On most days, the Quality Community Council (QCC), a grassroots coalition located in a small space on West Main Street, attacks tangible problems facing Charlottesville’s most troubled neighborhoods—voter education, affordable housing and crime prevention, to name a few. However, on Wednesday afternoons, QCC takes on the more abstract agenda of reconciliation, and opens its doors to UVA students for a course called “Race and Repair.”
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“It seems to me that the University has had a major impact on the community in many, many ways, and most of them not positive,” says Phyllis Leffler, one of the three instructors of “Race and Repair.” |
Co-facilitated by Frank Dukes, Director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation; Phyllis Leffler, Director of UVA’s Institute for Public History; and Karen Waters, Executive Director of the QCC, the course was designed to create dialogue between University students and Charlottesville community members. The trio has developed a curriculum that tackles many ugly truths about the University’s history, beginning with slavery and working through contemporary issues of employment and the impact of University construction on local communities.
“It seems to me that the University has had a major impact on the community in many, many ways, and most of them not positive,” says Leffler.
The course’s provocative content is tempered by an open and inviting atmosphere. Waters’ robust laughter punctuates conversation, and Dukes and Leffler offer a more muted warmth. The physical space of the QCC also adds to this dynamic, with one long table designed to seat all 25 students together, and blooming seedlings from the Council’s community garden brightening the room.
“Every class, I’ve come away feeling energized,” says Dukes.
“Race and Repair” is jointly sponsored by the QCC and the University Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE). Following a resolution passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 2007 offering a declaration of “profound regret” for slavery in Virginia’s history, the University’s Board of Visitors created UCARE and tasked it with fostering an understanding of UVA’s racial history and repairing its relationship with the larger community.
With this goal in mind, Leffler approached Dukes, also Project Director of UCARE, to collaborate on designing a class. Leffler thought a partnership with the QCC would legitimize the course in the eyes of community members.
“There are some things that are painful for people who have either directly lived it, or it’s a part of their family,” says Dukes. “The students really value having the community members sitting there, being able to talk with them, being able to hear from them.”
Because the three facilitators currently volunteer their efforts, it is uncertain whether they will be able to reconvene and teach the course again. Still, they view “Race and Repair” as a beginning, not an end: Leffler references the students’ final group research projects, which are expected to “develop new knowledge” and leave a legacy about the community’s public history.
Waters agrees. “We’ve put the facts and put the truth out there, and each person who is in the class can in turn carry that water a little farther.”
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