Hey You,
I’m happy to see you made it here; I hope this finds you well. My name is Gaven Green-Perez ’24 and I have served on FLI Council since my freshman year at Swarthmore College in 2019. It has been a long journey. If you are anything like me, Swarthmore College was not made for us and many of the people there are not like us. I spent five years trying to understand that and I am not sure I ever really did. I always expected orange juice from the water fountain.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Swarthmore College does not matter. The people do. Maybe not all of the people admittedly, but our community matters. Our friends matter. Our mentors, parents, staff, and even our acquaintances all matter. Remember that, because if you want to change Swarthmore College for the better you’re going to need them.
Now, I hope you’ll take the time to consider all of this carefully. My wish is that you will use any or all of it to build broad coalitions and make the changes to Swarthmore College that I never could. We can no longer afford to not center intersectionality, cooperation, and compassion.
Good luck,
Gaven
To the First-generation, Low Income Swarthmore College Class of 2024:
It is impossible to write a funny, thought-provoking, highly entertaining final send off. So, I didn’t. I wrote whatever this ends up being. I know that I am not even a true class of 2024, but I want to start by saying thank you, first and foremost, for existing on this campus, often being my one source of sanity, and recognizing the value of a community like ours. While I did not share with y’all one of the toughest freshman years a class could face, we were all thrown ‘unprecedented’ challenge after unprecedented challenge and stay standing today.
The truth is that even if we weren’t in the unprecedented eras of unprecedented eras, Swarthmore College was not made for us and throughout its long history has not been reformed for us either. Therefore, I hope you can trust that our struggle is not only united, but also makes up the composition of the universal FLI, ivory tower student struggle. In this time I am drawn to quote James Baldwin, as usual:
“Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bull-whips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except in so far as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and in so far as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; in so far as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”
We are not the first FLI cohort to survive this institution and we will not be the last. BUT, we survived. Many of us are the first in our families to receive a degree, many of us never existed in a place of privilege equivalent to Swarthmore College and here we are all the same: graduating. I have never felt more at home or honored than when I have served my FLI community. We should be thankful and feel privileged to be able to say “we made it” and “goodbye” because so many never get to say it to those that matter the most. Therefore, and finally, I will wrap up my speech by saying “goodbye to the First-generation, low income Swarthmore College class of 2024. WE MADE IT!”