Attending the UCSA Student Organizing Summit 2024
Two weeks ago, the University of California Student Association’s (UCSA) hosted the annual Student Organizing Summit (SOS) from August 2 to 4, 2024. For the weekend, delegation teams from all 9 undergraduate UC campuses (over 200 students!) met and stayed at the Sheraton Conference Hotel in Pomona, California. This was a super cool opportunity as I got to meet many new friends from my own campus, UC Berkeley, and from other schools as well who were passionate about the values of UCSA. The UCSA is the official voice of students from all UC campuses. Consisting of a coalition of students and student governments, their mission is to provide a collective voice for all students through advocacy and direct action.
At the SOS conference, the keynote speaker was Kimi Lee. Kimi is currently the Executive Director of Bay Rising, a civic engagement organization that organizes with working-class people and people of colour. She has worked in advocacy and organizing for the past 25 years and she previously served as the Executive Director of the UCSA. She spoke about her experiences with student organizing and how to get people to be interested and come out to your events. She reminded us as passionate advocates to remember to have fun in the work that we do; these are difficult and hard topics, and the best way to unite more people to the cause is to show how important this work is and how much fun it is to work together towards the goal. We also completed an Anti-Blackness training presentation from Salih Muhammad. He was a very moving and insightful speaker and something he pointed out that stuck with me was that the root problem with racism is not a problem of attitude but a problem of power. Societal attitudes are constantly changing, but until systems change and people in oppressed groups are the ones making decisions for themselves, we will never be able to truly be anti-racist.
The theme of this year’s conference was “We are each others’ business” and focused on the intersection between organizing and student development. After the large group speakers, we split off into smaller pre-assigned randomized groups where all the attendees received organizing training from the UCSA leadership team. We learned tactics and strategies to develop and engage in a winning campaign.
The UCSA has 5 permanent campaigns:
1. Fund the UC which works to ensure affordability, quality and accessibility to the UC for current and future students.
2. Racial Justice Now which campaigns to elevate student belonging and success in the UC education system to historically marginalized communities.
3. UCweVOTE which strives to increase voter participation in UC campuses for all elections to in turn increase the legislative power of UC students.
4. ACQUIRE (A Campaign for Quality in Resources and Education) which advocates for the availability of holistic resources and protection so that all students can succeed.
5. SEED (Students Enacting Environmental Defense) which seeks to pursue environmental justice in the UC campuses and surrounding communities.
After learning about all of the campaigns in more detail, we each chose the campaign that we wanted to work on and participated in campaign development sessions. We were free to pop into different groups to see what each was about. As an environmental science and political science major who is interested in environmental law and policy, I chose to be part of the SEED campaign. The goal of these campaign development sessions is to select and outline the top few goals, and then present it to the entire group who will then vote in a democratic process to select the annual focus of each of UCSA’s campaigns. Over the course of the 2 days, we had 3 campaign development sessions. We started off by sharing about environmental issues and concerns that our respective campuses had. One particular issue that was brought up by a student from UC Riverside was the Thirty Meter Telescope project on the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, and the call for the UC to divest from this project as it has not gained the prior consent of the Indigenous Peoples of the land. As an associate in the Eco Office of the Associate Students of the University of California (UC Berkeley’s student government) this past year, I worked on this Thirty Meter Telescope divestment project and helped organize an art exhibit in the student building to educate our campus community about this issue. It was interesting to hear about what other campus environmental communities were working on, and seeing how it differed and overlapped with my experience at Berkeley. After compiling a long list of different issues SEED campaign could focus on, we then narrowed down the list through a vote to decide on the top 5 issues that we felt should be addressed this year. We then split into 5 different smaller groups and thought through possible goals that would help tackle this issue. We identified short and long term goals, organizations and administrators who we could target our message to and receive assistance from, and create a detailed plan on steps to achieve this goal. The specific goal that I worked on was expanding environmental education. It is important for students of all UC campuses to have training on climate change issues and what environmental justice is. With increased environmental literacy, sustainability can be better incorporated at the intersection of different fields. This could take the form of a mandatory training module for all students during orientation that would cover environmental issues in respective campuses, green jobs, traditional Indigenous ecological practices and environmental resources available to them. While my group’s idea was chosen to be presented back in the large group but eventually not voted on to be the SEED goal of this coming year, I still believe that this is important work and will pursue the development of similar campaigns within my involvement in the UC Berkeley Eco Office this year.
We had a special workshop session after breakfast on Sunday morning with 5 different workshop topics to choose from to attend. I attended the workshop titled “Protecting and Advancing Immigrants’ Rights in California” facilitated by staff members of the California Immigrant Policy Centre. I learned a lot from this session on the role that immigrant workers play to propel California to be the 5th largest economy in the world, but they simultaneously face immense systemic and social discrimination. The facilitators shared eye-opening realities and noted that statistics show that individuals with legal representation have a much higher chance of winning their deportation case; however, most individuals facing deportation do not have access to proper legal representation. Shockingly, infants as young as 18 months old face against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents by themselves without a lawyer. This really encouraged me to find ways that I can get involved in campaigns to fight for immigrants’ rights starting in my own college campus.
To conclude the conference, everyone gathered back in a large group where student representatives from each campaign development team presented the ideas for campaign focus goals of the 2024-2025 academic year. After hearing presentations from 5 campaigns, all conference participants then voted through a link by rank choice voting for their favourite campaign focus goals of each campaign. The selected goals included:
1. Fund the UC: A state grant for nontraditional students to ease the financial burden of students from extenuating circumstances to attend UC schools.
2. Racial Justice Now: Form coalitions to pass Prop 6 that bans involuntary servitude as legal punishment in California in response to criminalization of homelessness in the US and to ban Prop 36 that increases sentencing for petty theft and nonviolent drug crimes that affects the BIPOC community disproportionately.
3. UCweVOTE: Expand voting accessibility by requiring at least 5 polling locations in each UC campus and having live translators (Spanish, Mandarin, etc) in at least 1 polling location.
4. AQUIRE: Increase funding for basic needs centers to create food security programs for reentry, undocumented and international students.
5. SEED: Ensure NAGPRA (Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act) compliance and return native remnants and artifacts to original tribes.
The 2024 SOS conference was a fun, informative, inspiring and transformative experience, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to attend. I got closer to many fellow Berkeley delegates and met new friends from all around California during event sessions, over delicious meals we had, and just chatting with people during break times. I am filled with hope and excitement after this conference and I am looking forward to getting involved in the development of the campaign goals in Berkeley and attending the next two UCSA conferences later this year.