PACE_CENTER

Breakout Princeton trips are open to all freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

Trip leader applications and trip proposals for Spring 2010 are now being accepted.

Trip descriptions for fall 2009 begin below.

Breakout Princeton Civic Action Trips are week-long opportunities to learn about and take action on important public issues with a group of your peers, preceded by a series of related (and required!) sessions to prepare you for the trip. Afterwards there will be at least one required wrap-up session for participants to share what they've learned and accomplished, and to discuss ways to stay involved.

Each trip is developed and organized by students, for students. This past Spring Break Breakout sent four groups of students on amazing trips to various locations (see trip descriptions and links below). Building on the success and popularity of the Spring Break trips, Breakout is now planning a series of Fall Break trips.

Fall 2009 Trip Descriptions

The United States contains only 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s incarcerated population. That translates to 2.3 million Americans currently incarcerated. China has the next- highest rate, with 1.5 million incarcerated citizens, while having four times the population of the United States.

On this Breakout trip participants will travel to New York City and urban areas in New Jersey to learn about the criminal justice system. Many of the activities and discussions will focus the difficulties of reintegrating newly released inmates into society and the role communities play in the functioning of the criminal justice system. Activities include touring a prison, meeting with a parole officer, and having a roundtable discussion with a group of inmates about prison education programs. 

Additionally, participants will be working with Integrity House and Safe Surrender in Newark and the Midtown Community Court and Bronx Defenders in New York.

On May 4, 2007, a Category 5 tornado leveled rural Greensburg, Kans., leaving the roughly 1500 residents with almost no remnants of their former homes and lives. Since then, Greensburg, located about a hundred miles west of Wichita, has made a commitment to become the first community in the world to rebuild in a completely green, environmentally sustainable manner, ultimately aiming to achieve a LEED-platinum rating on all new construction.

Traveling to Greensburg for the whole week, this Breakout trip will tackle environmental design from a number of different angles, dealing with questions about the engineering of green design as well as the social pressures associated with the magnitude of the commitment. By working on a green build with Greensburg GreenTown, participants will be able to get a first-hand account of the intricacies of energy-efficient construction. In Greensburg community centers, like the 5.4.7 Arts Center, we will also have the opportunity to talk to citizens whose lives have been completely upended since 2007.

A tremendous amount of media attention has been focused on Greensburg since the tornado, including an entire TV show, and the trip will also explore questions about the media’s role is in facilitating, or enabling, the city’s efforts. To connect the Greensburg experience to daily Princeton life, this trip will include a pre-trip day trip to Green Home Brooklyn and campus tour of Princeton’s green design initiatives, as well as a post-trip green rehabilitation volunteer experience with Isles in Trenton.

Deafness is not thought of as a disability by those in the Deaf (deaf with a capital D) community—a vital minority that shares a language, history, and pride. American Sign Language, or ASL, is often the focus of this pride among those who consider themselves a part of Deaf culture, giving its users not only communication. In Washington D.C., Gallaudet University bases itself around this premise—that the deaf can find a quality of life similar or better to that of the hearing through ASL and Deaf culture.

In Washington D.C., from Nov.2–6, we will visit Gallaudet University and interact with student groups on campus, attend lectures, and talk with professors. In particular we will focus on Gallaudet’s deaf studies and education departments, especially in terms of the achievement gap.

This trip will also look at other approaches to Deaf education. We will be tutoring kids at a private school that promotes mainstreaming and speech therapy, and visiting advocacy groups that promote various ways of life for the deaf. We will learn about cochlear implants at a local hospital and talk with the Department of Education about their policies toward deaf education.

This trip will immerse itself in a unique minority—the Deaf in the United States—while also exploring all the outside factors that affect this minority.

No ASL knowledge is necessary for this trip. We will have interpreters at all necessary events, although we will also be learning American Sign Language starting before the trip and continuing throughout. 

A certain fear, a fear that borders on aversion, exists in our society. It is a fear of the mentally ill and their illnesses, of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. The media propagates this fear; movies and television shows thrive on the violent behavior of the mentally ill, exaggerating their symptoms, transforming them into villains, stigmatizing them. The stigma associated with mental illness in our society has made life incredibly difficult for patients with psychiatric disorders; treatment facilities receive insufficient funding, and many employers aren't tolerant of the patients' conditions.

This stigma, though, can be understood and subsequently dispelled, ameliorating the quality of life and prospects for recovery of patients with mental illness.

