Sociology class fights child poverty

Michael Sholars
Features & Opinions Editor
In order to get a solid grade in his fourth-year sociology class, John Montuno needs to make a difference in his community.
It’s an unconventional project, and Montuno’s class has been working together since September to pull it off. Their professor, Peter Dawson, is no stranger to inspiring his students to think beyond the classroom. During last year’s summer term, his class raised over 9,000 pounds of food for the North York Harvest Food Bank. This year, the students of his Social Organization and Urban Culture class began to plan their group project early on.
“We started talking about it, actually, in the second week of class,” recalled Montuno. “[Dawson] was like, ‘We’re going to embark on this amazing project and it’s gonna touch your lives.’”
Apparently, he wasn’t kidding; the year-long project had the entire class working together to reach a shared goal, and Montuno said it created a level of camaraderie he wasn’t used to.
“In all my courses, in all four years here, this is the only class where I know everyone by name, which I think is fantastic,” he says. Montuno went on to explain some techniques Dawson used to break the ice between his students, like numbering them off each week and making them sit in groups to discuss the week’s readings.
Montuno said his prof calls this teaching style “experiential learning.” “He’s a big advocate for changing the status quo as far as teaching – he says it sticks more if you do things based on
experiences.”
Montuno agrees. The experience was “touching,” he smiled, beaming, recalling visiting food banks and talking to different people down there. “I guess I’ve been some sort of an advocate for it,” he said.
Despite his personal level of advocacy, Montuno was quick to point out that this is a group effort, with no designated leader. The genesis for their project came during the fall semester, when they all worked together with Dawson to examine projects that his previous classes had taken on. While past movements had focused on larger world issues of poverty, the class opted to focus on a local scale.
Montuno used York itself as an example. Many students were surprised to learn that the university has a food bank that is regularly used by students in need. “It blew minds,” he said . “People were like ‘Hunger? Are you talking about Africa or China?’ I’m like, ‘Toronto. In your school.’”
Through group discussion during their Thursday morning lesson, the class came to the conclusion many people are “desensitized to the situation,” as Montuno put it. “They think [hunger’s] off in this faraway place, wherein the problem’s here,” he said. “It’s great that a lot of people say ‘Hey, let’s help out other countries,’ but the problem’s here at home.”
The focal point of the class project revolves around the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a document that Canada signed in 1990 and ratified in 1991. According to the document, “state parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.” Canada, having signed the document and added itself to the list of state parties, agreed to uphold these standards for children.
According to United Way Toronto, “50 percent of Ontario’s children in poverty now live in the GTA.” The Canadian Association of Food Banks provides a similar fact, noting that in 2006, out of 753,458 monthly Canadian food bank users, 41 percent are children. The statistic is startling, and it highlights the group’s reason for focusing on a local issue.
The class split itself into three committees: education, food drive and petition. Montuno, who hopes to pursue teaching post graduation, is part of the education committee. The education team has been working with students at local C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, informing them about the child poverty situation in Toronto and what they can do to help. This relationship will culminate with around 70 grade 10 and 11 students from the school visiting the York University Keele campus on March 24. The all-day event will include guest speakers, a customized lecture for the visiting students and a tour of the York campus.
However, youth outreach is only a third of the class’ focus.  The food bank group has been gathering food items all March, and a final count will be made near the end of the semester. The petition group is gathering signatures to convince parliament to honour the commitments they agreed to with the Convention Rights of the Child document. Of the 2,000 signatures the group has gathered over a two-week period, Montuno estimates that only 1,700 of them are usable.
For a petition sheet to be officially recognized by a governing body, it must be clean and unmarked. If there are any crossed out or fake names in a single entry, the whole page is void. “We had some people who didn’t take the petition very seriously,” Montuno explained.
“[We encountered] a group of friends, and they were like ‘Yeah! We’ll sign it!’ Later, when we were checking our numbers, people had written ‘loser’ and ‘fag’ on the sheet – it’s very disheartening. Of our 2,000 I think we have around 300 we can’t count because there was [invalid] stuff written on our sheets.”
Expanding on this theme, Montuno has found that the biggest challenge facing his class is simply breaking through the apathy that can often grip students. He said that various classmates have found different strategies to make people care, but that it ultimately comes down to making a personal connection with someone when you can, even if it’s a one-in-one-hundred occurrence, and working from there.
“There’s so much rejection…[but] there is hope, you’ve just gotta find it. You’ve gotta build off that spark, and make it shine.”