Creating Your Vision

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

As a representative of Oberlin College, particularly focused on environmental issues, my focus was on developing a plan to reframe environmentalism on campus as a more inclusive and diverse issue set. As a larger unified group of students, we will encourage the college to more ambitiously and broadly pursue campus and community sustainability as a social justice issue, in keeping with Oberlin's track-record as a leading progressive institution on race, gender and class equality and justice, as well as environmental justice.

Assessing Your Campus and Community

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

Most students are generally invested, in one way or another, in developing a more equal and just society. The opportunity is in building bridges to these isolated activists. That bridge is climate change.

The fruit is a lack of interest, or information, regarding climate justice issues.
The trunk is a high emphasis on a single group's identity, motives, and goals.
The roots are the perspective that more can be accomplished in a shorter amount of time if the working group is smaller. Big coalitions are challenging because too many interests must be compromised for progress. If your interest group is part of a larger whole, your voice, demands and opportunity to be heard is diminished.

What communities will you work with?

• Campus community

Setting Goals and Deliverables

• Goal 1: Build a better understanding of different student groups interests in climate change.
• Meetings (1-2 per pertinent group) with leaders of student groups, and notes aquired from these discussions.
• A document in some format recording the larger membership of the groups interests, concerns and challenges regarding climate change and their group.
• A composite document comparing and contrasting all groups disparate interests, concerns, questions. A synthesis of their potential grounds for participation. A tenetative answer the questions: "What do you think about climate change? What can the environmental movement do better to respond to your specific areas of interest?"
• Goal 2: Increase the amount of discussion and interest in students, as an avenue towards bringing broad climate change coalition interests to trustees.
• A compilation of feedback after student group discussions (1-2 per group)
• Publication of an editorial in both school newspapers. (2 articles)
• Goal 3: Development of a campus wide concept of the potential for mutually beneficial collaboration around climate change issues. Perhaps also group framing of the values of that coalition.
• Notes regarding what the values of a campus wide coalition might be. (a composite document based on meetings)
• Facilitation of multiple open brainstorming and mission statement development meetings (potentially 8-10, open, but concise meetings with different student groups)
• Broad attendance of trustee meetings as a demonstration of broad student group concern ragarding climate change. (100-200 students)
• An event hosting a speaker in this environmental coalition building field, and a facilitated coalition goal development activity with broad representation from campus groups. (1 open event, and 1 workshop/inspiration session)

What is your primary approach? Network and Alliance Building

Why did you choose this approach?

This approach fits well with what is potentially lacking at Oberlin (a weakness) as well as one of it's greatest strengths: our students passionate interest in their unique arena of society.

Did you have secondary approaches? What are they?

Organizing is absolutely a secondary approach in the later stages of the current blueprint plan.
Capacity building is also another approach, in that part of the goals of the blueprint are to facilitate workshop style activities with other identity groups.

What will your tactics and activities be?

The main tactics and activities will be brief, well structured, formatted and presented discussions and activities facilitated with different identity and action groups on campus.
This includes coalition building and communication, increasing collaboration and relationship building, and joint platform development.

Connecting Back to Vision

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

Accurate understanding of currently dis-united views on broad issues is a fundamentally valuable resource for progress.
Oberlin is nearly a perfect site for this kind of progressive experiment. While most all students would identify as progressives, the expected unity among progressive values is not apparent.
This strategy should contribute to cross-interest communication and network development at Oberlin.
The students collaborating on the leadership of this project will also benefit from the experience, furthering their potential for leadership at the intersections of identity, justice, and progress.

Resources and skills you will need

What skills do you need for this approach?

Workshop facilitation skills.
Communication and listening skills.
Record keeping and information synthesis skills.
Organizational skills in the case of bringing a speaker/workshop facilitator to campus.
Publicity skills for writing editorials.
Motivational skills when encountering disinterest.
Collaborative planning and project development skills.