Saint Louis University Communications Professor Tim Huffman serves the Saint Louis community day in and day out. He shares his perspective on what it means to be a teacher while simultaneously being an activist and discusses the importance of getting involved in your community. Huffman navigates through the topics of social justice and homelessness as an expert but remains extremely humble surrounding his own impact. Huffman is not a cape-wearer, but an informed activist scholar that provides a priceless service to the world.
Image Courtesy of Tim Huffman Provided on Nov. 21, 2021.
“I never really thought of myself as a teacher, because I was… weird.” Huffman reflects on his journey to becoming a teacher. His own professors encouraged him despite his doubts and reassured him that his creative thinking is exactly what students need. “Maybe being a weirdo is great for being a teacher.” Specifically pinpointing his inspiration to a philosophy given to him by his undergraduate professor, Professor Kim. “He inspired me with his own story. He was a young man in South Korea during the war. As a young soldier he was told to march over mountains with no clear end goal. He came upon a town that was in distress and he found a man teaching the children in that town a lesson by using the dirt to write in. I took this story and discovered that even when society crumbles, we have to discover what we need to know in order to rebuild the future.” Huffman’s final reflection on his career choice was summed up by saying, “I became a professor to use the scaffolding of knowledge for the sake of the social good.”
As an activist scholar Huffman is inspired by his predecessors who “thought strategically and inspirationally about the changes that could be made into the world but sought to do so in a way that itself was just. Seeking justice, justly.” Non-violent activists such as Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and Martin Luther King were among the people Huffman listed. “I am inspired by the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, William James, Richard Rorty, John Dewey, who look at the way that knowledge enables us to act. They encourage asking the right questions of the right people, then we find out how to have the right conversations which result in us knowing how to know and act together.” The intersectionality of Huffman’s activism and his being a scholar and a researcher is of the utmost importance to him. His inspiration doesn’t stop with activists and scholars though, “The people that live on the streets, the people that organize on behalf of themselves and others, and people that run non-profit organizations; those are my people. Watching them think and grow and stretch and dream and challenge and fight… yea all of that is super inspiring.”
Huffman, himself, is extremely involved in the community around him. He discussed his current involvement, “I use a form of community based participatory research. I create long term partnerships with folks in the community across different stakeholder groups like government, community members, people who give services, and people who need services.” Huffman works closely with St. Louis organizations such as Labre, The Saint Patrick Center, the St. Louis Area Regional Commission on Homelessness (SLARCH) and St. Louis Continuum of Care.
Video of Interactive Map with Tim Huffman narrating courtesy of Nina Carlsen.
He reflects on how, essentially, the entirety of his volunteering is in and around the issues surrounding housing, homelessness, outreach and shelter. As a regular member of this social justice community he has developed a reputation. “I just get asked to do shit. If someone needs a neutral convener, there’s a good chance they’ll ask me. Being able to be a boundary spanner is valuable, my activism is a lot of capacity building. I am an organizational communications scholar. I help people organize. This means program evaluation, creating new programs, designing new programs, seeing whether or not they are effective.”
Huffman has had to adjust along with the rest of the world to the pandemic. “COVID caused the rewriting of how human services are organized. We had to find the gaps and then find creative solutions to these new problems. Shit hit the fan in the winter when it was below freezing for 10 days straight so I helped raise the money for the disaster shelters, I ran shifts in the shelters, I helped schedule and train the volunteers for those emergency shelters and then I helped a group of students run focus groups that evaluated the outcomes of these efforts.”
Despite all of Huffman’s very real efforts and significant amounts of time spent dedicating to the community, he touches on how impact is a tough subject to discuss. “Impact as an activist is a complicated thing because what justice is, is a complicated thing. You are not the only actor in society, people are responding to what you do. Sometimes you do something and it is only because you fail that somebody else succeeds or sometimes you succeed but then someone follows it up with a shitty thing that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t. It’s contested, it’s sloppy, it’s complex, it’s contested.”
Huffman’s passion took the front row seat when he said, “I hate “saved lives” as a metric because people fucking exaggerate on that all of the time. I’m very sensitive to superheroism in activism. White savior complex is totally a thing but it is not only tied to race. Nobody says it like this but there are cape wearers in activist life who aren’t there for the behind the scenes shit or the front-end stuff, only when the crisis emerges do they show up and do some fucking stupid stuff and then everything is harder because they didn’t do the real work. Super heroes, if you’ll just allow me to rant for a second, are defined by someone who rolls in not understanding the situation but whose sense of self importance is so great that all they have to do is do something and the world is better for it… that is not how activism works. Activism works because you know people, have long term relationships, understand systems, you have the skill sets, you have backups and support systems and allies.”
Huffman's impact does not go unnoticed despite his modesty. SLU Alumni and close friend of Tim’s, Chris Franco, is able to attest to Tim’s character. “Tim is by far the greatest mentor I have ever had in my life. There are few people in the world who are as dedicated to social justice and the flourishing of communities as Tim is. He has dedicated his life to reducing the dehumanization and destitution that leads people who live without homes to suffer and die needlessly. Beyond admiring him for his dedication to his mission, I also admire Tim for how great of a teacher he is. Tim is someone who fosters within his students a love of learning, a love of life, and transformation of heart that is honestly becoming more and more difficult to come by nowadays.” Colleague of Huffman’s and Consultant at the St. Louis City Continuum of Care Saint Louis Mental Health Board, Tammy Laws, also provided a few words on his character. “Tim brings a positive and inspirational light along with him, his work is so appreciated and without him we would not have nearly as strong of a community.” Current Communications Student at SLU, Kennedy Ewald, said “He is one of the most interesting professors I’ve ever had, he is a man of many talents and I think we could all take a page from his book.”
Huffman organized “Winter Haven”, which kept un-housed people out of the cold during the coldest point of the winter, he also initiated the effort to get women’s shelters to build walls as “privacy is super violated by the way that we imagine shelters”. Referencing "Winter Haven" Huffman said, “It was super beautiful to see the relationships that had been created because of COVID, materialize into very vivid forms of partnerships that wouldn't be possible without those relationships. Relationships first, relationships last, relationships always. Create mutual relationships, where all that you want and dream and feel is what I want and dream and feel.”
After being asked to pass on any advice to others interested in getting involved in activism, Huffman said, “Ask questions and use that knowledge to build power. Be thoughtful, strategic, respond with the wholeness of who you are and bring your best self to it, not just your spare hour. Go out and fucking do it. Be the person that the world needs you to be.”
Without Huffman, the Saint Louis community would look a lot different. He truly is what he claims to be and so much more, an activist scholar with so much knowledge and dedication going into his every move.
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