Creating Your Vision

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

We envision a society that supports and nourishes same-sex relationships, marriages and families.

Assessing Your Campus and Community

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

There is a lack of knowledge and visibility regarding the issue of equal marriage in our campus and community. Often, those who are familiar with the idea feel little urgency to act on the injustice.

State and national policies that limit marriage to one man and one woman institutionalize the problem.

What communities will you work with?

• Campus community
• Local community
• Statewide community

Setting Goals and Deliverables

• Goal 1: To education the community about LGBTQ issues.
• Goal 2: To establish more statewide and citywide support for I'L Pledge.
• Hold a conference involving campus leaders from other Chicago universities to raise support and awareness about I'L Pledge.
• Establish at least four new I'L Pledge chapters in Chicago universities, involving the leaders who attended the conference.
• Goal 3: Create new T-shirts and allow our members to feel more involved.
• Organize an online T-shirt design contest in which I'L Pledgers can vote on and ultimately select the new design.

What is your primary approach? Organizing

Why did you choose this approach?

Network and alliance building, as well as organization, are the primary approaches to this goal because they will foster a tangible outcome of multiple I'L Pledge chapters being created. While the ideological and activist pieces are extremely important, this conference calls on us to focus on spreadsheets, e-mail contacts, phone calls, and alliance and friendship building. At the conference we need to talk to the attendees about funding, how to manage their contacts, how to choose an e-board, etc.

Did you have secondary approaches? What are they?

The secondary approach is organizing. We want to engage as many people as possible. While it is critical that the conference not focus too much on abstract goals, we do want to energize conference attendees by discussing equality, LGBT activism, and T-shirt advocacy.

What will your tactics and activities be?

Year II of I'L Pledge is going to focus largely on creation of chapters in universities in Chicagoland. This will kick off with our conference called Spread the Love: Creating I'L Pledge Chapters in Chicagoland.

Because I'L Pledge is a T-shirt campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois, we would like funding for more T-shirts. (We are all out and have a long waiting list.) We would like to continue the chapter at DePaul with smaller events in the 2008-2009 school year as well as give a few T-shirts to the new I'L Pledge chapters to start them off.

Incidentally, we are planning on having a new T-shirt design contest this spring and, instead of giving the shirts away for free as we have done in the past, charging a small fee. This would help us gather more money for the next batch. We will kick off this T-shirt design contest in April by informing our contact list of the contest and asking for submissions. We will put the submissions on our website, www.ilpledge.org, and encourage voting for two weeks. We will then have a winner and order the shirts. This is also a way for us to stay in the minds of I'L Pledgers this quarter, as we are unable to have an actual event due to e-boarders' conflicting schedules. This T-shirt need is a large chunk of the $2,000 for which we are applying.

Connecting Back to Vision

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

First of all, every person who walks around with a shirt that says "Hooray same-sex marriage" is putting forth a powerful and bold message to everyone in their path. The more people wearing this shirt the better. Second of all, I'L Pledge is largely focused on letter-writing to our elected officials in Springfield. More Illinois representatives and senators need to hear from their constituents, which will be accomplished by encouraging students at these other universities to write, call, and lobby.

Resources and skills you will need

What skills do you need for this approach?

Encouraging already busy and heavily involved campus leaders to create an organization on their campus is going to be difficult. It is true that many have actually e-mailed us and asking how to be involved. However, once they realize how much work it is, those of us on the DePaul e-board will need to be strong and always positive supporters.

We could also employ media outreach skills in order to get out the message that we are spreading and searching for interested people and groups to house an I'L Pledge chapter.