KCC Reads 2008-2009

           KCC Reads was initiated at a meeting of the Kingsborough Faculty Assembly in the Spring of 2001. Like cities and colleges across the country, we wanted to use the common reading of a book to create community and bring all constituencies of our college together to read, discuss and talk about a book we have all enjoyed. From year to year, participation grew and so did the programs we offered around our common reading. Not only do we invite the author to address the college at large, we have created a number of college wide panels and programs open to the entire Kingsborough community. That includes a a web site, print and online journal, yearly art exhibit, an Interdisciplinary Panel, college-wide Round Table Discussions and more (click on Events).   In 2005 Peter Cohen expanded KCC Reads to include Freshman Year Initiative. In 2006 Associate Provost Reza Fakhari created a partnering of KCC Reads / Common Reading that involves all incoming Freshmen in our book selection and programs.
            Always the highlight of our activities is the visit of the author to our campus when this is possible. Most recently Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review and author of We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, addressed the Kingsborough Community. In the years before, Miles Corwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danitcat and James McBride joined us.
            One of the interesting and innovative features of KCC Reads is our online book selection process that allows an entire community to participate in book nominations and selection. The process includes two Open Meetings to which all members of the college community are invited as well as a reading group that meets during our winter module for intensive reading and discussion of the four books that make up our “short list” of nominations.
            This year’s selection is Unbowed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. The book is a stunning memoir of Maathai’s journey from rural Kenya, to Kansas, where a college education was made possible by the Kennedy Foundation; and from the completion of a Ph.D. back in Kenya at the University College of Nairobi (she was the first woman to earn a PH.D. in all of Eastern and Central Africa to a career of teaching and then, activism. Her studies and awareness of the way environmental policy was robbing the poorest of their ability to sustain life itself, led to the creation of the Greenbelt movement, the planting of at least thirty million trees, and to the creation of eighty thousand jobs for the poorest women of Kenya. It led to confrontations with forces in and out of the government responsible for the rapid degradation of the Kenya’s environment that took place in the few years between Maathai’s Kenyan girlhood and her return to Kenya in 1966.   And ultimately, it led to change in environmental policy as well as in governance. Maathai’s story clarifies the connections between poverty, the environment, gender equality, good governance and democracy.

            On the last pages of her book, Dr. Maathai writes:

What I have learned over the years is that we must be patient, persistent, and committed. When we are planting trees sometimes people will say to me, “I don’t want to plant this tree, because it will not grow fast enough.” I have to keep reminding them that the trees they are cutting today were not planted by them, but by those who came before. So they must plant the trees that will benefit communities in the futures. I remind them that like a seedling, with sun, good soil, and abundant rain, the roots of our future will bury themselves in the ground and a canopy of hope will reach into the sky.

The story of Wangari Maathai is the story of a woman who made a difference.