LAST SUMMER, several students worked to organize food co-ops for lower-income communities, working with either groups of students or independent community groups. Two students began a film on black working class experience. A Radcliffe sophomore helped a "videotape collective" to use videotape equipment in new educational and anti-crime programs in Cambridge and Roxbury.

Two students worked specifically on problems of women, one helping a group of divorced mothers to organize a handbook on the problems of divorce, another helping the Pregnancy Counseling Service in Boston. Other students initiated projects geared to the problems of black and Chicano workers: two people worked to improve minority health care; another two helped Detroit factory workers to organize a credit union. E4A funded one senior who traveled to Washington, D.C., to help in Ralph Nader's investigation of Congress; another student went home to Kenya to try to help local coffee- growers organize a cooperative.

Each of the projects involved its own successes and frustrations. Many students ran head-long into the morass of bureaucratic decision-making, which often slowed projects down or made their objectives unattainable. Some students were frustrated by the short-term nature of their projects; having gotten so far, many found they lacked the time to get as far as they would have liked.

People reacted in different ways to their experiences. Several students working with community organizing groups felt immediately at home and were put to work in many of the groups' activities. Another student reported finding his group hostile to "students and outsiders in general:" "I felt that I had to work hard to overcome any suspicions about another student hanging around...It is...a strange feeling to be among a group of people who know each other and trust each other and not be a part of the group."

But that student and others overcame the hostilities of people they worked with, which, like the limited time the summer makes available, is an endemic problem of short-term projects. In his project report, he listed four factors contributing to his eventual success: his willing acceptance of a subordinate role in the organization, a recognition of the limitations imposed by the nature of his brief involvement with the group, the openness of the people with whom he worked once they felt he wasn't trying to take things over, and his general agreement with the group on political matters.

"The hope must be for some limited effectiveness," he wrote, "and for an opportunity to learn and see the inside operation without having to make a long-term time commitment. In fact, a summer grant is a true luxury in the field of radical social change."

The experience of this student and others reflect two of the greatest obstacles which E4A must continually overcome: the small number of people it can serve in the University and off-campus, and the constraints which short-term project work inevitably makes necessary. The third chief obstacle is also a continual preoccupation-finding the money necessary to fund E4A and to serve more students by expanding the group's activities.

During its first three years, E4A operated primarily on two successive Ford Foundation grants totalling $50,000. After E4A's first year of operation, Radcliffe assumed the group's administrative costs.

Since the Ford grants ran out, E4A has received a number of smaller foundation grants, the largest coming from the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation-three successive grants of $10,000 each. These grants have been devoted entirely to funding student projects, but the Student Board next year will face funding difficulties again.

The Noyes Foundation has told E4A that this coming year's grant will be its final donation, according to Arthur Dudley '73, a student board member involved in fund-raising. E4A's recent appeal to smaller foundations in the Massachusetts area has so far yielded little response.

Another problem is the uncertainty of the University's continued support. Though Radcliffe President Horner, in an interview, said she hopes Radcliffe can continue to fund E4A as one of Radcliffe's retained functions under the "non-merger merger," the status of the organization under a new contract to come is unclear. Furthermore, while Bunting and Horner both express, as Horner said, a long-term interest in "student-initiated, student-run kinds of projects," the priorities of Harvard in negotiating a joint budget with Radcliffe are less clear.

Despite these difficulties, the favorable aspects of E4A's program, its considerable successes, and the board members' understanding of the limited effectiveness they can have in social change all contribute to a general sense among E4A members of satisfaction with the program's direction and cautious optimism for its future.

BLISS ATTRIBUTES much of the organization's success to the soundness of Bunting's original vision. Though E4A's outlook on the world always changes, it was originally founded, Bliss feels, on a principle of social initiative which underlies the students' own philosophy and the success of E4A's projects. Bliss also believes that the commitment of Presidents Hunting and Horner to E4A has been instrumental in facilitating the group's own creative energies.

The cooperative spirit of E4A shows most clearly perhaps in E4A's success in recruiting students to serve on its board. The board has consistently comprised roughly half women and half men, and its members reveal a wide range of extracurricular and political interests. Most of them appear to have taken on substantial time commitments to E4A in addition to unusually busy calendars.

In addition, most students working on the board developed their interest out of E4A projects. This has enabled E4A to attract more and more younger board members, which should help the group establish a stronger sense of continuity.