Anticipating possible activism in the last half of the school year, about a dozen University students gathered over the weekend to ready themselves for future confrontations.
Surrounded by pages displaying steps to action organization, charting “energy cycles” on campus, and defining relationships of power, the students listened and learned the basics of grassroots organization during GROW — the Grassroots Organizing Weekend.
Labor issues have been “hot topics” on the University campus — specifically last year’s protests pushing for University membership in the Worker Rights Consortium — but ASUO President Jay Breslow said there wasn’t a specific significance of having the workshop right now.
GROW is a project of the United States Student Association (USSA), and the workshop is simply a benefit the ASUO receives from the $50,000 it pays to the USSA in membership dues every year.
That doesn’t, however, rule out future action on the WRC issue.
“We’re working on it [and] we’re looking at a bunch of different stuff,” Breslow said. “It’s been kind of a tough year in regard to that.”
Laura McSpedon, one of the weekend’s leaders and co-coordinator of the national Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), spoke about the strategy she used when fighting to get her university, Georgetown, to join the WRC.
McSpedon formed the Georgetown Solidarity Committee, which pushed for labor rights and economic justice at a school where “free trade was a mantra.”
The university eventually decided not to join the WRC. Even so, McSpedon said she succeeded in building up the solidarity committee, which will be ready for future fights.
The University of Oregon’s tenuous contract with the WRC is set to expire at the end of the year.
During the weekend, students examined “the way to win concrete improvements in their lives and in their experiences,” said Treston Faulkner, another one of the weekend’s leaders and co-coordinator for SLAP.
Students learned the steps to choosing an issue they want to confront, setting their goals and implementing a strategy to achieve them. After each session, they had the opportunity to put the knowledge to work through exercises and role-playing activities.
Gypsy Walukones, a member of the Survival Center, said she wanted “to re-evaluate and get a new perspective on ways of actually accomplishing something, rather than getting bogged down in the process.”
Freshman political science major Sandy Newton, an ASUO legislative intern, and senior sociology major Gabe Baracker both said that as of Saturday, the best part of the workshop had been the role-playing activities.
The students were asked to act out a situation where community members and business officials confronted each other about chemical dumping and the community’s right to know what chemicals were being deposited.
“It was a very charged moment. It puts you on the spot,” Baracker said.