New Jersey Students are Bringing It
I took a great trip out to Rutgers on Saturday for their “Practical Guide to Changing the World” conference — a really sharp, really well-conceived, really well-executed daylong event.
If you’re a student activist or a student government type looking to kickstart organizing on your campus, you could do far worse than to follow the “Practical Guide” model. They started with a keynote and Q&A (your humble servant, in this case) over lunch, then broke for four one-hour workshop sessions. There were about a dozen workshops in all, with five slots per hour, so almost all of the workshops were offered twice.
And that was it. A rousing speech, a slate of practical trainings — everything from how to run a meeting to legal rights of demonstrators to using social media in organizing (me again) — and done. Six hours in all, everyone still fresh at the end, very little flakeout at the end of the day. It really was a model of a one-day, campus-based
