What’s your story?: Brittany Atchison ’10

Brittany Atchison is trying to save the world.

Listening to this energetic Randolph High School graduate leaves one with the impression that her goals are awfully lofty for someone who hasn’t quite graduated from college. She talks readily about working with others to make collective changes, about the injustices of position and privilege, about racism and the power of language, and helping the forgotten sections of society.

Think Paul Wellstone if he was a senior woman at Cornell College in Iowa. But with a fuller schedule.

Atchison’s aptitude for humanitarianism started early, just after she graduated from high school. During the summer she traveled, by herself, to Honduras for five weeks, teaching English and volunteering at a number of locations. The trip, she said, was eye opening.

“I was pretty naïve. I didn’t understand how the world worked,” she said. “It put things in perspective and made me realize that it can be pretty easy to forget people.”

Since then, she’s spent time in internally displaced persons camps in Kenya, investigated food distribution in Bolivia with the United Nations World Food Programme, interned for  Sen. Tom Harkin in Washington, D.C., and involved herself in nearly a dozen student organizations at Cornell College. All of it, she said, in an effort to learn from and work with as many people as she can.

“I love the power of people coming together,” she said. “That excites me more than anything else.”

One such experience was through the National Coalition for the Homeless, where Atchison spent two days without food, shelter, or the means to support herself on the streets of Washington, D.C. She panhandled, slept on the streets, ate at food kitchens, and, most importantly, spoke with the homeless about what it really means to live life on the streets.

“It was a life changing experience for me,” she said. “It opened my eyes to things that I being on the outside didn’t understand”

Atchison said she still keeps her panhandling sign in her room as a daily reminder of those people who couldn’t go home after two days. It reads: “Mom died. Need food. Please help.”

When she is not volunteering at African orphanages or building bunk beds on reservations (both of which she has done) she stays busy back in Iowa keeping the issues she’s passionate about on everyone else’s radar.

At Cornell, she founded the organization STEP – Students Together Eradicating Poverty and spent three years on Student Senate, most recently as Student Body Vice President.  She’s also involved in campus Mortar Board, has been recognized for her diversity programming on campus, led voter registration efforts during the 2008 election cycle, and is a Peer Advocate for incoming student. She’s involved in so many campus activities that this article could be just as long by simply listing her resume.

“I am trying to devote more time for hobbies,” she said, after listing off a litany of committees, activities, and leadership projects.

Her passions, she said, are driven by a love of learning and bringing people together.

“Life is bigger and there’s more to people than meets the eye. It’s the iceberg analogy. Only 10 percent is above the surface, and the rest is below,” said Atchison.

That 90 percent is key to her most recent pet project, Sustained Dialogue. Sustained Dialogue is an international conflict resolution program that supports a college network aimed at solving campus diversity issues. Atchison is the president and its lead moderator and hopes to use the program as a way to produce stimulate conversations and dialogue.

“I don’t think people talk about diversity enough,” she said. “Events don’t really change lives. They do and can, but it’s the personal conversations that really change lives.”

After graduation, Atchison plans to join Teach for America, and eventually pursue graduate studies in Public Policy, which she sees not only as a way to give back, but as an opportunity to learn more about the world and how collective change is possible.

“I’m learning all the time. I’ve never arrived and I never want to arrive. I want to learn for the rest of my life.”