The three co-founders of D3C discuss the inception of their novel club
By AMRA ABID — features@theaggie.org
In late 2022, Miguel Rezapour got a call from Parsa Bavargani with an idea for a club: one that was rooted in social activism, would create projects towards the end goal of sparking social change and was radically different from anything either of them had done. Bavargani asked him, “Are you with me?” Rezapour, with those same goals in mind, said yes.
Bazvargani, a UC Davis alum with a Bachelor of Science in computer science, and Divya Gautam, also a UC Davis alum with a Bachelor of Arts in design and sustainability, along with Rezapour, a fifth-year economics and statistics double major, became the three founding members of Davis Data Driven Change, or D3C. Together, the trio worked for three months to build the foundation of a club that was unlike any they had known on campus.
The inspiration for D3C was born out of a frustration with various clubs the three had previously been involved in. Although many of the social justice-oriented clubs had ethoses that closely aligned with their own passions, Rezapour noted that they all felt like the groups missed the mark.
“They are trying to do good work and help people at the end of the day,” Rezapour said. “[But] in the work they were doing, it just felt, not performative, but somewhat underwhelming. Even if a project is very small in scope, as long as the ethos behind it and the connections that are happening, the conversations are genuine and real, I don’t mind at all. But it didn’t even feel like that existed in a lot of clubs we were engaging in.”
Even with the abundance of clubs on campus, it was a challenge to find a space in which efforts felt meaningful for Rezapour, Bazvargani and Gautam. Political justice clubs brought together passionate individuals and facilitated important conversations, but they noted that dialogue often veered toward being discursive and unfocused. Tech clubs, on the other hand, had clearer intentions on how to push tangible change, but the heavily product-oriented culture made it easy to lose sight of humanitarian objectives.
Ultimately, it wasn’t enough to create just another club that combined the two fields to solve this issue. Bazvargani realized that in order to truly bring together like-minded students and create a group that felt impactful, they had to center social impact as the primary mission of the club, rather than a side project. Thus, alongside Gautam and Rezapour, the three set out to completely reimagine what a club like this could look like.
“When recruiting our first cohorts, we did not have a finite amount of positions that we were trying to fill. Instead, we were strictly on the search for passion,” Gautam said via email. “After selecting our passionate individuals, we created project groups and respective positions based on what capabilities, goals, topics and strengths we had in our final applicant pool.”
In practice, this meant organizing D3C around multiple project groups, each bringing together a mix of programmers, designers, researchers and project managers to collaborate on projects spanning the academic year or quarter. The structure followed three distinct phases. The first phase would be entirely devoted to research and ideation, in which the main focus of meetings was on conversation and learning about the people and the issues around them. Only then is this followed by a working phase, where teams develop their projects, followed by an outreach phase, in which teams work to share their efforts with the public.
The results from projects have ranged wide in topic and scope. Groups have done everything from presenting data-backed research on climate change models at a United Nations (UN) affiliated forum in the United Kingdom to organizing creative exhibits on Palestinian art and culture in a bid to raise awareness for international human rights. Other projects included short films, websites, events and resource hubs. Despite the variety, the shared objective of every group and the immense passion of each member were conducive to utilizing their skills towards social change.
“We just really wanted to create a structure that was different, so that a lot of those difficulties that popped up in other clubs were kind of avoided,” Rezapour said. “And that looked like a much more lateral, horizontal power structure where there wasn’t anybody reporting up to anybody. Everything was made based on consensus decision-making.”
Instead of club executives, they decided on project managers who largely functioned as team members and were only given special designations in terms of the duties they had, but not the responsibilities or the rights they carried. By deviating from the hierarchical structures that typically dominate clubs, they were able to create a space in which people could mutually encourage each other.
“[This was a space for those] who cared about politics and cared about people and helping people, and that was it,” Rezapour said. “If you wanted to create projects, cool, that was a good thing, but we weren’t demanding that. The only task that we really had was getting people together who were similarly aligned in terms of their interests, and if they wanted to do something from that, then boom, they could.”
Rezapour shared that he felt they were ultimately successful. When reflecting on the early days of the club, he remarked on how, even though it was a very conversation-heavy space, the emphasis on an interdisciplinary body of individuals yielded productive conversations; a stark contrast to those he had engaged in elsewhere on campus.
“In the first quarter, whatever the top five headlines were for [each] week, we would just get together and discuss them,” Rezapour said. “And I remember those being really productive in terms of just getting to distill my own thoughts as I’m expressing them to people. Just having these conversations with people who had different backgrounds and would provide different pushback or just provide their own unique insights from their own lived experiences.”
Rezapour believed that in prioritizing accessibility and freedom, the group would be able to facilitate open and honest conversations about achieving social justice.
“I had stark example after stark example of just how true it was,” Rezapour said. “When we would engage in these conversations, people would be like, ‘Oh, I’m so happy to have this conversation. I’ve never talked about politics or social justice to this degree in my life. This is the first time I’ve really had a depthful conversation with one of my contemporaries.’”
Even though the structure of D3C is one that is particularly unique, ultimately, the ideas behind its mission and organization were fairly simple.
“At its core, the club came from a simple belief: There are students on this campus who want to use their skills for good, and they just needed a community to help them do it,” Rezapour said.
Since its inaugural quarter, D3C has undergone many changes. Although former Co-Presidents Bazvargani and Gautam have since graduated and the club’s membership has grown in magnitude, Gautam said that the fundamental purpose and effect on campus has remained unchanged in the ways that matter.
“The goal here was to redefine the way we imagine a productive, collaborative, and purposeful work space, and prove that any major, any skill set and any personality type can be part of a movement,” Gautam said. “Everyone is essential in the fight, and empowering the masses begins by reestablishing what it means to feel qualified.”
Written by: Amra Abid — features@theaggie.org
