So you may know that some of us, in addition to blogging on Innermost Parts, are also staff on the Justice League, which is a new online organizing group on campus. We just sent out an end-of-the-year email laying out all that we accomplished in fall 2010 to all our members. Here’s a slightly modified version of what we wrote:
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Dear friends,
Happy New Year. Now that we’re in Winter Break – I hope you are enjoying it! – we’d like to thank you for working with us at the Justice League over the last semester. Thanks to you and hundreds of other Brandeis community members, we achieved a lot. Together, we:
- Elected Adam Hughes Junior Representative to the Board of Trustees.
- Trained 70 students to be leaders and community organizers.
- Brought cage-free eggs to campus.
- Hosted alumni to teach and inspire us
- Brought the progressive community on campus closer together.
- Invested in progressive groups on campus.
- Influenced Peretz Apology.
- Celebrated Brandeis.
We rallied together to support Adam Hughes in his campaign, and he won. Adam is smart, humble, and he is a member of the activist community. During his two-year tenure, students will have a devoted and strategic advocate. This was big.
At the tail end of September, we hosted a “Campus Camp Wellstone” with three trainers from Wellstone Action, a national center for training and leadership development. The hours of training covered topics like campaign planning, crafting a message, leadership development, how to work with the media, recruiting volunteers, and more.
We partnered with the Real Food Challenge to turn out 877 people to vote on cage-free eggs at Brandeis. 877 voters is huge – more people voted in that poll than the vast majority of student union elections. The results were lopsidedly in our favor as well – 89.1% voted for cage-free eggs. This campaign gave us a great model for how we could work effectively with other groups in the future. The Real Food Challenge did a wonderful job taking the lead on this and we look forward to working with them again on future campaigns.
Corey Hope Leaffer, a strategist with SEIU Boston and all around rad individual, joined us to run a workshop on creating effective leadership and building strong organizations. Later, we brought Andrew Slack to a Hillel dinner of 400 people to talk about Brandeis, Social Justice, Harry Potter and changing the world. He spoke and then engaged with community members for over two hours; it was truly incredible. With your help, we will be able to replicate these awesome experiences and expand this promising program in the future.
We held 3 summits for the leaders of progressive clubs. Together, we discussed common problems, came up with collaborative solutions, shared best practices, and made connections. We also worked with our partners at InnermostParts.org to give progressive clubs access and a platform on the site. Now they can get their ideas heard by administration and faculty, reach out to potential members, and coordinate with other activists.
We value solidarity and we value the larger social justice movement. That’s why we gave over $500 out in grants to six progressive groups on campus. We helped fund STAND’s successful fundraising barbecue, Positive Foundation’s hunger banquet, SEA’s postcard campaign, the Labor Coalition’s meet the janitor lunch, the Dem’s Food Not Bombs speaker, and Real Food’s amazing end-of-year banquet and strategy meeting.
This semester opened with a bang. Marty Peretz, a famous and powerful Brandeis Alum, sparked an uproar when he wrote inflammatory, hurtful and shocking things in The New Republic. Almost 500 of us immediately signed an open letter rebuking him – Brandeis was founded specifically to defend the marginalized or minority, after all. New Voices magazine wrote a feature about us, and we were covered in the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and other media. Two days after the launch of our campaign, Peretz backed down and apologized. Friends of Peretz told us that they had no doubt that he knew about us and that we had a large role in his decision to apologize.
The Westboro Baptist “Church” scheduled a demonstration attacking Brandeis. We united as a community to plan our response together. Our hastily-assembled group of volunteers raised $4301.72, gathered commitments of 1417 members of the Brandeis community to celebrate everything that Brandeis stands for, threw a festival on the great lawn, held events throughout the day, earned media attention, got the entire school on-board, and grew together as leaders and citizens. I am so proud to have been part of this with you all. In planning and executing all this, we showed that all Brandeis students are leaders and can be leaders – when a challenge came our way, students from all different parts of the community stepped up to take it on. Much of our work at Brandeis involves prodding this institution forward, pressuring those in power to live up to our values. I’m proud to have been able to work with you on something different – a cheery event that reminds everyone why Brandeis is worth it in the first place.
Wow. When the two of us began writing this letter, we did not fully realize how much we had accomplished in one short semester; but looking at this list – wow. We hope you’re impressed with yourself.
Brandeis was founded upon a revolutionary idea: that this University could also be part of a movement for justice. The Brandeis Justice League’s mission is to fight injustice, to right that which is wrong, and to make sure that vision comes to pass.
Over the last semester, we’ve worked with this goal in mind, focusing our efforts in two primary directions – boldly taking a stand for Brandeis values, and building the strength of progressives on campus. Morgan and I couldn’t have done a lot of this without your help and participation. Thank you. I hope you approve.
If you like what you see and want to join us as a team member, please let us know in the comments or via email. I hope you do.
It’s been our pleasure to report back to you. I hope you find joy in seeing how the campaigns you’ve worked on with us have ended successfully.
Please, let us know what you think of all this.
Enjoy the rest of the break.
-Sahar Massachi and Morgan Gross, Justice League