Becas Por la Liberación: Mobilizing Our Student Resources Towards Justice

We’re sitting in a van on the way to Tucson, Arizona for Scholarships A-Z’s one-day conference. Earlier in the day we announced at our press conference that due to our campaign, Prescott College is implementing a $30.00 fee towards a scholarship for undocumented students on National Institutions Coming Out Day. We’re the first in Arizona to do this, and the second nationwide. The past week was a hurricane of messaging and framing, editing press releases, scheduling interviews, dealing with administrators, handling racist backlash and more. Writing this blog during the four-hour drive is the first time we’ve slowed down and reflected on everything.

The Freedom Education Fund (FEF) was started by Miriel Manning for their senior project. Miriel was inspired to start the scholarship after interning with Scholarships A-Z, an organization helping undocumented students attain higher education. FEF also built on the on-campus, anti-racist organizing history by mobilizing resources that structurally prioritize students pushed out of academia.

Miriel did the groundwork of setting up the scholarship with the Board of Trustees and began raising money. More students joined into what grew into a larger collaboration between community members, undergraduate students, the Social Justice Human Rights Masters program, and faculty.

In the Spring of 2015, students at Loyola University had passed a $2.50 student fee for a similar scholarship. Inspired, in the Fall, we began petitioning to gather support of a $30.00 fee. After collecting the majority of students’ signatures, our student government endorsed our petition, and that was enough for administration to implement the fee in the fall of 2016.

We were inspired by Loyola and we hope we can inspire other students as well.

In no particular order here are five tips for students planning a similar campaign.

1. Have a solid team that you trust.

Our core team of organizers are all wonderful people who we could count on. Each person actively worked to their strengths and took their own initiative to complete tasks they saw needed to be done. Together we strategized, petitioned, learned, made mistakes, ranted, skipped classes and meals, and had delirious late nights. Of course, as with any team, there were disagreements, but just like everything else we worked through them together.

While discussing how we developed this trust we asked “at what point did this stop being Miriel’s project and become our project?” Every one of us had a different answer, but we all agreed there wasn’t one specific moment but happened gradually.

2. Find partners in the struggle and learn from the success of others.

Early on Miriel interviewed other schools in the US to learn how their scholarships for undocumented students work. They also learned a lot with Scholarships A-Z. Eventually we connected with the Arizona Dream Act Coalition and with students at Illinois Institute of Technology (who are also doing a fee campaign) to exchange knowledge and resources. Finding like-minded people provided regular reminders that we’re not in this alone but part of a larger movement for migrant justice.

3. Find the bureaucratic procedure to get the fee passed.

Every school will have a different set of procedures and bureaucracy to start scholarships and pass fees. At our school, there had never been a student initiated fee before. It took many meetings from the various departments to figure out the process and ultimately in the end we had to work with our administration to create one.

4. Develop strategic messaging and media.

We got our media list from our friends at Scholarships A-Z and Arizona Dream Act Coalition and worked on our framing and did practice interviews. We sent out the press release Monday, did a huge social media push, and held a press conference on April 7th for National Institutions Coming Out Day. Lesson from this included the need to have updated our list further in advance and to keep in mind the the value of developing relationships with media for the future.

The conservative media was claiming that there was widespread opposition to the fee, it was forced on us, and that it was controversial, but this was absolutely false. Any loud opposition was actually manufactured by conservative media. At one point we were the number one trending story at Fox News. What we cared most about was potential new students at Prescott College and other movement activists finding out about the fund.

Late one night we all stopped what we were doing and heavily tweeted and called progressive media outlets. We told them “if Fox News was covering us, why weren’t you?” It worked. The next day the supportive news articles came flooding in.

5. Prepare for backlash

Immediately after the announcement, racist backlash quickly arrived. The dehumanizing use of the word “illegal” was rampant. The school got calls from people upset at the fee and the Facebook page was full of negative and racist comments. The local radio had called Prescott College a “sanctuary for ISIS”.

We anticipated the backlash, but we weren’t prepared.

We campaigned for every on-campus student to pay the fee, but in order to implement the fee Fall 2016, we had to compromise with the administration that students could opt out of the fee if they refused it as long as this option would not be publicized. But the backlash scared administrators — they went back on their promise to not publicize the opt out, decided that they were no longer going to participate in our press conference, and asked us not to have it on campus. If we had met with administration to prepare for backlash prior, they might have had more courage in that moment.

The week was already stressful enough with media work, but now we had the extra task of returning to negotiations with a nervous administration. Movements are complicated and are never as rosy as we read about them in history. Most of our team were angry and confused with how to move forward and we didn’t all agree. Some felt betrayed by the administration. Others were upset, but brought it back to the fact that we still won the implementation of the scholarship and fee.The next day, after we got national support, administration recognized again the importance of our work for the college and came back to us — now we can figure out our power to continue impacting the priorities of our college and stand united with our messaging.

Mainstream media wants this to be a story about a fight between students and administration, between college and community, but that’s not our story. Our story is that united, as a student body, as a school, and a community, we are mobilizing our resources towards justice.