Schaumann sets up office at Eastern

By KATIE MACLEOD

Staff Writer

Karen Schaumann is an Eastern Michigan University sociology professor who combines community issues with classroom learning.

Schaumann is a welfare-rights activist. A former welfare recipient herself, she helped co-found the Welfare Rights Union of Washtenaw County in 1992.

For about five years, the organization had been located in a housing development. Shaumann and others sold barbecue chicken dinners to raise money to keep the office operational and participate in national conferences and protests.

However, Welfare Rights Union eventually lost its free office space with the International Workers of the World. No one was willing to help the group out, Shaumann says.

Photo by JESSICA HAVENS   Karen Schaumann (back) helps EMU student Teresa Long.

"We packed up the office and continued to do advocacy from our homes, and I helped EMU students who came to me with severe economic problems. After a year like this, a couple of students and I started Welfare Rights at EMU."

Schaumann recently helped open an office in the Multicultural Center at EMU for student and community advocacy. She will do advocate training so that Welfare Rights will be able to hold regular office hours.

"Hopefully, this will empower students and community members to help themselves and others," she says. "Our mottos are ‘Each one teach one’ and ‘Fight poverty, not the poor!’ "

Welfare Rights has been participating in an international economic human rights campaign based on the UN’s Economic Human Rights document, which Eleanor Roosevelt helped to bring about over 50 years ago.

Schaumann says she loves her job, her students and EMU. She feels that being an activist is very compatible with being a sociologist.

"I am what is called a critical sociologist. We believe that it is not sufficient just to study a problem. The idea is to change it."

And, according to Shaumann, the welfare system could stand some change. It has both its good and bad points, she says.

"I hated many aspects of welfare – from lazy, incompetent workers to most workers trying to tell me that I couldn’t complete my education because I wouldn’t be able to get a job with a political science or sociology B.S."

She says, though, she liked the fact that the welfare system used to allow individuals to go to college without having to work.

"I was able to go on and get my master’s in sociology and have been teaching at EMU since 1994."

Now, such a system isn’t in place.

"Single parents are required to work, and they only get very limited support for their last year in school," she explains.

Shaumann also says, as a sociologist, she is interested in issues of poverty, race and gender.

"There is no good reason why the U.S. has the highest poverty rates and the lowest rates of medical insurance coverage in the midst of such wealth. There is no good reason why a college education can’t be accessible to all, not just to those who can afford it. There is no reason why racism should still be a barrier to equal treatment."