Many students across the country are faced with an almost existential challenge. Undocumented students, many of whom arrived as young children and barely remember their country of birth, must often contend with the threat of deportation, being separated from their family, and being forced to live in the shadows.
Students Working for Equal Rights (SWER) is trying to do something about it. SWER Is a student led campaign affiliated with the Florida Immigrant Coalition. It works to both pass the DREAM Act, which would give young people who attend two years of college, or serve in the military for two years, a path to legal status, and challenges the deportation and detention of students that would be eligible for the DREAM Act.
SWER has done some amazing work this month. As part of a statewide day of action, student leaders from across South Florida held a protest outside of the Broward Transitional Center, where several DREAMers are being detained:
Students elsewhere in the state held film screenings and other events, asked their college presidents for endorsements of the DREAM Act, and held a statewide call-in day to urge their Senator to get more involved in this issue.
By the way, if you don’t know much about the immigrant detention “system,” then you should reallylearnmore. The Obama administration recently announced some promising reforms, but there is much more to do.
SWER recently received an Organizing Grant through Campus Progress’s Action Alliance Program. Student and youth-led issue campaigns and movement building projects are eligible for up to $1,500 to organize for progressive social change.
Campus Progress, is happy to announce its Progressive Partnerships for 2009-10. Progressive Partnerships, part of the Action Alliance program, are year-long intensive relationships between Campus Progress and youth-led groups working on issue campaign or movement building projects.
Campus Progress will provide guidance, networking, strategic planning, and training for these organizations in order to help strengthen the progressive movement over the long term, and help young people make concrete change in their communities now. Click here to learn more about the 2009-10 Progressive Partnerships.
Campus Progress is working with partners like the US Students Association and the PIRGs to mobilize students across the country for the Raising Pell Week of Action, October 6th – 8th.
Students are taking action to ensure that their Senators support President Obama’s plan to stop funding government subsidies to banks, and instead increase the Federal Pell Grant.
The University of Houston Students for Fair Trade (UHSFT) recently won a major victory on their campus. Their university administration decided this month that Java City, a campus coffee shop located in UH’s student center will only serve fair trade certified coffee starting in the fall. This has been a major request of UHSFT for some time.
Some of UHSFT’s other victories have included:
Made fair trade coffee available in all campus corporate coffee outlets (but not the dining halls)
Made Fair Trade greeting cards available in UH’s Barnes and Noble-run campus bookstore
Helped make a small business, Hope for Women, become an official vendor for all Barnes and Nobles campus stores nationwide
Made fair trade coffee available in campus dining halls
Placed signage and brochures about fair trade coffee at every coffee outlet
Generated quite a bit of local and national publicity,
UHSFT has received Campus Progress Action Grants for two years now. Action grants make $200-$1,000 available to progressive issue campaigns led by college students and young people. Grantees will also get assistance with events, publicity, training, and other resources.
Campus Progress Student Reps in Austin, Texas have been doing some amazing work through Students Against the Death Penalty (SADP) and the Texas Moratorium Network.
One of their biggest issues right now is the impeachment of a state judge that refused to receive paperwork a few minutes for an urgent appeal from a man that was scheduled to be executed the same night. The cause against Judge Keller has received widespread support, including from the New York Times. SADP has a campaign website where you can find more information about this issue.
You can find recent testimony at a committee hearing from Hooman Hedayati, a University of Texas student, and an update from Margaret Haule, a student at Austin Community College, below:
Divest Nebraska, a student organization at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), was recently awarded a grant of $400 from the non-profit Campus Progress for their campaign to convince Nebraska lawmakers to divest from targeted companies. Targeted companies are those companies operating in Sudan that provide few to no benefits to Sudanese citizens and generate revenue used by the Sudanese government to fund genocide. Read More »
"All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous weather patterns and devastating storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster."
BARACK OBAMA, speech, Apr. 3, 2006
Students in Universities across the country (and world), are working for change. Many have realized that if we do not change our ways now, we will pay life-threatening consequences in the future.
I wanted to highlight the current waves of "activism in academia" because the two really go hand in hand. Learning about and becoming more aware of environmental issues ignites passion. The following sustainability digest was posted by the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley...please read on and share with others.
Campus Progress Student Representatives at American River College (ARC) in Sacramento, California are working feverishly along with other members of the ARC progressive community to make sure that their campus is not used to support anti-equality policies like California’s Proposition 8.
