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Youngin Chung | Phoenix Staff

Cecilia Marquez and Sarah Apt participate in a role play on organizing student campaigns.

BY ASHIA TROIANO

In print | Published January 29, 2009

The “Swarthmore has GROWN” sign in the Scheuer Room marked the completion of a weekend-long, grassroots organizing set of training sessions conducted by the United States Student Association. A multi-faceted program designed to empower students across the country to advocate for themselves, especially concerning issues of higher education, the USSA Web site calls itself “the country’s oldest and largest national student-led organization.”

The sessions were led by San SunOwen, a senior at the University of Oregon, and Wes Weaver, a junior at Temple University in Philadelphia. GROW (Grassroots Organizing Weekend) specifically focuses on how to best utilize direct action organizing. Each session addressed a different facet of organizing, such as “Understanding the Relations of Power,” “Choosing an Issue,” “Recruitment and Organization Building” and “Coalitions.”

“The tools and skills you learn [at GROW] are invaluable … Students can make a real tangible change in people’s lives, including their own,” Weaver said.

Among the groups represented throughout the weekend were Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective, Amnesty International, Student Labor Action Project, STAND, White Women Confronting Racism and Coalition for a Free Haiti. Despite the commonality of the weekend’s goals, each attendee came with his or her own agenda about what the organization hoped to learn.

“Grassroots organizing has always been a topic that I have found interesting,” Philippe Celestin ’11 said. “At the same time it has been something I have found difficult to wrap my head around. The idea that you can bring together a large group of ordinary citizens on a set of issues and overcome well-established systems of power seems somewhat difficult to fully understand. I felt like the training would be a good start to learning how to tap into that kind of extraordinary power.”

In addition to discussion on the principles of organizing, the group was asked to participate in several interactive exercises. In role playing activities, students were put on opposing sides of an organizing campaign and decided what they had learned throughout the weekend that would help their side most. “Direct Action Organizing is common sense,” SunOwen said. “[We provide] a new way of looking at organizing concepts. They will work for us and our opponents.”

For Celestin, these role plays drove home the themes of the training. In a role play that divided the students into the State Student Association and the Board of Regents, the groups were asked to act out a direct action scenario between the teams. “Our team walked into the role playing scene a little more amped up and ready to take on ‘the man’ than we probably should have been. We ended up adopting a pretty aggressive way of dealing with the issue in the scenario, and that resulted in a lot of tension and yelling. … Immediately afterwards we all kind of let go of our different roles … and the tension seemed to dissolve away, and I think that maybe at that moment we came to a sort of collective understanding of what we had been learning about and I think that was a really valuable thing for us as a group to experience.”

Many of the attendees agreed that the concepts taught during GROW will always be useful. Joanie Jean ’11 said that she has already begun implementing them in her own work.

“The fact that I took home the poster that said ‘POWER’ in huge black letters and hung it over my dresser speaks volumes. … I walk through Parrish and instead of absentmindedly reciting Japanese vocabulary [for class] in my head, I find myself thinking about power relationships. In terms of [Coalition for a Free Haiti], we’ve already begun reorganizing our plans so that they are more strategic and concrete.”

While GROW trainers can hold up to 25 trainings a year at campuses across the country, the planning committee felt that a small liberal arts school like Swarthmore has as much to gain from the experience as any big university.

“It was necessary to bring GROW to Swat because it provided a lot of practical information to aspiring activists. I think that especially at Swat, where everyone likes to think of themselves as politically engaged, it is sometimes harder to get organized, because everyone has very strong ideas about what is effective, which is what I think differentiates GROW from a lot of other workshops. It has a system and organization that is extremely pragmatic,” Lauren Ramanathan ’11, a member of the planning committee, said. “In the past I’ve found that a lot of workshops can be based purely on idealism… [and] don’t take into account the fact that ideologies are subtle and can differ, not only across the whole entire political spectrum, but between progressives also.”

And true to Swarthmore form, attendees spent their lunch break collaborating on how to use their new skills in their current campaigns, which was especially exhilarating for Sara Forster ’11, another member of the planning committee. “We discuss[ed] how the GROW strategies could be specifically applied to Swarthmore. All the people there had different experiences running campaigns, and the information they gathered from being involved in their respective campaigns could help everyone there be more effective in the future. Everyone was really energized by the training — exactly the response we had hoped for.”

SunOwen and Weaver, both very active on their respective campuses, shared their personal insights about organizing and forming campaigns. In their efforts to form a department of ethnic studies, SunOwen and fellow organizers handed out good and bad apple awards to the school’s administration as a symbolic gesture. As a result, the group was guaranteed two meetings with the administration to plan for the department.

Weaver emphasized that “sometimes the best actions aren’t planned.” During a celebration planned by the president of Temple for alumni and donors, SLAP, of which Weaver is a member of, invaded and talked to the guests about their movement.

Though they were escorted out by the police, the group achieved their goal of getting sick days for sub-contracted security officers on campus. With experiences like these under their belts, SunOwen regrets that the training is only three days. “It would be nice to help input in a school’s strategy… Who better to connect with than other students?”

Disclosure note: Lauren Ramanathan is a Living & Arts columnist for The Phoenix but had no role in the production of this article.

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