Since last spring, the Multi-cultural Resource Center has hired four new community coordinators whose jobs are to highlight and address current issues of diversity in the Oberlin community. The overall mission of the MRC, as described by its director, Eric Estes, is “to serve as a resource for students traditionally disenfranchised from higher education.” 

Courtney Patterson was hired as the Africana Community Coordinator. She has a degree in African American studies from the University of Pennsylvania but until recently had been teaching secondary mathematics with Teach For America in Philadelphia. She considers the MRC “a wonderful space that challenges people, including myself, to think on higher levels in order to catalyze and implement change in society.”

She hopes that the work she does here will help Oberlin students make the best of their college careers. As for her work in the African American community this year, Patterson will help organize annual events such as theater projects and general education about the history of the black community at Oberlin.

Rashne Limki ’05 OC was hired as the Asian/Pacific American Community Coordinator. She attributes her desire to work for the MRC to the chance she had as a student to work closely with the A/PA Community, as well as other communities through the MRC.

She went on to say that “working at the MRC offered me the opportunity to work with the people I love and trust and to support current students in their own activism while continuing to work on issues that I was invested in as a student.”

Her primary goal as new coordinator is to increase the sense of community by working more closely with new students so that they can find their own spaces and voices within the community and work toward stronger and more comfortable relationships between students, faculty and staff. Limki also hopes that she can help bring various communities together in a collaborative partnership to address issues of awareness and education such as ethnicity, disability, race, class, gender, sexuality and religion.

Tamara Serrano was hired as the Latino/Latina Community Coordinator. She graduated from Colgate University in 2003 and worked for its multicultural affairs and women’s studies departments for two years. She came to Oberlin for a number of reasons. She was fascinated, for instance, by the MRC’s mission to engage in conversations about intersectionality.

She is looking forward to her work on My Name is My Own as well as the Indigenous Women’s Series, two signature programs of the MRC that allow the discussion and contemplation of identity politics.

Serrano is also excited to work with Oberlin students, whom she describes as people who “[find] any way possible to have meaningful conversations and develop strategies for change,” and are capable of “talking the talk and walking the walk.”

This year Serrano is working to organize Oberlin’s 2005-2006 Latino/a Heritage Month, which showcases Latino/a research, performance efforts and films.

Finally, Andrea Stokes was hired as the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Coordinator. She was unavailable for comment.

“Each coordinator brings an amazing track record of both academic knowledge and social justice activism to Oberlin College,” enthused Estes.

Serrano echoed this very optimism.

“We bounce ideas off one another, support each other’s programming [and] develop collaborations across community,” she said. “Quite importantly, [we] help each other maintain our sanity. I knew I would be coming into the MRC to be challenged, engaged and supported.”