use tab and shift-tab to navigate once expanded

History, Government & Politics

Asian American Students in Action (AASiA)

Student Leaders: Frances Leung (fl5) & Sunny Hu (sh16)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Aly Corey

Asian American Students in Action (AASiA) is a political student organization independent of existing Asian cultural organizations at Williams College and was created to foster and execute political action among Asian and Asian American students. This organization implements a structure in which Asian and Asian American students form project-based committees (PBC) for community building and political change. AASiA seeks to build a politicized pan-Asian community to organize around community and institutional change.

Berkshire Immigrant Center

The mission of the Berkshire Immigrant Center is to advocate for the rights of all immigrants by helping them navigate the complex U.S. immigration system with affordable legal services, local resources, and education.

Berkshire Immigrant Center provides its clients with tools to help them overcome financial and cultural barriers, with the goals of strengthening civic engagement and creating equal opportunity for all. Berkshire Immigrant Center supports changes to systems which are unjust to immigrants, and supports state and national immigration advocacy efforts.

The Center assists more than 700 individuals annually from more than 60 countries in several languages. Our Case Workers are accredited by the Department of Justice to represent clients with the US Citizen and Immigration Services and give legal advice to those seeking immigration benefits in the US and education on civil rights.

67 East Street
Pittsfield, MA 01201
413-445-4881
www.berkshireic.org
[email protected]

Berkshire Translation Project

Student Leader: Chen Chen Huang (ch15) & Catherine Chen (cc22)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Luana Maroja

The Berkshire Translation Project seeks to provide a free translation service of simple documents (mostly of legal nature) for the immigrant community, in order to lower the financial barriers to immigration. However, with translation also comes community, connection, and responsibility. Therefore, the translation project will also provide opportunity for students of various cultural and linguistic backgrounds to use their abilities to help the immigrant community, while practicing and improving their language skills, and learning about the immigration system of the United States.

Black Student Union

Student Leaders: Isha Kamara (ik4) & Shannon Billups (smb12)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Bilal Ansari

The Williams Black Student Union shall provide a local mechanism through which Black-identifying and allied students can find academic, emotional, and social support by providing: 1) a forum in which all students can articulate concerns regarding not only the curriculum and the general administration of the College, but also concerns regarding specific events and issues. 2) A network beyond Williams that will enable Black students/students of African ancestry to achieve in the classroom, professionally and socially. 3) Funds and a space for academic, cultural, political and social events relevant to the Black Diaspora and African ancestry at Williams.

Bread and Roses

This group is currently inactive.

Student Leaders: Wylie Thornquist
Faculty/Staff Adviser: Shanti Singham
Meeting Time/Place: Wednesdays in Environmental Center

Bread and Roses is a student organization interested in bringing discussions of labor rights and organizing to campus, by engaging with existing labor movements in the Berkshire area and learning about labor history more broadly. We organize talks with local unions, and try to facilitate student participation and support for worker’s rights. Our group also holds discussions for students to learn about and discuss left politics, theory, and action more broadly.

Circle of Women

Student Leaders: Jaeeun Lee (jl35) & Jennifer Sarmiento (jrs14)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Kris Hoey

Circle of Women (CoW) is a national nonprofit organization–run completely by students–that provides the necessary resources to girls around the world who are pursuing an education. As such, our focus is primarily abroad. We partner up with local groups to implement construction projects and fundraise to make such projects possible.

Website

CLiA Community Outreach Summer Fellowship

This paid summer program trains a small team of Williams students to help build better community service and experiential learning opportunities at Williams.  The selected rising Sophomores and Juniors are initially oriented to the Berkshires and trained in key skill areas before spending the balance of their time immersed and leading others in community engagement work.  This 8-week, 35-hour/week position reports to the CLiA Director.

Additional Information & Application:

learning-in-action.williams.edu/opportunities/community-outreach-summer-fellowship

 

Coalition for Immigrant Student Advancement

Student Leaders: Abed Togas (art6) & Estefany Lopez-Velazquez (el11)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: D. Clinton Williams

CISA aims to achieve administrative progress and create a campus consciousness around immigrant issues. We hope to improve college policies to better address the needs of immigrant and mixed-status family students. We also want to foster a richer campus dialogue and give a voice to these stories.

Darfur Cookie Project

This group is currently inactive.

