Civic leader starts initiative to turn protesters into policymakers
30th May 2017 · 0 Comments
By Meghan Holmes
Contributing Writer
Last month, more than two hundred area high school and college students gathered at the University of New Orleans as part of the Isaiah Institute’s Student Civic Engagement Strategy.
Executive Director Joe Givens launched the program last year with the goal of moving students beyond protest and into policy, using techniques developed during his 40 years organizing faith-based groups around New Orleans, and also seen in Chicago during Barack Obama’s organizing days.
“We know our young people care and want to be engaged, and protest is an important step in raising the public consciousness, but we want to train them to go beyond that,” said Givens. “This model worked in the churches and we believe it can work for students.”
In addition to drawing inspiration from past organizing experience, Givens also looked to student movements in the 1960s civil rights era as a model for the institute’s Student Civic Engagement Strategy. “There’s historical precedence for this,” Givens said. “In Selma, it was students like John Lewis who led the march. They were beat by Bull Connor. Young people played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement.”
The Isaiah Institute was formed in 2008 as part of a renewed effort to rebuild area churches following Hurricane Katrina. Givens began working on organizing churches in the 1990s with an organization called All Churches Together and specifically through an initiative called All Congregations Together.
“We brought together faith-based organizations to project values into the community, and we had great successes reducing crime in New Orleans in the 1990s through our partnership with the mayor’s office. Marc Morial said yes when we asked for things like a community center, and he would ask if we were going to help, which is the reaction you want to see from a civic leader.”
After the storm, churches with hundreds of members often saw attendance drop into the single digits. Givens and other organizers wanted to see a resurgence in that community, and in its ability to influence local policy. “We formed Isaiah with assistance from (civil rights leader) Andrew Young, who also came and spoke to the students during our April convocation. He said to the students, ‘After Selma, and after Birmingham, we had the next step. What is yours?’”
Prior to the convocation, the Isaiah Institute began recruiting student leaders, looking for 10-15 students from each school in a diverse group including UNO, Southern University at New Orleans, Dillard, Loyola, Tulane and Xavier universities, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as St. Augustine, Ben Franklin, and Lake Area high schools.
“This was a targeted campaign to find a core group at each school, not something advertised on social media for mass attendance, and we also worked with faculty dedicated to the project,” Givens said.
Selected students spent months conducting a listening campaign on their campuses, using one-on-one conversation to address issues. “When you have a serious conversation with someone about an important issue that’s impacting them, you build a relationship that you didn’t have before, and you begin to learn what they’re passionate about. Later on, if you decide to address this issue, you ask that person, ‘Will you help us?’ and that’s how you get folks engaged,” he said.
Different campus representatives arrived to the convocation at UNO with a different list of issues.
Dillard students worried about crossing busy streets during rush hour. Students at Loyola and Tulane commonly mentioned public safety issues, like crime on Freret Street. Across the board, students expressed concern about national politics and the Trump Administration. Many talked about participation in the 2018 midterm elections, and the importance of voter registration and education. Students brought up issues equally prescient during similar 1960s campaigns including criminal justice reform, police/student relations, homelessness and public safety.
“The listening campaign is the first step in an organizing model that builds relationships, and this is what Obama was utilizing before he was in the White House,” Givens said. “The next step is training and connecting students to legislators and policy influencers.”
Students will continue to work with faculty advisers skilled in law, public policy, political science and criminal justice to research and develop policy initiatives and further their organizing skills.
“We are going to hit the ground running this fall with a training in models of organizing, which will lead to further listening campaigns and then beginning to research the issues that surface. That will lead to opportunities to influence the general session of the Louisiana legislature. They will have access to officials that make policy,” Givens said.
The Student Civic Engagement Strategy initiative’s first convocation took place on the 60th anniversary of the founding of SNCC, and the 49th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. As the students met and discussed issues also relevant to the community since that era, Givens was struck by the many parallels between past student movements, and the Isaiah Institute’s current effort to build a citywide collaborative reminiscent of those efforts.
“I think that sometimes history does repeat itself. This is a time when many students feel they may not have a friend in Washington, and that the government doesn’t care how they feel, who they are, or what they want. They are in the streets protesting, and saying Black lives matter, and they need to know there is historical precedence for what they are doing. There is a next step, and opportunities to really civically engage,” he said.
This article originally published in the May 29, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
