Antonia Izuogu, Class of ‘21
STUDENT LEADER, RACIAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES,
Spelman College
Antonia Izuogu, a 2021 graduate, Bonner Scholar and Social Justice Fellow at Spelman College, developed the passion for ending homelessness from a unique perspective. Growing up, she and her family experienced homelessness, and this experience served as a strong motivator for her to address the issue. In her words, “. . . It's nice to reach back into my first experience, being homeless myself . . . being impoverished and what change I would like to see for others.” Antonia has been working with the Bonner Office of Civic Engagement and Social Justice Fellows Program at Spelman College. Through this placement she has been able to pursue her passion in social justice by hosting a summit to raise awareness of the struggles that people who do not have homes face.
Community service has been Antonia’s whole life, even before Bonner. Growing up homeless herself has given her a unique perspective on how she plans to fight against poverty and homelessness. She knows the impact she's making because she has first hand knowledge of what these people are going through, giving her the ability to truly listen to these people and get them the resources they need. As part of her way of giving back, Antonia wants to share her knowledge with others, and what better way to do that then to plan a summit around the issue.
When Antonia attended the second summit on Homeslessness and Poverty, she got inspired, and decided to bring the summit to Spelman College, with a focus on the African-American community and other minority groups. One of the major goals of the summit is to “bring together student-led organizations that serve people experiencing homelessness, and provide a unique opportunity for students to share best practices, and improve the quality of services they provide.” (Source: https://hopeatbrown.wixsite.com/summit). Antonia took her inspiration and made it a reality by bringing the summit to Spelman.
The Summit on “Homelessness and Poverty: Disruption” at Spelman was a three-day event hosted by Spelman College's Bonner Office of Civic Engagement and Social Justice Fellows Program. On October 2-4, 2020, the summit gathered high school students, college students, residents, and local nonprofit leaders, across the country who are working to disrupt the system of poverty.
They achieved this by following the summit’s intended outcomes, which are split into three areas.
First, is to increase awareness of and contribute to building a culture of equity within marginalized communities. This includes teaching about topics such as; gentrification, food insecurity, and recidivism.
Second, is to support communities and marginalized groups to find solutions to contentious issues. To spread awareness about Homelessness and Poverty and spread ways in which people can become change agents to solve these issues.
Third, is to strengthen local capacity to advocate by building relationships between communities, policy-makers, or funders. This summit will gather current social advocates: students, residents, and professionals.
Antonia and her team addressed how to strengthen a community’s collective efforts in order to assist homeless and low-income individuals. The summit served as a unique opportunity for various community organizations to share best practices and how to improve the quality of services they all provide. Also, the summit afforded the opportunity for student-led organizations to educate the participants on different elements of homelessness and poverty and present their service to combat such issues on an educational and hands-on level.
With the support of the Bonner Foundation’s Racial Justice Community Fund, they featured many keynote speakers from local institutions, such as Georgia Tech. A professor came to teach about gentrification and how to prevent it in Atlanta. Antonia described how one of her goals for this project was to bring people who do anti-poverty work together, and share resources. She often sees in her own community non profit organizations that work within the same sector working by themselves. “The impact could be so much greater if we all worked together,” Antonia said.
Antonia’s work paid off as over 200 people registered for the virtual event and had a fantastic turn out for the opening speaker, the author of Evicted: Poverty & Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond. The Summit facilitators also spoke on topics such as the wealth gap in Atlanta, racial disparities, creating partnerships within the community, and more. They aimed to have people learn more about homelessness and be able to use and apply what they learned from the summit to bring more awareness and support to the community.
Antonia stressed one of the main takeaways from this summit should be that while individual action matters, when communities come together to help those in need, bigger changes can be accomplished. With the help of Bonner (RJCF) Antonia’s team had the funds and support to do a community fund scholarship and a book scholarship for those who need the extra assistance.
To continue the summit's legacy in the AUCC, Antonia’s team have considered holding a smaller version of the previous summit. The one-day event would host a speaker to talk about their anti-poverty work and then have a follow-up workshop with students actively brainstorming and creating a personal or collective plan to contribute to alleviating homelessness and poverty. She is also cognizant of amplifying voices of those who are homeless themselves. She believes in “letting them tell their stories because we see a lot of stats. It's hard to put a name, to put a face to the stats.”
She hopes to pass the torch to other team members, showing them what the workload is really like and the effect it can have on a community. Antonia presented the project with Bonner Foundation staff during the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Diversity, Equity, and Student Success conference (as seen in slides agove) in March 2021, garnering interest from other campuses about participating. The project, along with others in the Racial Justice Community Fund, demonstrated how campus community engagement could be linked with racial and social justice efforts.
Antonia and her team were able to make a significant impact by offering scholarships to students that promoted their work in unimaginable ways. Antonia describes the team's biggest impact by wanting this legacy to continue and not just end now that she's graduated. Antonia describes her favorite part of the project by learning and continuing to learn about homelessness and the intersectionality of homelessness. She hopes that her team continues the legacy she built, and that the summit grows tenfold.