The Slay Fund for Social Justice provides grants to a wide variety of programs. We enable direct social justice work, and research and pedagogy meant to enhance social justice learning; we bring speakers to campus, and enable students to travel to workshops and events off campus - and to return to share what they have learned.
Projects
LiveLaw San Quentin
In December, 2015, four Drake students travelled to San Quentin Prison to take part in a groundbreaking LiveLaw legal storytelling event- the first of its kind held behind prison walls. LPS majors Gabriella Gugliotta, Katie Berger, Jamie Wall, and Alliyah Greaver accompanied Professor Renee Cramer on the trip, where they joined more than 200 incarcerated and free Americans for an evening of song and reflection. They learned about the tremendous programming available to incarcerated men in San Quentin, and heard first hand about how these men have grown through their participation.
After returning from San Quentin, the LPS students put on an evening event with excerpts from the program, sharing with the campus community about the impact of rehabilitative programs in this context. They provided attendees with resources for learning more, and for activism around issues of prison recidivism, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the importance of rehabilitative programs for incarcerated Americans.
Kikandwa Health Clinic
McKenzie Leier's Story
In the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I traveled to Uganda for a six-week class about sustainable development. The country and its people left a deep impression in my heart; I strongly desired to keep working with Ugandans.
The Slay Fund for Social Justice gave me the opportunity to travel back to Uganda over the J-term of my senior year. Thanks to the Slay’s generosity, I was able to re-engage and continue to work with our Ugandan friends and colleagues. While in country, I helped set the groundwork for a student healthcare shadowing program at local clinics and NGOs. In the summer of 2015, two Drake students were able to participate in this program.
In addition, I was able to contribute to the lengthy project of establishing a health clinic in the rural village of Kikandwa, Uganda. International development and health care are extremely complicated fields; I am no expert. However, thanks to the generosity of the Slays, I was able to learn in-country from Ugandan doctors, architects, and entrepreneurs, as well as contribute in small ways to the health clinic.
I strongly believe that health is a human right. Many of the people of Kikandwa, as well as many other Ugandans, are unable to access quality, life-saving health care. I hope that these projects will make a small contribution towards health equity in Uganda.
For more information about the work that Drake students, professors, and Ugandans continue to undertake, check out https://connectuganda.weebly.com/.
Faculty members Darcie Vandegrift and Lourdes Gutierrez Najera used Slay funds to deepen student ties to social justice focused community engaged learning. The project gave students new ideas about innovative ways to do research about and to present data for building a more just Des Moines metro.
The social justice outcomes for Vandegrift’s spring course on qualitative interviewing were two-fold. First, students came to understood gender violence on college campuses from a feminist sociological perspective. That is, sexual assault and other forms of gender violence happen through a combination of institutional policies, spatial arrangements, interpersonal interactions, and individual attitudes that make women on campuses vulnerable to gender violence. They analyzed gender violence on their own campus through empathic feminist interviews of college students. Finally, they worked to transmit their findings into social change through converting interview findings into theater vignettes with the editorial expertise of Drake student Clare Vanechaute and Vandegrift.
Impressively, fourteen students with no theater background wrote and performed the script, “How it Goes.” They created a performance that was coupled with a poetry reading by Roosevelt High School’s Women’s Studies students. Together with teacher Petra Lang, the Women’s Studies students talked about creating a safer college experience while sharing with Drake students the challenges faced at the intersections of race, class, nation and gender in high school as well as the traditions of spoken word poetry. This powerful morning of exchange was made possible by Slay Grant funding, which paid for Ms. Vanechaute’s time as a theater collaborator and the food for the workshop held for the performance.
Scenes from “How it Goes” were produced again for first year orientation at Drake in Fall 2016. The script and Vandegrift’s analysis of the experience is under preparation for publication in a journal article.
The Slay Fund also made possible an important collaboration between Community Housing Initiatives based in East Des Moines and Vandegrift’s spring course “Methods of Social Research.” Students completed a report based on focus groups and a survey of employees of Lutheran Hospital. They asked employees about perceptions of the neighborhood to imagine ways that the hospital could become a better East Side neighbor. Findings included misperceptions about safety, recommendations on programming to encourage interaction between hospital and community, and ideas on how to incentivize employees across social categories to move closer to work. Vandegrift and Drake student Heidi VonDeBur coauthored the final study and presented it to the City of Des Moines and the Capital East Neighborhood Association in June. Slay Funding made possible the community meeting for students to give presentations on the findings and for VonDeBur to create the final draft with Vandegrift and present it to East Side stakeholders.
Oral History Courses: Gutierrez Najera created a reception to invite informants for her students' oral history work. In honoring community member's stories, students were able to learn the obstacles faced by immigrants, refugees, and political activists living in the Des Moines metro. Informants were also able to give feedback about how their stories were told.