Student Leaders: Isabel Abraham ([email protected]), Todd Hall ([email protected])
Faculty/Staff Adviser: Tendai Muparutsa ([email protected])
Meeting Time/Place: Once per month, Paresky

This project is an attempt to bake and sell 400,000 cookies. We bake and sell cookies to raise money for the Jewish World Watch Solar Cooker Project. The Solar Cooker Project provides solar powered stoves for refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan, who are in camps in Chad. We also hope that our project will help people understand the enormity of genocide.

Divest Williams

This group is currently inactive.

Student Leaders: Isabelle Furman ([email protected])
Faculty/Staff Adviser: Shanti Singham
Meeting Time/Place: Wednesdays 9 PM in Zilkha Center

Divest Williams seeks to build and foster a movement around divestment of the college’s endowment from fossil fuels; in this work, we aim also to undermine the entire extractive economy. Through this work, we strive to educate the community and challenge people to think more deeply about both their own and Williams’s place in social movements. We hope to develop a deeper understanding of systems of power and oppression and the points at which these systems are vulnerable. We understand the fight for climate justice to be inextricably linked to the fight for racial justice, economic justice, LGBTQIA justice; to the fight to end colonialism and imperialism and dismantle the patriarchy; to end ableism, transphobia, heterosexism, and all other forms of oppression. Therefore Divest Williams stands with all other groups fighting for social justice and climate justice on campus and beyond.

Website

Education Outreach

For 20+ years, Williams has partnered with our local educators to create hands-on programming that serve the needs of the children and their families in a host of Berkshire County schools in the areas of science, writing, mentoring, homework help and more. Currently, more than 350 students participate and serve in K-12 schools in paid and volunteer positions in Williamstown, Lanesborough, North Adams and Pittsfield. We welcome your involvement and ideas, and look forward to hearing from you! Please visit the Education Outreach section of our website for more information.

EphVotes

Student Leaders: Jesse Schumann (jhs2) & Emily Du (ewd2)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Paula Consolini

EphVotes is Williams College’s first-ever voter outreach organization. Our mission is to promote voter registration, turnout, and civic engagement on campus. By bringing together students, faculty, and staff in a nonpartisan manner, EphVotes hopes to increase campus registration and voting rates and make it as easy as possible for every Eph to vote. Whether someone is an experienced community organizer or new to the concept, we welcome everyone into our big tent.

Feminist Collective

Student Leaders: Arielle Nathan (adn1) & Brianna Nelson (bmn1)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Molly Magavern

FemCo focuses on providing a safe space for folx with marginalized genders/identities to foster community and facilitate activism. This involves hosting activities, speakers, and workshops that are created with the intention to empower individuals and destabilize current structures of power.

Grassroots Advocacy and Labor Alliance

Student Leaders: Levi Hughes (nmh3) & Zephie Gollin (zcg1)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Jean Grant

The purpose of GALA is to create student engagement in matters concerning, labor, class, and unions under a nonpartisan affiliation. One of the central goals of GALA is to educate students on how to unionize, protect themselves from exploitation in the workplace via policy and resources, and organize not only themselves but also their local communities in the common interests of workers. Since local communities strengthen unions and unions help to energize communities in a mutually beneficial relationship, GALA hopes to generate student involvement in the local community to help revitalize parts of the labor movement through understanding how communities may be impacted by matters concerning, employment, labor, and workplace discrimination.

Hoosic River Revival Summer Internship

The Hoosic River Revival (HRR) is looking for students to conduct research and assist with public programs, and help produce a short film.  The HRR is a community-based, nonprofit organization with a mission to reconnect the North Adams community to a clean, beautiful, and safe Hoosic River and to enhance the river’s recreational, cultural and economic vitality. For complete details, visit learning-in-action.williams.edu/opportunities/hoosic-river-revival-summer-internship/.

Kinetic

This group is currently inactive.

Student Leaders: Zachary Brand
Faculty/Staff Adviser: Jessica Bernheim

The purpose of Kinetic is to cultivate a social innovation incubator committed to designing and implementing creative, non-political, sustainable, scalable solutions to pressing social issues in the Berkshire region. Kinetic teams, which are comprised of 4-8 Kinetic members, work on a particular issue in three distinct phases: research, design, and implementation. Kinetic members work to understand the entire landscape of an issue and to discover gaps where they can intervene and create systemic change.

