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The change.org website is running a poll on its readers’ top ten “ideas for change in America.”
They say that “the top 10 rated ideas from the final round will be presented to the Obama administration on January 16th at an event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC,” and that at the NPC they will “announce the launch of a national advocacy campaign behind each idea in collaboration with our nonprofit partners to turn each idea into actual policy.”
Anyone can vote, and the polls close at 5pm Eastern time this afternoon. There are several education-oriented ideas among the leading proposals, and the United States Student Association is urging its members and allies to vote for two in particular — passage of the DREAM Act and student loan forgiveness.
Go check it out.
The Associated Student Government at Northwestern University has been busy this winter.
In recent weeks, ASG has gone live with four different online projects serving the student community — a ride share board, a ratings site for off-campus housing, a research assistance site, and a student guide to academic majors.
The new programs are part of a strategy to shift ASG’s emphasis toward student-directed projects, an ASG representative told the Daily Northwestern. The student government’s operations director estimates that the ride share program has already saved students $15,000 since it went live in early December.
Now, none of these projects stand at the cutting edge of radical activism, it’s true. But each is intended to make a positive practical difference in the lives of students at Northwestern, and several — I’m thinking specifically of the housing site and the academic majors guide — are designed to equalize information imbalances that put students at a disadvantage in dealing with other university community members.
Student services and student advocacy are too often treated as alternatives, or even opposites. In my experience, a strong student government is likely to be (or become) an activist student government, and serving students’ needs makes a student government stronger.
The Texas Student Association, a statewide student advocacy and lobbying group, has officially constituted itself at a meeting on the University of North Texas campus.
Texas’s last statewide student association was founded after the Second World War but went dormant about a decade ago. The new group, organized over the course of the last few months, is moving forward in 2009 with a lobbying agenda that emphasizes pocketbook issues.
A quick Google didn’t turn up a website or contact information for the TSA, but if any of our readers have that info, we’d be glad to post it.
Here’s an excellent project.
Students for a Democratic Society has set up a wiki page for links to news coverage of SDS events and actions. The page is set up chronologically, so it’s easy to see what’s new, and easy to check up on what was going on at any particular time.
Since it’s a wiki, of course, anyone can add anything to it whenever they like. And it’s not just for traditional media coverage, either — I learned about it when the page linked to a December post of ours on the aftermath of a Brown SDS protest.
The page is part of a larger SDS wiki that I haven’t had a chance to explore much yet, but what I have seen I really like.
A morning grab-bag of stuff on the York University strike…
- Our post from last night on the announcement that a date has been set for the contract vote.
- An article from the Globe and Mail newspaper about an anti-strike Facebook group.
- A union parody of the York University website.
- The York Federation of Students has established a strike relief fund.
- The Toronto Star is running a series of profiles of students affected by the strike.
To keep tabs on our ongoing coverage of the York strike, check out our Labor category archives, or just bookmark our main page.
studentactivism.net 
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