Community Engaged Learning Faculty Fellows
Drake's Office of Community Engaged Learning sponsored two Faculty Fellows for 2020/2021. These faculty, who are engaged in community-based teaching and learning, come from different disciplines to help expand Drake's felt commitment to our city and our region.
Alison Bechdel
The Slay Fund was instrumental in helping to fund the visit of MacArthur Foundation award-winning cartoonist, author, and performance artist Alison Bechdel to Drake University in 2015.
Michele Norris
The SJMC partnered with the Slay Fund and the Des Moines Public Library's Wonder of Words Festival to bring NPR journalist Michele Norris and her Race Card Project to campus in 2013: http://theracecardproject.com/ There was a packed house in Sheslow Auditorium of members of the Drake and Des Moines communities in Sheslow Auditorium. Michele also had breakfast with the Crew Scholars and talked with an SJMC class. Many members of the university participated in a “race card” exercise in which they wrote their feelings about race on postcards that were displayed in an installation set up in Olmsted Center. Leonard Pitts
The School of Journalism and Mass Communication partnered with the Des Moines Public Library's Wonder of Words Festival to bring syndicated newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts to campus in 2014. Pitts gave a well attended public lecture, had a meal with the Crew Scholars and visited multiple classes.
The Trevor Project
Two Drake student groups: InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and The Rainbow Union, partnered to screen the important film The Trevor Project for our campus community.
Dolores Heurta/Chrysalis
Campus leaders and leaders from the Slay Fund brought more than 20 staff, faculty, and students to an event hosted by The Chrysalis Foundation, featuring activist Dolores Heurta. Prior to the luncheon, members of La Fuerza Latina screened the documentary Dolores! for the campus community.
Drake Community Press
Since our founding in 2014, the Drake Community Press (DCP) has been serving a community readership on issues of interest and concern to Iowans. DCP partners with Iowa organizations to promote positive interaction and community betterment, as well as provides students with practical knowledge of book editing, design, and production with a cross-disciplinary and collaborative focus. Working within the unique framework of a community-publishing model, DCP engages in community writing projects where all stakeholders are writing with each other.
While the results of a DCP project culminates in the release of a book, the Press is critically invested in relationship-building among individuals and groups, where all collaborators gain a deeper understanding of their community.
The sales of all DCP books go directly to a community beneficiary, to help further the cause and development of the partnering community organization. Since its release in early 2014, DCP’s book—The Ones I Bring With Me: Iowa’s Young Latinas on Identity, Education, and Success—has raised nearly $15,000 with its collaborator, Al Éxito, a Latin@ mentoring program for middle and high school students across central Iowa.
DCP partnered with Drake University’s The Comparison Project as well as the Des Moines Area Religious Council (DMARC) to highlight the astounding religious diversity in the Des Moines area. Religions of Des Moines introduced readers to 15 local religious communities through descriptions of their embodied practices, sacred spaces, and local histories. Proceeds of the sale of the book were donated to DMARC’s food pantries of Central Iowa.
In a time when we could all use a dose of inspiration, Above and Beyond Cancer, the new book out from Drake Community Press, is just what the doctor ordered. Oncologist Richard L. Deming teamed up with professional photographer Dylan Huey to produce a collection of more than 100 voices and scores of stunning full-color photographs that illuminate the difficult journey of a cancer diagnosis and the opportunity it provides for profound personal transformation.
Unique to this 171-page collection are excerpts from the narratives of cancer patients, survivors and caregivers who joined Dr. Deming on mountain treks he has led since 2011 to some of the world’s most breathtaking altitudes, including Mt. Everest Base Camp, Machu Picchu, Mt. Kilimanjaro, the High Himalayas and Mt. Kailish in Tibet.
All revenue from book sales will support cancer prevention and health & wellness programming across the state of Iowa.
As part of the community-based publishing model, DCP also organizes community-building events to strengthen relationships between all stakeholders.
The Slay Fund’s generous donations over the past three publishing cycles have funded the work of student editorial interns, responsible for research, writing, editing, and organizing content for the book project as well as grant writing, event planning, and organizational tasks to make sure the community publishing process is in order.
For more information on our involved organizations and events, visit our websites:
DCP projects are dedicated to improving awareness about cultural groups in our community and raising thousands of dollars to fund organizations that support them. In so doing, the DCP offers meaningful experiential learning opportunities (like pizza and marathon editing sessions into the wee hours) where students commit to a project larger that matters more to them than any individual outcome.
The Comparison Project
The Slay Fund for Social Justice has offered funding for the social justice pedagogy undertaken by faculty members in Philosophy and Religion, who engage digital storytelling technology to enable students to tell the stories of religious groups in the Des Moines metro area.