OSCA uses food to improve town-gown relations

The promise of what is being called a cozy afternoon at Old Barrows this semester has Oberlin Student Cooperative Association Community Liaison senior Jonathan Curley hoping town residents and students will come together.

Hot drinks, snacks and desserts will be served, live music will provide entertainment and town residents and Oberlin students will have a chance to do something Curley believes they don't do enough of: talk.

"I'm really interested in ways the College can have better relations with the town on the whole, and OSCA's a good vehicle to do that. OSCA has a lot of good, motivated students in it," said Curley.

The afternoon will be the second of two such events this semester organized by OSCA's year-old community relations committee. The first, a Nov. 14 dinner and dessert contest, drew 30 town residents to Harkness Co-op.

Curley said the committee planned the two events so as to give community members an opportunity to see what co-ops are like and to provide co-opers and people from town with an opportunity to interact. "Originally I had more grandiose ideas of hosting events in all the co-ops, but we didn't have the time, so we decided to focus on two events," he said.

Before the Harkness event, committee members went door-to-door distributing invitations to town residents. "Knocking on people's doors was really fun," Curley said, "At first people expected us to be selling something, but then they were really pleasantly surprised to find we were doing something nice for free. I think we'll go door-to-door again."

This time they will also have publicity help from at least one town resident. Sophomore Nicolas Stahelin, also a member of the OSCA community relations committee, said that after the first event a woman who had attended went out of her way to track him down and let him know how much she and her family had enjoyed themselves. She then offered to help with future publicity.

Stahelin said the Harkness event was a definite success. "There were lots of families there," he said, "and I saw lot of town residents and students sitting together and talking."

After a co-op dinner of vegetables, tofu and bread, Dave Parsh, owner of Dave's Army-Navy store, presided as dessert-contest judge, awarding prizes to many of the 20 entries.

Curley attributes much of the November event's success to children who, excited by the prospect of a dessert contest, encouraged their parents to attend. This Sunday's event is not quite as kid-oriented. "The food will be good," He said, "but they probably won't want to just sit around and chat with the adults. So we're also going to run kids' games."

Curley also plans to have information available for town residents on opportunities and resources available to them at the College, including concerts, film series, plays, tutoring services, libraries, and Experimental College classes. "The College is such an enormous potential resource in Lorain County, an area that is really short on resources," said Stahelin,."The idea is to inform town members how they can benefit."

Next semester, the committee plans to continue the series of events. "I'd like it to become an ongoing thing for the co-ops to continually sponsor events to bring people from the town in," said Curley. He also hopes to have an event next spring, which would introduce students to opportunities in the town. "Ideally, we'd like this to be a reciprocal exchange," said Stahelin.

Curley says Oberlin's town-gown divide is partially rooted in the fact that many students come to the College from far away and, once here, rarely leave what he refers to as the "bubble" of campus. "It has to do with the way colleges are pitched to people," he said, "The attitude is sort of 'You can pick any college anywhere, and the where doesn't matter much.'"

Curley regrets this attitude. " I think that there's so much opportunity for students and town members to learn from each other; the interaction can be so positive, and it's so healthy for students to interact with people who aren't all the same age," he said.

Dessert at its finest: OSCA co-op Old Barrows will be hosting town residents and co-opers, providing food and fun. This, the second meal hosted by OSCA members, will provide the opportunity for Oberlin residents and students to talk and will hopefully begin to improve town-gown relations. (photo by Pauline Shapiro)