We will be attempting to understand this stigma on a trip to New York City. The trip will begin on Sunday, Nov. 1, and conclude on Friday, Nov. 6. We will meet with various organizations and specialists to better understand the relationships between homelessness, substance abuse, crime, and mental illness. In addition, we will have the opportunity to visit an art exhibit of works created by mental health patients and to watch a presentation of patients' experiences in facing their illnesses.

The Pine Ridge community, capital of the Oglala Sioux Nation and the home of many Oglala Lakota and site of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, hosts a rich history and vibrant plains culture but a myriad of economic, political, social, and other ills which have resulted in high levels of gang violence, drug use, and an interminable cycle of dire poverty.

Among the ills facing the Rez today are a high murder rate—between 1973 and 1976, Pine Ridge had the highest murder rate in the nation—and unemployment higher than 80%, and residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation struggle to find legal representation due to a lack of attorneys. This trip will provide substantial assistance to Dakota Plains Legal Services, a free legal clinic on the reservation, as well as interactions with members on all sides of tribal legal issues, including U.S. attorneys, representatives from indigenous social movements, current tribal legal officials, and the former tribal president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Participants will be immersed in a very different legal system, becoming acquainted with the many overlapping layers that form the complex body of tribal law, and explore the nexus of deeply rooted Lakota ideas about crime and punishment and a judicial system modeled on American courts. The trip’s focus will be the town of Pine Ridge, but during the course of the week participants will travel to many destinations within the bounds of the Oglala Sioux Nation and western South Dakota and northern Nebraska, including the Badlands and the Black Hills, a sacred site to many Lakota which is the location of a longstanding ownership dispute.

The purpose of the trip is to delve deeply into the place of law on the Reservation and to serve the people of Pine Ridge, but also to submerge Princeton students in a place wholly different from the University community. Individuals who wish to participate in this trip should be prepared to step onto the Oglala Sioux Nation with open minds about complicated issues and a genuine desire to address the legal needs of reservation residents and the unique challenges of tribal law. Applicants with specific interest in the rights of indigenous peoples, tribal sovereignty, contemporary and historical issues facing Indian Country, or criminal justice are encouraged to apply, but candidates from all backgrounds are more than welcome on this trip. Diversity of interests and perspectives is vital to the intellectual foundation of this trip.

This trip will explore how music can be used as an “instrument” for civic engagement (no pun intended!), with an emphasis on the role of community music organizations in building social capital. Our main goal will be to broaden the work of music outreach beyond senior care facilities (such as giving free weekend concerts at nursing homes) and to explore music-oriented projects involving young people and schools in low-income communities.

We also hope to learn more about the role of civic arts groups in promoting public goods, starting with the observation that virtually every major American “big city” is home to a symphony orchestra or community arts franchise of some kind. This indicates that music has indeed become an integral part of enabling American communities to realize their full potential through the development of social capital.

We will team up with community partners such as the Philadelphia Orchestra (one of America’s top-tier symphony orchestras) and the Curtis Institute of Music (Philadelphia’s world-renowned music conservatory).

In a recent speech, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cited the following statistics: 27% of America's youth drop out of high school. 17-year-olds today are performing at the exact same levels in math and reading as they were in the early 1970s. Just 40% of young adults earn a two-year or four-year college degree. How can current university students inspire American teens to graduate from high school and attend college?

The College Awareness trip is a partnership between the Pace Center and ReachOut56 that will send fifteen students to learn about the minority achievement gap and education reform in New York City. In addition to meeting with educators, policymakers, and students in several New York schools, the Breakout group will also provide college guidance counseling to high school students in two schools in Brooklyn (Paul Robeson High School and the Academy of Innovative Technology) as part of the ReachOut56 College Awareness program. Trip participants will have the opportunity to do curriculum and lesson planning in partnership with the teachers at each school, where they will spend their mornings working directly with students both in large groups and one on one. Afternoon and evening activities may include visits to high-performing charter schools, a discussion session with a prominent education reformer, and education policy seminars or workshops.

Before the trip, Princeton students will host students from one of the participating high schools on campus for a day of touring and college planning. Other orientation events will include workshops on lesson planning and classroom management, as well as a short "crash course" on education reform and the achievement gap.

Prior teaching or tutoring experience is not necessary; applicants must only have a commitment to closing the achievement gap and the belief that all children can succeed.