Secret Students

A quick look at the good work of Community Impact.

By Chris Brown

Illustration by Chris Brown

Columbia has a secret class of students. Every morning, afternoon, and night, year-round, this group of students is learning in classrooms within and around Columbia’s gates. Instead of reading Foucault and Augustine, these learners are preparing for their GED tests or learning English as a second language through an organization called Community Impact. 

Community Impact at Columbia University is an odd organization. It exists simultaneously as one of Columbia’s four student governing boards, responsible for distributing funds to student-led community service projects. It also supports a local food kitchen and clothing drive, organized from Columbia’s Earl Hall, and acts as an independent organization that serves the local community by providing free ESL and GED classes. It’s for the latter that I’ve spent the last two years working, watching some of the most important work Columbia does. 

The CI office is a strange place, one of many small outcroppings of Columbia that you can easily miss walking around northwest Manhattan. It sits at the bottom of a nondescript staircase a few blocks north of NoCo, with only a small sign to direct those looking for it. Inside is a small staff with just three permanent members: Ms. Georgia, ESL’s matriarch; Harry, who runs the GED programs; and Mary, a new hire who helps with everything else. The rest of the staff is made up of a rotating cycle of work-study students, who are, by their nature, temporary workers.  

Students have always formed a crucial part of Community Impact’s work. The organization traces its roots to the merger of two student-run organizations from the early ’80s, Diakonia and the Columbia Community Volunteer Service Center, both founded with the idea that Columbia owed something to its local community. Diakonia’s founder, David Joyce, CC ’81, was a committed volunteer and community organizer, but he died only two years after his graduation. Diakonia focused on giving back to the community through food banking and clothes drives. Though Diakonia’s original scope didn’t include language classes, the spirit of students working to improve their community continues on today. 

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The work is important, but most days in the CI office as a work-study student are wholly uninteresting. Come in, sit down, file paperwork, do homework. But at the start of every new semester, the office suddenly becomes one of the city’s great hotbeds of diversity, a rival to Jackson Heights or the Lower East Side. With so few staff at hand, it suddenly falls to the students to help process the overwhelming number of students who want a chance to learn from Columbia, just like those processing them. 

I don’t speak Spanish, but I’ve picked up a few words from processing students: Tienes un ID? Sí, claro. Enough to scrap and claw my way through the conversations I have three or four times a shift. I don’t speak Ukrainian either, but I can say Привіт. Ms. Georgia constantly translates our paperwork into as many languages as she can think of: Turkish, Indonesian, Fulani. But there’s one word in every language that gets brought up more than any other—waitlist, lista de espera, liste d’attente. Like with any organization providing aid, CI’s number one problem is its inability to help everyone who needs it. Many potential students commit themselves to waiting six months or more for the opportunity to take Community Impact’s classes. 

As university students, it can be easy to forget how many opportunities even the most basic education can open up. The people coming to Community Impact’s office looking for help with English or access to and classes for the GED are often some of the city’s hardest workers. They’re coming to the office after or before long shifts. They’re leaving their children to come to class, for the sake of creating a better life for them. They’re immigrants and the displaced, starting from scratch in a foreign place. I’ve met Ukrainians searching for a life away from the war in their home country, first-generation immigrants of every stripe, and local New Yorkers fighting to improve their lives. It’s cliché, but it’s impossible for me not to think of Emma Lazarus’ words: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

No good deed goes unpunished, and it isn’t always easy for Community Impact to complete its mission. The organization gets no funding from the university and relies on grants from state and federal governments that have become increasingly uncertain over the past six months. Columbia’s locked gates and a sudden decrease in available classroom space  have also troubled the program. But whether it’s in local middle schools, Manhattanville, or the Community Impact office itself, every day students and organizers come together to ensure these classes continue.