UA News

A decades-old organization is working with UA students and staff to promote values in diversity through a workshop that will run Jan. 10-15.

The next five days will be full of emotional, experience-sharing dialogue when a group of University of Arizona students and staff get together to discuss race-based hatred, gender bias, religious discrimination, homophobia and violence.

A first-time collaboration between the UA and Anytown Arizona Inc. resulted in the creation of “A-Town,” a nearly weeklong workshop that will explore the biases people carry and what problems discrimination can cause.

“Social justice is an important issue in our community, especially here at the UA where we have such a diverse student body,” said Dustin Cox, a senator with the Associated Students of the University of Arizona. The UA celebrated a record during the fall semester after enrolling its most diverse incoming class in its history.

Anytown is an effective way to build a class of socially conscious leaders on campus, said Cox, an A-Town co-director and the student who worked to bring the workshop to southern Arizona.

Anytown Arizona, which promotes progressive thinking and values in diversity, is a nonprofit that was born out of an organized effort to bring religious understanding to East Coast communities during the 1920s.

Eventually Anytown was created, and the organization expanded to begin addressing racial, social and gender issues during and after the Civil Rights era.

The nonprofit's mission is similar to The Tunnel of Oppression, a multimedia tour that explores issues of discrimination and violence in an event that students organize each year at the UA. 

Cox, who spent nearly one year working to introduce A-Town, said he was able to raise nearly $30,000 necessary to ensure that UA that students and staff could attend at no cost. The majority of funds came from Anytown, ASUA and the Board, formely known as the University Activities Board.

Students were able to apply to attend A-Town and, on Wednesday, the delegation of about 75 UA students and staff headed out for the Triangle Y Ranch Camp and Retreat Center in Oracle where the workshop will run through Jan. 15.

Such college student-focused Anytown workshops are not so common, as the nonprofit generally provides the bulk of its programs to high school-age youth through its summer camps in Prescott and special trainings at schools.

Anytown offers other programming to groups ranging in age. In any case, the programs have the same purpose, which is to promote understanding and acceptance, said Jorge Cordova, treasurer for Anytown Arizona

“It is sometimes very transformative and brings down those barriers just by having discussions that you don’t usually get to talk about in society,” said Cordova, who has served on the nonprofit's board of directors since 1990.

Though the national organization has since dissolved, organizations like Anytown Arizona have continued their work.

Dialogue and experiential learning are at the core of the Anytown model, which promotes self-reflection and action. The UA group will engage in small and large discussions and take part in activities that will require participants to question why they act a certain way and carry certain beliefs.

“The underpinning of it all is celebrating your diversity,” Cordova said, “but with the daily added challenge of figuring out what we are doing to reach out to people who don’t look like us, who don’t believe like us and who don’t come form our same socioeconomic background.”

The UA students and staff will continue meeting after A-Town comes to a close, said Cox, a UA political science senior who participated in Anytown while in high school.

Cox also said he hopes the work of this inaugural group will continue for years to come.

“My vision is to have the workshops twice a year so we can get a new infusion of passion and experience before each semester starts,” Cox said. “It will help us get a kick start on social justice and make sure it’s always at the forefront of students’ minds.”