Creating Your Vision

What is your vision for the campus and/or community?

Our overarching vision for Columbia College is an engaged student body and a transparent and responsive administration.

Our shorter-term vision for the Columbia College community is a campus free from Wackenhut, the security firm contracted by the school. Wackenhut does not respect the guards or their union, Service Employees International Union (S.E.I.U).

Assessing Your Campus and Community

What campus/community problem does your blueprint address? What structures, practices and policies institutionalize the problem?

Our Blueprint addresses several problems at Columbia College.

First, it is difficult to engage the student body. The most significant problem is that Senate and committee meetings are not accessible to the student body. Students do not show up to Senate and committee meetings because they have class, commuting takes a long time, or they are busy working. Meetings are also held in dank, dungeonlike basements blocks away from the actual campus hub and scheduled at times when students, faculty and staff are in class or working. The days of paper fliers are over and the new age of technological advocacy must be fostered to grab the attention of this young people’s movement. If we want to increase student participation, we must make the decision-making process more accessible. Student government meetings must be available to view or listen to online. It is as easy as setting up a tripod, camera, point and shoot, upload, edit and post.

A more transparent and accessible decision-making process will contribute directly to our cause to remove Wackenhut from campus. The problem is that Columbia College allowed Wackenhut to de-unionize and refused to take an official stance when questioned by students, faculty and staff. We believe it’s the right of college students to have input on college policies and be a part of the decision-making process. If Columbia College encouraged policy transparency and involved the entire community, than it would be easy to avoid similar issues in the future.

What communities will you work with?

• Campus community

Setting Goals and Deliverables

• Goal 1: To rid Columbia College of Wackenhut
• Create awareness literature about Wackenhut to teach students, faculty and staff about their fraudulent past and their prior human rights violations
• Create awareness videos about Wackenhut discussions in meetings, interviews and forums
• Use this media to create a dialogue with students, faculty and staff online and face-to-face, allowing involvement and the feedback to be reported on and given to administration
• Columbia College will change the security company using student input because they publicly recognize our role as consumers and investors in their product*
• Goal 2: To adopt a progressive policy that allows workers to unionize
• Write policy
• Submit policy to the Student Government for approval and sponsorship*
• Work with students, faculty, staff and administration in open forums and committees to change the current policy
• Force the school to implement our mutual community agreement*
• Goal 3: To adopt a college-wide progressive policy that honors students as investors, giving them a say in the decision-making process
• Videotape student government meetings
• Post hearings and committee meetings online
• Encourage students to review and comment

What is your primary approach? Advocacy and Activism

Why did you choose this approach?

We choose this as our primary approach because we are trying both to lobby the administration to change policy and to provide opportunities for other students to engage in advocacy and activist work.

Did you have secondary approaches? What are they?

Ideas Creation: Media Research and Culture

We go to a visual arts school. We are journalism and fine arts majors. To involve all students, a visual presentation will be most effective. I feel this is the best approach relating to our tactics because I am being trained to do the same thing when we leave school. I have experience posting videos online, editing videos with different applications, burning video onto DVDs, and blogging. I need the tools to give our cause a technological advantage over paper flyers that are thrown away and meetings/events that people cannot come to because they don’t fit their schedules. I want students to be able to participate without having to give up class and study time. I decided that if the meetings are on YouTube, the Columbia College server, the YP4 blog, or a website my organization creates, then the students can participate in meetings with pajamas on, at home, without missing school, at their leisure.

What will your tactics and activities be?

We are setting up petitions, street theater and dorm storms of political art and handing out DVDs of our meetings in open spaces as a way of informing students about the issue and blog postings. We will use the feedback given to write reports to the Student Government, the ACLU, the student body, YP4 and the administration. We will be editing video, writing articles and posting them on blogs as soon as it happens, as if they were meeting minutes, so people can participate in a timely manner. Students, faculty and staff concerned about protecting their jobs can post comments on our blogs anonymously. We will use the information as opinion polls and surveys.

We already attend Student Government meetings, committee meetings, handing out information at CCCC-ACLU voter registration drives, submitting proposals to the Student Government and suggesting changes to proposals sent to the Student Organization Council.

Connecting Back to Vision

How does your strategy contribute to your vision for your campus and/or your community?

If the Columbia College 2008 YP4 fellows achieve the expected outcomes, then the students, staff, and faculty will have practiced consumer democracy. Columbia College has good intentions. Still, only with a strategy of watchdog journalism, political art, and a policy of inclusion with accountability will our vision truly begin to create change.

People like to form their own opinions, and I feel that the footage of meetings and responses by administration will be enough to convince everyone that Wackenhut is wrong and not the type of institution the student body wants to support. We can engage the study body; it is as easy as setting up a tripod and camera, point and shoot, upload, edit and post. Then everyone on-campus and off- can be involved in the struggle to remove Wackenhut, to enforce a set of rights that encourages the formation of unions and have their voices heard whenever they are ready.

I see this as a lifelong campaign of video making and the wave of the future. I want to document all struggles in my community. Even newspapers have changed tracks, giving readers more of the story online in multimedia presentations. At the Sun-Times, writers, mostly columnists, are encouraged to have a Facebook account to involve readers in their daily lives. The community is shifting.

Our biggest problem is that the school does not support the technology they encourage us to use. Computer labs are shrinking. The best equipment is reserved for those who are in that particular department. We do not have access to a video camera or laptop. The mobility offered by access to technology is priceless because we will not be able to involve so many people in any other way.

Resources and skills you will need

What skills do you need for this approach?

Policy writing advice, arbitration skills, and artistic skills in the way we present footage, literature and arguments to the school. I will practice speaking and leadership skills and develop confidence throughout the process. I will learn how to protest and petition as I do it. I will use our connections with YP4 for honest feedback when we need it. I already have skills in editing and posting content online and I will only get better the more I post.