Kinetic Website

Rules Change Project

The Rules Change Project is an initiative to support action ideas for capitalism and the common good.  America is not working for all of us. The Rules Change Project is an open coalition to spotlight, amplify and educate the public about existing efforts to foster economic “rules change.” It is an informal, non-partisan collaboration of individuals and independent groups seeking to help launch a national conversation about how we govern, regulate, manage and interact with corporations, about their relationship with government, and with their stakeholders — employees, customers, communities, the environment — in addition to stockholders.

Additional Information & Current Opportunities:

learning-in-action.williams.edu/opportunities/rules-change-project

Sentinels Summer Public Policy Research Fellowship

This U.S. public policy research program supports student research projects focused on contemporary issues in U.S. economic, social, and/or environmental policy, including but not limited to community and regional development, regulation, inequality, and/or processes and powers of the American Government at any level.  Sentinels Fellows are awarded research funding based primarily upon their written project proposal.

Additional Information & Application:

https://learning-in-action.williams.edu/opportunities/sentinels-summer-research-fellowship/

Sisterhood

Student Leaders: Shiara Pyrrhus (sp23) & Cheyenne Willis (ccw5)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Toya Camacho

The purpose of Sisterhood is to empower its members by instilling a sense of camaraderie amongst Black women and by supporting Black women as they navigate the world as a double minority. A primary goal of the organization is to instill a sense of unity and community amongst Black women and to equip Black women with professional development tools. Sisterhood aims to provide Black women with a solid platform to discuss and address issues that are often both undetected and overlooked. Sisterhood embodies leading with love.

Student Veterans Association

This group is inactive as of the 2022-23 academic year.

Student Leaders: Brandon Hashemi (bah4) & Joseph Grillo (jag20)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Tamanika Steward

The purposes of the Student Veterans Association (SVA) are thus:

  • Provide academic and professional outreach for prospective and current student veterans.
  • Connect members with on-campus resources, generate awareness of veterans on campus, develop a supportive community, and serve as a voice for veterans on campus.
  • Serve as a resource for non-veteran students and the community at large for those who are interested in pursuing military service.
  • It is also the purpose of this organization to abide by the Code of Student Conduct and to uphold the educational mission of Williams College.

Students for Education Reform

This group is currently inactive.

Student Leader: Cooper Bramble
Faculty/Staff Adviser: Shawna Patterson-Stephens
Meeting Time/Place: Wednesday at 6 PM, Paresky 220

Student’s for Education Reform is an organization that is committed to improving the state of education in the United States. We advocate at the state, local, and national levels, pushing for positive legislative change and raising awareness for important educational issues. At the college, we work to increase understanding and foster discussion about education related issues by holding events, bringing in speakers, conducting school/school board visits and holding dinner meetings.

Students for Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue

Student Leaders: Sydney Pope (sgp2) & Gaby Ivanova (ggi1)
Faculty/Staff Advisors: Seth Wax & Bilal Ansari

SIPD aims to bring students together — no matter their background, ideological leanings, or perspectives — and provide opportunities and forums to share and learn more about the Israeli Palestinian conflict and occupation. We feel that there is a gap in campus conversations, so our goal is to create more open dialogue, education, and compassion within the community about the reality in Palestine and Israel. We hope to achieve this by inviting speakers from the ground and around the world, ranging from activists, artists, filmmakers, scholars, to individuals with powerful stories to share. Part of our mission is to increase education and awareness and to create spaces to practice critical skills, so a big part of our programming is hosting workshops around Palestinian and Israeli history as well as dialogue and active listening skills.

SIPD aims to combine compassion with knowledge and learning about a topic that is often simplified due to its historical and emotional complexities. We aim to extend interdisciplinary learning beyond the classroom and apply it to a global setting, emphasizing the diversity in background, education, and opinion of those on campus and in the world.

Students for Justice in Palestine

This group is inactive as of the 2022-23 academic year.

Student Leaders: Gina Al-Karablieh (gza1) & Lour Yasin (liy1)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Aseel Abulhab

This is an organization that activates for Palestinian rights and strives to spread awareness about the history of Palestine with regards to the Israeli occupation.

Williams College Democrats

Student Leader: Carlos Hernandez Tavares (ceh9) & Ollie Saleh (oas1)
Faculty/Staff Adviser: James Mahon

Our primary goal in College Dems is to mobilize Williams students to help elect Democrats and liberals at the local, state, and national level. We will also partner with local organizations to help further liberal goals through community volunteering, and will work with other college groups and the college itself to better the Williams community through advocacy. Finally, we hope to provide Williams students with the connections and experience needed to pursue a fulfilling future in public service, community organizing, non-profit work, and other enterprises revolving around government, community, and advocacy.

