Creating Your Vision

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

My vision for Columbus is one in which greater awareness is given to how class divides activists and organizations and creates a barrier preventing cooperation and mutual aid between them, so that we can overcome class issues and become a more cohesive and powerful network.

Assessing Your Campus and Community

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

Columbus has many issues facing it, such as environmental justice enemies like American Electric Power, American Municipal Power, Battelle, etc, and social justice problems, like growing poverty, hunger, homelessness, and gentrification. It also has many activists who are eager to face these enemies and issues, but whom are under-skilled and under-prepared to do so. This blueprint would aim to empower these activists with the skills, knowledge, and tools to run healthy, productive, and successful campaigns.

What communities will you work with?

• Campus community
• Local community

Setting Goals and Deliverables

• Goal 1: Increase activist knowledge of/comfort with the tactics they will need to run winning campaigns
• To have 7-10 Free the Planet members attend the workshop
• To have 20-25 activists from outside groups attend
• Participants will 'explore their class backgrounds at their own pace and without the burdens of judgment, blame or guilt-tripping'.
• After the workshop, collectively develop a sound list of points of unity committed to class-issue awareness within the activist community, and a pledge to acknowledge and overcome such issues
• Goal 2: To build coalitions across the labor, peace, welfare-rights, environmental and other movements around Columbus and on OSU's campus
• 3-5 outside activist groups like WARR, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, Women Making a Difference, Student for a Sustainable Campus, and Students Against Sweatshops will help organize and members will attend the event
• A list of needs and tasks will be created by a core group of activists from the participating organizations that can be taken back to the groups so that tasks can be facilitated back to members who wish to help organize the event
• Develop a stronger relationship between participating organizations, so that at least one more event is cooperatively coordinated this year
• Goal 3: To give members of Free the Planet the experience of organizing a weekend-long event
• Leadership development of 3-5 newer members who haven't organizaed an event like this before, by encouraging them to be point people on various necessary tasks, like coordinating the Groundwork Team, the Student Outreach team, the Funding Team, etc.
• Everyone who attends will feel more comfortable working with members of the other organizations in attendance, despite differing campaigns, politics, etc
• at least 3 new people will join Free the Planet through attending the event

What is your primary approach? Network and Alliance Building

Why did you choose this approach?

This event will provide Free the Planet an opportunity to reach out to other community organizations and demographics that we have not previously been in contact with.
This will help us in the future, as we will increase our visibility in the Columbus community. It will also provide an opportunity to increase our membership by reaching out to community members and OSU students. By increasing our visibility and membership, it will increase the power Free the Planet has in Columbus and on campus to make change.
What is more, this could be an opportunity for other groups to meet one another, and encourage them to work together even though their backgrounds, membership class-base, goals and issues are different. Hopefully, after this event reaching out to organizations from other class backgrounds will be made a priority and it will be easier as well.

What will your tactics and activities be?

-Grassroots outreach (Visiting contacts and their organizations)
-Strategic online organizing via OSNs
-flyering on campus and around Columbus to bring in people or organizations that might be interested in attending, but that we are not aware of yet
-putting it on the Sporeprint Calendar

Connecting Back to Vision

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

Columbus is a great city because it has a lot of things to work on and a lot of diverse people to work on them. However, groups of activists are commonly divided along racial, economic, gender, and sexual lines, resulting in a generally disjointed and ineffective movement. My vision for Columbus is to work towards a more united, cooperative, radical community, and I feel that we can do that only when we realize the dichotomies within our city and work to overcome them. Workshops like 'Class Matters' go beyond particular campaigns and raise awareness instead about deeper issues that we all, everyone across the country, are faced with, like racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and oppression in all forms. While we all play our own role in the movement, we need to realize that the things we do, independently and on a group level need to address these issues, should we wish to work to a more just world.

Resources and skills you will need

What skills do you need for this approach?

-Leadership development for our current members
-Networking across racial, economic, gender, age, and state lines
-Using different tactics to inform people of the event (flyering, attending meetings, ads)