Civic Digest Letter from the Board

To Columbia Civic Digest Readers, F&C students, TAs, Dr. Lee, and Dr. Lowe:

It has been an honor to have been given the chance to be a part of the F&C community.

When we first started the program the summer before our senior years, we would have never anticipated how much we would end up cherishing the time spent together as a cohort. From groggy eight AM breakfasts in Lerner, to heated debates in class seminars, to evening conversations in the dorms with our TAs and our fellow peers, F&C will be an experience that will stick with us for the rest of our lives.

We started this newsletter to document the F&C experience, not only so we can look back at everything we’ve accomplished, but as encouragement to future F&C cohorts and truly anyone who wants to make the world a better place. We want this newsletter to inspire you to take initiative and to understand that anyone can make a difference, no matter how big or small. We hope that when our time as F&C students comes to a close, this newsletter will live on.

As citizens, as students, and as people, we have learned about the value our voices have in igniting change in the political and philosophical world we all live in. We didn’t learn about this exclusively in the classrooms—we also learned this from our TAs, our peers, Dr. Lee, and Dr. Lowe. With many of us coming from minority and low-income backgrounds, it has been empowering to have all of these people make it possible for us to step foot into an institution of academia and be told that our voice matters. We would like to especially thank Fernanda, Phoebe, and Dr. Lee for helping this newsletter come to life.

We can’t wait for everyone’s civic leadership project to be completed so we can see just how impactful our voices can be in the diverse communities we are a part of.

Best, 

‘23-’24 Editorial Board <33

“From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” 

—Frederick Douglass