Williams College Firefighters’ Association

Student Leaders: William Titus (wlt1) & Grant Gattuso (gmg6)
Faculty/Staff Advisors: Rick Daniels & Robert Briggs

The goal of our organization is to support the William’s students who are members of the Williamstown Fire District. This includes supporting emergency operations and community outreach efforts; provide members with the resources, training, and support to safely and effectively execute their duties as Firefighters and First Responders; and foster a sense of camaraderie and community among the members.

Williams Empower Through Health

Student Leaders: Nina van der Velde (ncv1) & Rebecca Kim (rdk3)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Kiaran Honderich

Williams ETH seeks to pioneer the fight against the global mental health crisis by supporting the organization who provides psychiatric medical care and reforming social norms regarding mental illness in the Busoga region of Uganda. Through partnerships with the community, we hope to create long-term, sustainable improvements regarding treatment for those suffering from psychosis, among other mental illnesses. In addition to empowering and expanding health education locally, we aim to involve the Williams community through creating interdisciplinary dialogue surrounding global health inequities with a primary focus on mental health. Ultimately, our work to provide scientifically-based education and treatment is rooted in the necessity to not only dispel misconceptions surrounding mental illness, but to facilitate the incorporation of mental health as an essential aspect of universal health.

Williams Law Society

Student Leaders: Tim Kelly (tjk6) & Aishvarya Bedi (ab33)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Anthony Pernell-McGee

The Law Society brings together Williams students who have a common interest in law along with alumni, faculty, and professionals in fields relating to law through programs and activities dealing with or related to the field of law. It also promotes understanding of the legal profession, the rule of law, and the legal process while also identifying and discussing the bias and contemporary problems in our legal and justice system.

Williams Political Forum

Student Leaders: Davey Morse ([email protected])
Faculty/Staff Adviser: TBD

The Williams Forum provides the primary platform for open political discourse in the College. The Forum hosts student-led debates and forums with political leaders, and its member pursue select political initiatives. The Forum is guided by deep mutual respect, appreciation of disagreement, and a drive to improve society.

Williams Refugee Advancement Coalition

This group is inactive as of the 2022-23 academic year.

Student Leaders: Kazi Raleh (kfr1) & Jonathan Breibart (jsb8)
Faculty/Staff Advisor: Colin Ovitsky (cmo2)

The Williams Refugee Advancement Coalition seeks to assist in the advancement of refugees and evacuees coming into Berkshire County. Currently, we are collaborating with the Center for Learning in Action, Jewish Family Service, and other local organizations to mobilize structural assistance and create a welcoming environment for 60 Afghan evacuees who are in the process of being relocated to Pittsfield, MA. As the resettlement process further develops, we expect to be providing a diverse array of services that could make a tangible difference in their new lives and we would love your help!

Williamstown Historical Museum

The Williamstown House of Local History was founded in 1941 to promote knowledge of the town’s history by collecting and preserving materials, mounting exhibitions, presenting educational programs and facilitating research. Its goal is to document the diverse people and buildings, the associations and institutions, the businesses and events which form the town’s history from the earliest days to the present time. The collection includes photographs, documents and artifacts from the 1700s to the present day as well as published material on the town and genealogical material on local families.

If you’re interested in history, the Williamstown Historical Museum is the place for you!  We are a museum and research center that maintains a collection of photos, artifacts and documents that relate to Williamstown’s past. We work to increase the public’s knowledge of Williamstown’s past in a variety of ways including educational exhibits, programs, events, research and publications.

We have numerous volunteer opportunities available. Our goal is to help you to use your talents and interests in a way that allows our organization to maintain a diverse collection of photos, artifacts, documents and manuscripts, and use our materials to educate the public about the town.  As a volunteer you are a valued member of our team and you will develop a greater connection to the community around you as your understanding of our local history grows. All of our volunteers will receive training and a manual to assist you with your work.

To learn more about our organization please visit our museum, visit our website or give Sarah or Nancy at the WHM a call:

32 New Ashford Road
Williamstown, MA
413-458-2160
www.williamstownhistoricalmuseum.org
[email protected]
Contact: Sarah Currie ([email protected]), Director