Just Students, or Powerful Grassroots Leaders?
By Anais LaVoie
During the first weekend in April, students from Cal Berkeley Democrats, CALPIRG, and College Democrats at UCSC gathered at UC Berkeley for a Campus Camp Wellstone training. Campus Camp Wellstone is a two-day intensive training on grassroots organizing, based on the strategies of the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone. We spent the weekend studying strategy planning, membership development, volunteer recruitment, messaging, and grassroots lobbying—both in theory and practice. Progressive leaders like State Senator Loni Hancock, CDP Women’s Caucus Chair Karen Weinstein, and Joanna Rees, who all contributed to make the event possible, spoke at a lunch on Saturday about the unique power of students invested in Democratic activism.
The whole weekend centered on the story of St. James, a fictional town experiencing controversy over environmentally friendly development. A bill before the city council would incentivize green development that favors small businesses and union labor, rather than big corporations that cut environmental corners and only provide minimum wage jobs to the citizens of St. James. Students assumed the role of POWER, a grassroots organization with ties to other community groups, which would be responsible for running a campaign to pass the bill. We first engaged in power mapping, an exercise which allowed us to visualize which city council members could be convinced to support the bill, and what groups would be able to pressure them to do so. Then, we created a central message that would be used in a radio commercial to get the public on our side. One team’s radio ad included an ambitious appearance by President Barack Obama. Finally, we each acted as community members, who went to each of the city council members and St. James Mayor Dean, to lobby them to pass our bill.
The training motivated me to build the relationships that will make a difference in campaigning for student issues. I felt most inspired by the trainers themselves: Carmen Berkley, Bill Schiebler, Matt Smriga, and Van Nguyen (a Cal alum and former ASUC President). These four professional organizers are fellow young people, just a few years older than ourselves, who have made careers out of mobilizing supporters around the issues they care about. They gave us a realistic view into what it takes to transform our values, such as environmental justice, reproductive rights, higher education, or labor, and turn them into legislative realities. But most importantly, the four trainers pushed us to be leaders. We left Campus Camp Wellstone with a better sense of the skills used by grassroots organizers and a mission to carry that knowledge into our communities, to inspire others to be strong, successful activists themselves.
