On Thursday I was out and about until two in the morning helping out USSA students with plenary meeting prep, and then I was up again at seven to start getting ready for the plenary itself, so I never had a chance to post a recap of the day’s events.

The plenary itself went for more than seventeen hours starting a little after ten o’clock Friday morning, and it was astounding in all sorts of ways. There’s a lot to say about it, and I’ll put up a full post about yesterday’s events later, but first a quick overview of Thursday.

The day was devoted to workshops and caucus meetings. The workshops covered a lot of ground — from “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: How to Prevent Burnout” to “Autonomous Organizing Down Under,” led by the president of the Australian National Union of Students, David Barrow — but a common thread ran through almost all of them.

USSA sees itself first and foremost as an organization of grassroots student organizers. It conducts regular Grass Roots Organizing Weekend (GROW) trainings for its membership, and many of its staff and officers come up through the ranks of its GROW trainers. Its major campaigns are organizing campaigns, and its closest institutional allies share that perspective.

Over and over again at this Congress, USSA’s formal and informal leadership has framed questions in terms of organizing strategy and tactics, pressing their fellow students to plan concretely for how to run and win campaigns around the issues they care about. This is not a group that’s particularly interested in making abstract statements of principle or engaging in acts of symbolic protest for protest’s sake.

I’m off to run a workshop now, but I’m hoping to find some free time later this afternoon to post about yesterday’s plenaries.

Previously:
USSA Congress Begins Today!
USSA Congress 2009, Day One
USSA Congress 2009, Day Two