Gabby Hochfeld graduated from Moravian College in 2019. She majored in political science and minored in women’s, gender, & sexuality studies. Gabby lives in Bethlehem, PA, where she works at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center as a Health Outreach Coordinator. 

Utopias, Dystopias, & Manifestos was the class that forced me to come up with answers to how the world could work if I was in a position of power. We often complain and criticize without actually coming up with solutions or anything productive. Having a class of passionate students come up with ways that the world can be better was really inspiring. 

At my current workplace, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, I realized how small my worldview was when I wrote my utopia paper [for Dr. Haddad’s course]. 

My workplace’s mission heavily involves accessibility to healthcare and health education. I did not include healthcare at all in my utopia. It is important to be specific in what we want out of our policymakers. 

It is also important to listen to voices from different groups of people, so that we can be mindful in an intersectional way when we advocate for change. Even if it is an abstract story for a course, we can still learn a lot about how the world could be better for all people.

As told to Julianna Fedorich.