A Better Barbeque at Berkeley

Our staff team at University of California-Berkeley was exploring ways for racial reconciliation to be more of an integral part of all our ministries. We talked about racial reconciliation a lot with our students but also wanted to live it out in our Berkeley context.

New Student Outreach events were a good place to start. The Black Campus Ministries (BCM) staff and Cal Christian Fellowship’s multiethnic fellowship staff met to find ways to do outreach together. We tried to find ways our ministries could intersect and share resources so that our students could partner with each other for outreach to the whole campus.

We knew that these changes would require much pastoring on our part for our BCM and Cal Christian students. How would we make changes without alienating our students or new students coming in? How would we get students to come on board with a vision for a joint event? Would black students want to come? How would our students be welcoming those who are different from them? We had a lot of questions and concerns since this would be our first time doing this together.

First, we prayed. As we prayed, God began to give us vision for the first ever, joint Cal Christian Fellowship and BCM Barbeque. The idea was to make the barbeque accessible to as many students as we could through all the I-V chapters on campus: Cal Christian Fellowship, BCM, Kapwa (our Pilipino-American fellowship), La Fe (our Chicano-Latino fellowship) and our International Student Ministry students. We shared the idea for the joint barbeque with our students at our August leadership training camp, VISION 2000. Phil and Leslie Bowling Dyer brought BCM students while we brought Cal Christian and Kapwa students for the four days of training. Phil and Leslie led the New Student Outreach training and introduced the idea for the joint barbeque. They shared the vision for it, the why’s and the how’s in a way that affirmed and empowered all the students there. Everyone was on board with the new endeavor, knowing that a few changes had to be made.

We realized that our usual way of doing the barbeque had to change to make it feel welcoming to our target students, Christians, non-Christians and, especially, new black students. Here are some of the changes we made:

We changed the menu from burgers and hotdogs to burgers, steaks and hot links.

We put our food tables closer to the entrance so new students wouldn’t have to walk far to enter the field and get food. The farther the food and people, the easier it would have been for students to feel insecure and leave right away.

We wanted people to mingle so we spread out picnic blankets and put up a mini-tent structure to give a bit of shade.

We played different kinds of music, including lots of hip hop, rap and gospel to make it feel like a fun party atmosphere.

We put up African-American cultural icons to help the black students feel comfortable and welcome. The kente cloths (native African prints) on the ground, the hip hop music, and the red, green and black balloons all helped our black students feel welcome and comfortable.

We had a great turnout of students, between 150-200 throughout the three-hour event. What helped us tremendously was doing our barbeque the same day as a black student event nearby. Rather than being a hindrance, it helped more people come by our barbeque first. It was clear that our extra efforts in working together to welcome new students helped all the groups get off to a great start for the year.

—Christie de Leon has been on IVCF staff three years and enjoys reading the Chronicles of Narnia and novels by women of color. She works with UC-Berkeley's Pilipino student ministry, Kapwa.