At our 8/25 meeting, we reached several major decisions about the dates and locations for two upcoming events:
- September 29: Bay Area Student Union Forum @ CCSF
- October 20: Statewide Student Union Conference @ UC Berkeley
We would love to get SoCal folks involved as soon as possible in shaping these events, partcularly the conference in October. We have yet to form working groups for the confence, but it would be great for folks to start talking about ideas for the agenda/how this conference might be used to build the union project. Please feel free to send any ideas, large or small, along to me (elizabeth.demartelly@gmail.com), and I’ll start collecting them for discussion after the September meeting.
In the immediate future, our meetings will focus on building for the September 29 forum at CCSF. This date and location were chosen in order to use this space to help building CCSF’s organizing capacity before October 15, which is the school’s deadline for submitting a major restructuring plan to the private accreditation firm WASC. We will use this forum as both an agitational event for CCSF students and to discuss how a student union might intervene with plans to further privatize education.
The following people have volunteered to bottom line working groups in preparation for the forum:
- Securing a Location at CCSF: Alex and Carlos
- Outreach/Propaganda: Juan, Carla, and Alex (many more people had great ideas and should feel free to pursue them autonomously even if I neglected to record your name!)
- Fundraising to Bring International Unionists: Alex and Andy
- Planning the Form and Content of the Forum: Juan, Carlos, Alex, Rhea, and Beezer
*The next CA Student Union meeting will be on September 8 @12pm at the Redstone Building in San Francisco (2926 16th Street).* At this meeting, we will be hammering out proposals for the form/content of this CCSF forum–if you have proposals or ideas, again, please send them to me. If folks from the East Bay want to head over to this meeting together, meet at the Downtown Berkeley BART at 11.
P.S. For those of us in NorCal, don’t forget that on September 17, Occupy SF will be celebrating the 1 year anniversary of the Occupy Movement. They are calling for a creative convergence at 555 California St. in SF at 5pm and have asked that education be present as a prominent theme.