundraising is key to creating a network of support for students at the University of Chicago.
Brown’s idea for the Emergency Fund came following the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Brown remembers the election well. It happened during her first year at the University of Chicago. Election day that year fell on Tuesday, November 8, which is also Brown’s birthday. She remembers being excited to celebrate this birthday with her new friends and watch the election results be reported. She remembers the celebratory air sagging the more states turned red on the electoral map. She remembers seeing looks of shock, disappointment and fear start to enter her friends faces. She remembers those own feelings consuming her. She remembers waking up the next day to a campus that had changed overnight. She remembers realizing that someone had to do something to ensure that marginalized communities on campus would be okay in the wake of the election. She remembers coming up with the idea of the Emergency Fund.
Figgins was one of the first people Brown told about the Emergency Fund. He was someone that had been with her that night to celebrate her birthday. When Brown approached Figgins, he was immediately on board with the idea.
“She approached with a full idea and I trust her,” Figgins said, “I saw it as an opportunity to help a shit ton of people.”
That was two years ago. Now, the Emergency Fund has even more members with two different boards, the decisions board and the finance board. In the Fall 2018 quarter alone, the Emergency Fund gave out $830 in aid to four different students. The aid was given to students for reproductive health cost, other health cost and bills, school related fees and “extreme everyday financial burdens”.
“We are redistributing wealth every day and centering that redistribution on students that are poor or otherwise marginalized,” said Brown.
It is a style that is radically different than any other type of funding being given to students.
“It’s not capitalism for sure,” Figgins said, “The kind of -ism it is I just don’t know”.
Looking at the program this appears to be largely true. The Emergency Fund is a redistribution of wealth to the most marginalized members of community. It functions very in ways that the administrative emergency loan programs just don’t.
One of these differences being that administrative programs are loans, not a grant like the Emergency Fund. Students are expected to repay the administration for their generosity; the Emergency Fund does not set up that expectation for their recipients. “We want to give you money,” said Raven Rainey, a second year Political Science student on the finance board.
The major difference is the process of getting approved to receive money. The members see the administrative process as something that is more harmful than helpful to students. It a process that forces students to put themselves and their situations into the spotlight for people who might not even understand the gravity of their issues.
“You have to put your trauma on display and beg old, white men for money that they might not even give to you,” said Figgins, “We are not gonna do that.”
So many marginalized students are forced to explain and demonstrate their trauma in order to receive university help. Their needs are not believed or recognized without having to explain them in almost embarrassing detail. The process can leave students feeling exposed for no reason. The Emergency Fund has attempted to create a process that gets rid of this show and tell trauma expectation and gets right to helping students.
The process for to apply for Emergency Fund money starts with an online application; this is already very different from the administrative process which usually includes having to do a face-to-face interview. The Emergency Fund asks for documentation of the emergency, the nature of the emergency, the amount of money needed and contact information. The contact information is kept between the chairs only and not shared with any other people. The applications are reviewed at decision board meetings where the nature of the emergency is the main deciding factor on whether or not money will be given.
This year’s focus is reproductive rights. The first year’s focus was immigration, which was in direct response to what President Trump had said and planned to do regarding immigrant students and DACA recipients most importantly. The decision to have reproductive rights came for many reasons, but one of those once again had to do with highlight how different the Emergency Fund is from administrative money programs.
“It is the least likely to be funded,” said Chorine Adewale, a third-year student at the University of Chicago. Adewale realizes that the Emergency Fund is in large part attempting to fill the gaps the university is simply failing to fulfill.
The reason why the Emergency Fund is able to use the money in a way that the administration would not agree with is because they fund themselves. The only use a university associated bank account to store their money. Other than this they are self-sufficient. The fundraising process is handled by Rainey and the other members of the finance board. The fundraisers they plan expand throughout the whole year and range from large in size to simple baked good sales.
For example, the Emergency Fund recently had one of their go-to fundraisers: selling and delivering Krispy Kreme donuts to the Regenstein Library. Donuts were available for pre-order as well as on the spot purchase, with the pre-order donuts costing less. The donut sale aligned with the midpoint of the quarter and thus midterms. Enter the Emergency Fund with their low-priced donuts delivered and sold directly at the library. Even in their fundraising, the focus of Emergency Fund remains helping students with something as simple as sweet pick me up during a tough time in the quarter.
While smaller fundraisers happen all throughout the year, there are large fundraisers that place usually at the end of quarters. The large event for the Fall 2018 quarter was an art show. At this event art by students was auctioned off to people in order to raise funds. The Emergency has decided to stick with the artistic theme of large fundraisers with its most recent large-scale fundraiser.
Currently the Emergency Fund is accepting submissions from students to create an anthology of marginalized voices. In a statement calling for submission the Emergency Board Fund explained that, “The voices that we most need to hear are often silenced, forgotten, or drowned out. This is true of many places, college campuses included.” The anthology is to be entitled Emergent Voices: An Anthology and is set to be released during the Spring Quarter.
“We’re looking for poems, poses, art pieces to create this booklet,” said Rainey.
The Emergency Fund hopes to collect works from marginalized students all over the country to create this booklet which will be sold, and the proceeds will go directly in to ensure that even more students can receive grants from the Emergency Fund.
Much like everything they do, the Emergency Fund wants to differentiate itself from administrative money program by making it clear that everything they do is political.
“This is not an apolitical organization,” said Figgins. The Emergency is political in its choice to focus on marginalized people, to uplift their voices and needs is a political decision. It why the program started and something that both is chairs have had apart of their lives for years.
