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For Scholz, who recently took a job as a consultant for Women’s Land Rights Africa after a year at the Geneva-based Center On Housing Rights and Evictions, it is the lack of systems altogether that make conditions difficult. That’s why, for her, smart activism is driven by the realities on the ground, not the rhetoric at the top. “It’s not just crying out loud for a cause,” Scholz said. “It is working steadily and often unseen towards a change, hand-in-hand with, not for, those wanting the change.”
It was during her time at the USF School of Law that she realized the struggle had to be waged on a human rights level, Scholz said. Working for both the International Human Rights Clinic and the Civil Law Clinic at USF, she traveled to Geneva to speak before the United Nations and lobby for women’s rights to adequate housing, and helped mediate local eviction cases in San Francisco public housing developments.
“I got into housing rights because of the fact that I have always been disturbed by the fact that homelessness exists around the world—especially disturbing in countries like the United States, where wealth abounds,” said Scholz, who has worked in nearly one dozen African countries since graduating.
From training clergy on women’s housing and land rights issues in Nigeria, and conducting a fact finding mission on the inheritance rights of women in Rwanda, to investigating housing evictions in Zambia and Zimbabwe, much of her success in raising awareness has been built at the grassroots level, Scholz said. But, that isn’t to discount the influence she and others have had advocating in front of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, as well as the Africa Commission on Human and People’s Rights, she said.
“I believe my desire (for social justice) comes from my faith and my strong belief that we are all equal,” Scholz said. “All of us are God’s children. That is, we are all born with equal rights, equal dignity, equal grace—but an inequality is created through the circumstance of where or to whom or into what situation we are born.”
For many activists, including those like Scholz and Farmer, the future of smart activism lies in pursuing results-oriented policies aimed at building and improving the efficiency of systems. Much as former President Bill Clinton’s foundation has worked in Africa and the Caribbean to cut out middle-men and create buying consortiums to bring down HIV/AIDS medication costs and speed delivery, Scholz and Farmer believe that improved systems are likely to be driven through an increasing number of partnerships between local communities, nonprofits, non-governmental agencies, and governments.
“I strongly believe that social change can come from structurally changing systems to be more socially conscious and effective, while still utilizing current resources,” Farmer said.
The evolving interdisciplinary and interagency approach to activism is also behind current efforts to expand and remake USF’s Smart Activism program. Rather than a seminar for a classroom full of students, faculty organizers envision the next model as more collaborative. The idea is to encourage better cooperation and coordination of various activism approaches across campus—including service-learning, living-learning communities, and student leadership.
“I think there are opportunities that we haven’t even imagined yet,” Ranck said.
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