WDA provides sustainable solutions
Whitman Direct Action embodies all that Whitman promises to foster: creativity, leadership, intellectual vitality, service and global awareness. Despite this, the long-term future of WDA is uncertain and hinges on a few factors, the most important of which is administration support. 
The mission of WDA is to help marginalized people internationally through student initiatives and sustainable solutions.
Last week WDA held an information session to garner support and expand membership. Up until recently the group consisted of a handful of students working independently. Now WDA has its sights set on securing a permanent place on Whitman’s campus and a distribution of responsibility.
“What they’ve done involves enormous personal sacrifices,” said sophomore Camilla Thorndike, who joined WDA recently.
In 2005 senior Joseph Bornstein and junior Curt Bowen founded WDA after they completed a Build-A-House Project in Nicaragua. Through the project a family, rendered destitute after a fishing accident, was provided with a home and a means of livelihood.
“While building the home, our crew was exposed to the devastating social implications of petroleum dependence seeing that within a single year, petroleum price spikes had caused the cost of goods to rise by 100 percent. Witnessing this painful reality sparked in us a strong desire to generate structural changes by aiding marginalized communities, helping them to become stronger and more autonomous,” said Bornstein in an e-mail.
WDA inaugurated its inception with the Central American Biodiesel Project. They hosted two biodiesel conferences and co-founded cooperatives and resource centers throughout Honduras and Nicaragua.
This year’s undertaking is the Sadhana Clean Water Project. WDA is hosting a conference and water fair in Mumbai, India in March and in partnership with Sadhana Village and United World College is coordinating an Appropriate Technology Study Group.
The culmination of the project will be the publication of a book illuminating not just the technological but also the political, cultural and economic hurdles and their solutions. It will also serve as a case study for NGOs. The book will be a collaborative effort including 10 organizations specializing in water development.
“What we’re doing right now as part of the Sadhana Clean Water Project is figuring out the best way to recognize and address the hurdles that we’ll inevitably come across. Those hurdles include religious, socioeconomic, regional-specific—basically, cultural barriers that would in many cases prohibit the use of certain appropriate water technologies.
“And after all, what the hell is the point of setting up appropriate technology that doesn’t even have a chance to begin?” said junior David Youngblood, member of WDA and head of fund raising.
It is fund raising, however, that is central to the project’s success.
“The logistical details of our project are well underway, yet funding for our conference and study group is seriously lacking. I am optimistic that we’ll get there, but it will be a challenge,” said Bornstein in an e-mail.
That is where the support of Whitman College comes in. Until now, WDA has functioned as an independent student venture. Now it is also an ASWC club, but the goal is to establish a program on par with the community service center and the study abroad program.
“The next step, and the long term of WDA, is not up to us entirely. It will, no matter what our best efforts are, be up to how important the administration feels it is to provide its students with the kind of learning that would make good on the promise of a liberal arts education,” said Youngblood.
WDA is unparalleled by any established Whitman program in that it is run entirely by students and it merges study abroad concepts with community service ones.
“The process that we’ve gone through is absolutely invaluable for what, ultimately, is creative thinking. Thinking creatively itself knows no bounds. What we’re doing is learning in the ideal form, in the sense that we have a one-on-one relationship with the obstacles we’re dealing with. We face the challenges of our mistakes and the good feelings of our successes. And that unmediated experience is vital. You’ll never be able to conceive of a form of learning that replaces actual experience,” said Youngblood.
WDA has given its participants not only marketable problem-solving and critical thinking experience, but also invaluable personal rewards.
“This kind of learning actually allows you, maybe for the first time in most undergraduates’ lives, to be a certain kind of person and that’s the much greater outcome that we all want from school, whether we think about it immediately. The kind of person you’d be proud to be is the kind who comes from dealing with problems that have no given answers and then finding the best answers on your own. It’s a certain kind of struggle, and that struggle is not replaceable by sitting in a classroom,” said Youngblood.
The obstacle for WDA, however, is not proving its value but overcoming institutional barriers and allocating resources.
“I know many of those hurdles and I recognize what some of the true difficulties of the administration doling out capital are. On the other hand, what the administration can and should do is make an effort that is equal to the effort on the part of its students, and the student effort is monumental,” said Youngblood.
Youngblood hopes that Whitman’s bureaucracy will not undermine the very imperatives that it is meant to uphold.
“If bureaucracy is its own greatest hurdle, which I’ve discovered it can be, all I can say is replacing the ability to jump on something special when it’s right before your eyes, with the need for that something special to walk a certain line before it can actually be considered, is unfortunate in a place where cultivating skills for creative and innovative learning is its number one objective,” said Youngblood.
WDA hopes to prove that it is not just a great program but one that is very different from anything Whitman currently offers, and that therein lies its value.
“Surely, you can think of the community service office as a type of experiential learning; undoubtedly, you might find certain experiential learning language in some of the study abroad programs. But are any of those primarily geared toward the kind of experiential learning that synthesizes community service with travel abroad concepts? No, absolutely not,” said Youngblood.
Support from the administration exists but it is not yet substantial enough to ensure WDA remains viable.
“Of course there’s support. Verbal support is very easy to come by. But stopping at a place of verbal recognition is like walking to the door of a soup kitchen and thinking you’ve done your part. And so everybody is wildly supportive in one sense but as long as that deluge of support exists only in the action of speaking, you’re forced to take it with a grain of salt,” said Youngblood.
Among students and faculty the support is more concrete.
“Faculty and students are overwhelmingly and genuinely supportive. As a matter of fact, if this present project succeeds, it will be because of the support of certain faculty, it’ll be because of students,” said Youngblood.
Students who are interested in becoming members should attend weekly meetings on Saturday at 1 p.m. WDA meets at the couches upstairs in Reid, then moves to a conference room.
This Friday, Oct. 19 at 7:00 p.m. WDA is hosting a silent auction and raffle in Young Ballroom to raise money for the Sadhana Clean Water Project.
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