For Brown, the concept of students helping student is something she is very familiar with. When she was a sophomore in high school Brown founded the one of the first black student unions in her district. Brown did this in response to the way that marginalized students were being treated at her high school, especially by the principal.
Brown’s principal was person who seem to want actively marginalize students. The reason I know this is because he was also my principal. He was a person who called himself a wigger, a combination of white and the n-word, to my face. He is the type of person who would ask a trans student about their genitalia in the middle of the hallway. He is the type of administrator that wanted to hear and see students’ trauma on display. It is the same behavior that she saw taking place at the University of Chicago.
Her idea garnered support from at the school but was not without its opposition. The strongest push back for this came from the school’s administration. Her idea got her deemed as “weed in the garden of the school” by the principal.
Despite these comments, Brown persisted. She saw a need and wanted to fulfill it. It was a need that she saw in her fellow students, but also when talking to her younger sister, when she started to exhibit low self-esteem in regard to her hair and skin tone.
Brown continued that same pattern of fighting for marginalized people to be heard, even getting kicked out of a Trump rally for protesting during her senior year of high school. Just over a year later, Brown was getting the Emergency Fund off the ground at the University of Chicago.
Figgins helps students on campus every day being a math tutor. His work helping younger students with the difficult math work that the school requires is something is a passionate about. A quick look at his twitter not only reveals a wicked sense of humor, but a deep love for math and helping other understand it. Talking with Figgins, it is hard to miss the way he comes alive when he talks about helping student understand the subject he loves so much.
Another prevalent theme on Figgins twitter is him openly talking about mental illness. As someone living with bipolar disorder, Figgins openly talks about the struggles he has faced with people misunderstanding about his mental illness. He understands what it is like to be multiply marginalized person, who intersecting identities compound on each other to make life more difficult. He knows that people need empathy to help one another.
“That’s what the emergency fund is trying to cultivate, a sense of community, of empathy between students,” Figgins said.
Due to its radical nature, the university has not been fully supportive of the Emergency Fund.
“Where to start,” Figgins said looking at the other board members when asked about any push back from the administration.
The different board members began to explain what exactly the administration had done. Apparently when it comes to taking money of other their university account, the Emergency Fund always run into difficultly.
“We don’t ask for bank account or social security information, so the money must be given in person,” Rainey said. This a concept that university seems to have a hard time understanding and taking money out of their account always is process of trying get the university to understand their process.
There was also the issue of the university starting a near-identical program. Same goals, same name.
“We people that were members of the board asking if this was us,” said Brown, “That’s how similar it was.” The Emergency Fund was never consulted about the starting of the program. The members had to heard about the university’s “new initiative” through confused questions from students trying to identify if it was the student-ran Emergency Fund.
Brown, Figgins and the rest of the board have made direct attempts to as transparent as possible with students so issues like this do not come about in the future. It is yet another way that the Emergency fund attempts. This has included holding office hours to allow students to sit down with member of The Emergency Fund’s board about the operational processes of the board. Board members sit at different table at the university dining areas and wait for students to approach them with questions about the program. These questions can range from interest in joining the program, to questions about the application process and how the program is financed. As long they are approached in a respectful way, then the board members are ready and willing to answer the questions being asked of them. The board has hosted larger forums to give people to ask questions in larger format as well as give people to join the board.
To further the transparency of the process, the Emergency Fund has made it a point to introduce its members via the Facebook page for the fund to ensure that people can put faces, personalities and ideology behind the people deciding who gets funding. The fund has also been transparent in their decision-making process will center and prioritize some emergencies over others. They want students to have a clear understanding of what they are donating to. This means putting out as much information out about themselves as possible.
The board members of the Emergency Fund see this as program that could expand outside of the University of Chicago.
“We want other students to be able to create this at their universities,” said Brown.
The Emergency Fund is a concept that when applied at any university properly could do world of good for marginalized communities. For students who want to work to have an Emergency Fund program at their school, the board members had some words as advice.
There program has to be run by dedicated people. People who understand the gravity of the work being done.
“You’re literally saving someone’s life,” Rainey emphasized.
The program can never lose its political message. Everything being done has to keep the political messaging of centering marginalized people in mind. That is the foundation of the program. If that was lost, then the whole purpose of the program and actual work it does would be gone with it. An Emergency Fund is year dedication to cause, not a moment in time where all the focus can go at once.
“This is not a service trip,” said Figgins, “This is building a community where people rely on one another.”
With that sentence, Figgins highlighted yet another way in which the Emergency Fund is radical.
The Emergency Fund goes directly against the narrative of current college age people being selfish, unable to be self-sufficient and only talking about problems with giving solutions to fix them. Selfish students would not be willing to give their time, much less their money, to help people who are strangers to them.
The Emergency Fund is a call to action for students. It is call to action for students at University of Chicago to rely on another for their needs. It is call to action students to hold each other responsible for their peers at their campus and grow the empathy in their heart. It is a call to actions that the board members of the Emergency Fund want to expand beyond their campus and share with universities all over the country. The Emergency Fund is nuances. It is at its core call to action to students, marginalized students in particular, to start to feel empowered.
“We are creating a campus where people feel responsible for one another,” said Figgins and that is the most perfect summation of the Emergency Fund there. It is not just about money, it is about building a campus students community that genuinely helps itself survive.
If you have interest in donating to the Emergency fund, submitting to the anthology, or learning more about the Emergency Fund please go their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ucemergencyfund/