When the ARC’s Student Council decided to take up a resolution supporting the proposition, which would outlaw same sex marriage, students swung into action by packing the student council meeting to show their opposition. They also collected twice the number of signatures needed for the council members to be recalled. Unfortunately, the resolution was passed, but it is abundantly clear that the vote did not accurately reflect the will of the student body.
You can watch Nancy Dziuba, one of the two Campus Progress Student Representatives on the campus, on the local Fox station speaking about some of the intimidation that members of the progressive and GLBT community have faced at ARC recently:
Mayor of the Berwyn Heights community in Maryland, Cheye Calvo, found himself Tuesday evening on the floor of his house with his hands behind his back, wearing nothing but boxers and socks, with his two beloved dogs’ bloody carcasses lying lifeless next to him for hours. The first question that pops into my mind after hearing a description like this is what kind of an evil criminally minded lunatic would go to such disgustingly brutal lengths to torture someone? And what could have Mayor Calvo possibly done that inspired such an attack?
The answer, surprisingly enough, is that it was no criminal at all, at least not according to the government. In fact, it was the Prince George's County Police Department who broke into Mayor Calvo’s house during a no-knock drug raid, shot his two Labrador Retrievers, and interrogated Mayor Calvo and his mother-in-law for hours about a package that had been intercepted in Arizona addressed to the mayor’s wife containing 32 pounds of marijuana. After raiding the house with a SWAT team, and finding absolutely nothing, police released the Calvos, coming out with no arrests. The Calvo family did nothing wrong, and denies knowing anything about the drugs.
The “War on Drugs” has killed yet another two innocent victims. Every day, people’s lives are wrongfully lost to this unnecessary and counterproductive battle.
University of Maryland’s Students for Sensible Drug Policy chapter will be holding a memorial service for the dogs, Chase and Payton, on Saturday at 5pm at Lake Artemesia. We will be inviting the community and surrounding areas to bring their dogs to the event, where we will be giving out ribbons to the dogs and owners to show our solidarity with the Calvos, have a moment of silence for the dogs, and take some time to speak about other incidents in which innocent dogs’ lives have been lost to the “War on Drugs”. More information about the event can be found here.
UMD-SSDP sends our most sincere and heartfelt condolences to the Calvo family for their loss, and pledges to do their part in preventing such violent police tactics in the future.
Sometimes campaigns at the college level are drawn out and take a great deal of time and energy. In the middle of the summer I began working on a resolution to introduce at the first meeting of the Muhlenberg Student Council. The resolution called for a divestment of Muhlenberg funds from the "highest offending" companies working in Sudan to perpetuation the genocide in the Darfur region.
Hard work pays off, over time. It took a few weeks to get it passed through the Student Council (with all but one vote) followed by meetings with administrators, articles in the student newspaper, and meeting with a group of members of the Board Of Trustees.
Over half a year later, the Board of Trustees voted in favor of the following resolution to:
not knowingly make direct investments with Category One highest offender companies engaging in business in the Sudan as defined by the Sudan Divestment Task Force. Furthermore, if Muhlenberg commingled investments are invested in Category One companies, letters will be submitted to managers of these funds requesting that they consider removing such companies from the fund or create a similar actively managed fund with commingled holdings devoid of such companies.
Yesterday, thousands of students and faculty members participated in Focus the Nation, and national teach-in on global warming. Check out some excerpts of the media coverage below the fold: Read More »
I’m so great to see that the Queer Student Union (QSU) and the Campus Democrats at the University of California, Santa Barbara co-sponsored a highly successful ENDA rally last Tuesday.
Getting universities to divest from companies doing business in Sudan in ways that support the genocide in Darfur has been one of the hottest campaign issues for student activists on campuses around the country. (It has also been one of the most closely watched topics on Campus Progress, which has published at least this, this, this, and this on student-led divestment movements.)
**NOTE: this blog post was written by Stephanie Lee, a Campus Progress Representative at MU-Ohio, and a member of Students for Staff
It is so easy to forget about poverty, when we are so comfortably surrounded by wealth. Most Miami University students come from families with an average household income of over $200,000. Miami University is fairly well off as well, with a total of $47 million in net assets. Yet, there are innumerable staff at Miami who are living at or below the poverty line.
Students for Staff organized a successful rally and protest outside the Miami University student center yesterday. Despite the unusual cold, there was a crowd of about 70-80 students and staff gathered together on the patio, eating snacks and getting to know one another in a different setting.
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