College Organizing: A Struggle

Zero Hour
Zero Hour
Nov 1 · 5 min read

By Rachel Serna-Brown, 19

Photo credit by Rachel Serna-Brown, Students from Oberlin and Kenyon College head to Sherrod Brown’s office to demand support for the Green New Deal.

With the rise of the global climate strike, the climate justice movement is a movement praised for its youth leadership and initiative. Youth leaders are constantly in the news for sacrificing their time and education for climate action. While youth organizing in general is arduous, organizing as a full time college student proves to have its own unique set of challenges.

As an out of state college student, organizing, let alone climate organizing, has proven to be very difficult at times. I am currently a sophomore at Oberlin College and have been organizing throughout my whole college career. College organizing has proven to a hardship for a multitude of reasons.

One of the biggest challenges that I face is time management. This is a challenge that not only students face, but any general organizers at almost all times. However, this has been especially hard because I often find myself struggling to balance my time between classes, friends, advocacy work, other clubs, and looking for a job. College is already difficult enough to try to adjust to its life and becoming an independent person. Now add all of those additional factors, and you get a recipe for a disaster. I am also a part of the Sunrise hub at my school which organized our town climate strike on 9/20. Having to plan a strike of this magnitude, as well instructing a teach-in about environmental justice, within the 3 weeks that we had returned back to school really affected my school work. Balancing 4 classes and planning a climate strike, an estimated attendance of 600 people, proved to be too mentally taxing. However, the success from the climate strike made me realize the importance of the role I played in climate advocacy organizing. Although I am learning time management to balance classes and climate advocacy, garnering financial independence has also proven to be a barrier to organizing.

Fortunately enough I was able to survive my first year of college without a job because I needed time to adjust to this new lifestyle. However, I understand that this is a luxury that many people cannot afford. As I carry on to my sophomore year now, the significance of a job dawns on me and is more tangible as I have had time to adjust. However, even just looking for a job is time consuming, especially in a small college town, and when I need a campus job because I receive work study.

Unfortunately, these kinds of financial burdens are what holds many people back from getting involved on campus, which affects the climate organizing effort. I, and many others that I know, feel that it is hard to put in 100% of ourselves into the climate advocacy movement, due to the lack of time, even though that is what is needed of us. The Deputy Director of Logistics of Zero Hour, Faith Ward shares this sentiment, “Being a first generation and low-income students means having to deal with extra stress in trying to navigate college, both financially and structurally, and it only gets harder when you’re trying to do those things and organize at the same time. That extra stress really takes a toll, and in a movement full of privilege, it’s not something that we talk about enough. A lot of my peers have to try to keep themselves and the planet afloat at the same time.”

In addition to financial burdens and time management being barriers to college student organizing, the change in state politics is an added burden. My home state, New Jersey, is a very Democratic based policy state and our state government has a majority of Democrats. In an ideal world, this how all states should be as it makes for advocating for liberal policy easier. After doing some organizing in high school, I had established some contacts in the field which made for future organizing to be easier.

However, once I moved to college in Ohio, it was a different story. I was unaware of their politics and had to start my contacts from scratch again. The Ohio government is currently dominated by a Republican supermajority which has changed the playing field in approaches to organizing for any policy that is remotely construed as Democratic.

I also recognize that I am fortunate enough to go to a college with a very liberal campus. This has made organizing within my campus much easier as we are able to garner support from many of the students, as well as local businesses and the community of Oberlin. However, this further indicates that our efforts are not as needed on a local level and to focus our efforts on more state policies.

Many of our actions have been geared towards our state senator, Sherrod Brown, as he is one of the very few Democrats in Ohio with power. We have tried to pressure him into sponsoring the Green New Deal to no avail as he is very hesitant about endorsing any sort of climate policy. It is very disheartening that we have had little to no success with our Democratic senator, let alone trying to approach any of our Republican representatives which is a majority of our state government. During the 2018 election, I interned with the Ohio State Democratic Coordinated campaign which involved a lot of canvassing. This meant that I interacted with lots of different kinds of people, including Republicans that were unsupportive and intolerable to a lot of my ideologies.

This kind of organizing is not only more difficult due to the difference in political ideologies, but this an extra external factor that turns college students away from climate advocacy efforts. College students hold so much power as they speak for their generation and hold the experiences of advanced organizers. Yet, we have little to no time or motivation, due to the difference in political ideologies, to make the change that we want to see happen. This is why I encourage and motivate all college students to make a more conscious effort to make the time available to participate in any kind of political action, no matter how big or small-especially for the climate advocacy movement as its growing need of attention continues to increase by the second.

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