Grinnell Social Justice Tour
A community tour designed to pique your curiosity, help you notice connections, and potentially discover your civic place.
What can we learn about a place when we look beyond what is immediately visible and ask how it came to be the way it is? Grinnell’s Social Justice Tours invite participants to explore the community and surrounding region through the interconnected histories, systems, relationships, assets, and challenges that shape life here. Rather than presenting Grinnell simply as a collection of community needs or social justice issues, the tours encourage participants to ask questions, notice connections, and become curious about the people, places, institutions, and forces that shape our shared community.
As we travel, particular places and stories become starting points for exploring larger questions. Depending on the group and purpose of the tour, we might consider education and access, health care, housing and economic conditions, agriculture and land, libraries and civic infrastructure, the natural environment, local government, or other topics. We look for connections among things that can initially appear separate: people and institutions, history and present-day conditions, policies and individual experiences, community assets and inequities, local decisions and larger systems.
Understanding How We Got Here
The town of Grinnell and Grinnell College share a history. Both were shaped by Josiah Bushnell Grinnell and have developed in relationship with one another, the surrounding region, and much larger forces ever since. Depending on the focus of a particular tour, we draw from different moments and stories to explore that history. We might put Grinnell’s connections to abolition and the Underground Railroad in conversation with Iowa’s history of Black exclusion; consider the founding of the College within the broader history of Indigenous displacement and Meskwaki persistence and sovereignty; or explore how agriculture, land ownership, labor, public policy, economic change, education, health care, and other systems have influenced people’s experiences and opportunities over time.
These aren’t simply historical facts to learn along a route. They give us ways to ask questions about what we encounter today: What happened here? Who shaped this place? Whose knowledge and experiences are part of its story? Who benefited? Who was excluded? What has changed? What has persisted? Where can we still see the effects? These questions also help complicate easy narratives. A community can have a proud abolitionist history while existing within broader systems of racial exclusion. Policies can dramatically improve people’s lives while distributing their benefits unevenly. Institutions and individuals can contribute to meaningful change while also being shaped by the assumptions and limitations of their time.
The community we experience today didn’t simply happen. It has been shaped over generations by people, relationships, policies, institutions, movements, conflicts, choices, and acts of courage. Grinnell College isn’t outside that story looking in. Neither are those of us who study, work, or live here. We are part of a shared place and an ongoing story.
From Exploring a Place to Finding Your Place
Understanding the community is only part of the purpose of a Social Justice Tour. The tour also invites participants to begin considering where you might find your own civic place within it. What are you curious about? What issues, places, or questions draw your attention? Whose perspectives might help you understand them better? Where might you want to spend more time? Where might you begin building relationships? These questions matter because becoming civically informed and engaged rarely begins with having the answer. More often, it begins with curiosity, context, relationships, and a willingness to keep learning.
As we encounter organizations, institutions, community initiatives, and local stories, participants are also introduced to different ways of participating in civic life. Some people may be drawn toward direct service, working alongside others to address immediate needs. Others may become interested in advocacy, organizing, policy, or systems inquiry—asking why particular patterns persist and exploring where change might be possible. Still others may find pathways through research, creative work, community-engaged learning, careers, local institutions, or simply becoming a more informed and connected member of a community. These aren’t competing paths, and one isn’t inherently more valuable than another. They frequently intersect. Direct service can generate questions about systems. Systems inquiry can point toward policy or advocacy. Advocacy is strengthened by relationships and by the knowledge of people closest to an issue. And across all of them, listening, learning, building trust, and understanding context matter.
The tour doesn’t ask participants to choose a cause or leave ready to solve a community problem. Instead, we hope they leave with deeper context, better questions, new connections, and a clearer sense of where they might want to keep learning and building relationships. For some, that may lead quickly to volunteering, a community-engaged course, research, advocacy, or another form of participation. For others, the next step may simply be to show up again, listen more closely, and learn. There is no expectation that everyone will participate in the same way. The larger goal is to help each person begin developing the relationships, knowledge, and insight that allow them to make increasingly informed and intentional choices about whether, where, and how they want to participate in civic life.
A Tour Built Around Your Questions
There is no single Social Justice Tour.
Our general tour offers a broad introduction to Grinnell and the surrounding area, drawing from a range of places and stories connected to education, health care, economic conditions, agriculture and land, the environment, civic institutions, local history, and the College and community’s shared story. Tours can also be shaped around the interests and learning goals of a course, department, student organization, campus program, or other group. A tour might focus more deeply on education access, health care, housing, agriculture and food systems, economic opportunity, environmental issues, local history, or another question. The particular stops and stories change, but the approach remains the same: look closely, ask questions, make connections, listen to multiple perspectives, and consider where you fit within what you are learning.
Whether broad or focused, a Social Justice Tour isn’t intended to provide a definitive account of Grinnell. It is an invitation to begin exploring a place with greater curiosity and context and to consider how relationships with the people and places around us can help us become more informed, connected, and intentional participants in the communities of which we are a part.