‘Move Along,’ a screen print artist Art Hazelwood is displaying in the ‘Visual Politics Exhibition.’

Election season is here again, and when words are just not enough, art is one way for people to express their opinions and ideas about social and political issues.

The Santa Cruz Art League (SCAL) is making this possible once again before it’s time to vote. SCAL celebrates visual and performing artists and makes the arts accessible to the community.

The “Visual Politics: Art and the American Experience” exhibition will run from Oct. 27 to Nov. 25. This year, Visual Politics is judged by Maureen Davidson, who said she believes the artists’ pieces will share unique points of views about social and political issues.

“The artists do look at things in a different light,” Davidson said. “So in order to bring something to two-dimensions and have something powerful to say on a canvas is a process of distillation, which means it’s boiled down to its essence.”

Curated by Peter Selz, the “Visual Politics” exhibition began four years ago right before the 2008 presidential election. The exhibition is once again taking place before an election, as it is a time when people are thinking about big political and social issues. Artists sent their applications to Davidson and were chosen among many to be displayed in the exhibition. There will be a $1,000 “Best of Show” award, as well as $1,000 in additional cash rewards.

Applications consisted of several hundred pieces of artwork from all over the country for this year’s exhibition. Many of the artists who are sending in their work usually focus on other topics.

“It’s many artists who do not normally deal with political issues,” Davidson said, “but have in this year come up to something constructive to say about the political and social issues in the U.S.”

One of those artists is David Fleming, who has been a member of SCAL for about 20 years. He is displaying two pieces for the exhibit, titled “Travesty” and “Perdition.”

“Travesty” is a painting of marching protesters holding signs with a police officer in the foreground, snarling dogs in tow. “Perdition” displays four men sitting on a bench in a barren landscape who are meant to portray bankers or hedge fund managers.

“It just doesn’t look like a very pleasant place at all,” Fleming said. “They’re waiting for their just rewards.”

About 10 percent of Fleming’s work surrounds around political and social justice work, but he likes to change it up and work on a little bit of everything. He believes art can communicate ideas to society.

“That’s one of the ways people get inspired for certain causes or certain reasons,” he said. “I get inspired mainly to do work that maybe I see in an exhibit. It’s like a point of departure for me to take off on and try something new.”

Art Hazelwood is another artist also involved with quite a few programs that create art relating to social and political justice. When it comes to working on the topic of political justice, he said there is a lot to go around.

“When you’re working on a political issue, especially when you’re working with organizations and people who are activists, [art] contributes a big part to any kind of movement like that,” Hazelwood said.

In the fall of 2008, Hazelwood organized a nationwide series of exhibitions called “Art of Democracy,” all focusing on the state of the American political scene. He has also worked with many San Francisco and Bay Area groups on issues with the homeless to create his own touring exhibition called “Hobos to Street People”. His screen print, “Move Along” portrays the injustice of the law against sitting on sidewalks in San Francisco Bay Area cities. “Move Along” will be one of his three works displayed in “Visual Politics: Art and the American Experience.”

Hazelwood said he believes art is an important way to stand up for political movements.

“Generally you’re up against big money,” he said. “And we can only really compete on creativity. We can’t compete with the size of the megaphone.”

For more information on events at the Santa Cruz Art League, go to www.scal.org.

City on a Hill Press: How feasible do you think it is for green jobs to stay in the United States? Are green jobs enough to make up for endemic losses?

Van Jones: You won’t be able to offset all of the losses in the manufacturing sector, but you can offset some. We never propose green jobs as the answer to every economic problem in the US. We don’t think it’s enough, but we don’t think you can get there without the green manufacturing component.

CHP: Do you have suggestions or tangible ideas of how to bridge the class gap in the environmentalist movement?

Van Jones: We have to look for those environmental solutions that also address poverty. In other words, an environmental movement that can fight pollution and poverty at the same time will get a huge following. For example, community gardening and farmers markets are ways for people to get healthy food who can’t afford to go to Whole Foods and those are things we should be focused on. Maybe not everyone can afford to put a solar panel on their house, but we can fight to make sure that public school buildings, our community centers, those places in our neighbors…where we have opportunities, are being solarized. And that the jobs that are being created to solarize low income communities are going to low income people. Those kinds of fights tend to put those conversations in a different place.

CHP: Do you think it’s important that legislation is enacted to insure that those kind of programs are targeted in the right communities?

Van Jones: Yes, I think those communities that have been locked in to the pollution based economy – locked into the poison, locked into the bad health that came with the pollution based economies, we should make sure those communities are locked into the clean and green economy.

CHP: Do you see environmentalism as self-determination for communities of color?

Van Jones: I don’t think of environmentalism as a single issue that’s over there in a corner. We all have to drink water that’s clean, we all have to breath air, we all have to eat food. I see it as the basis of every other issue. What good is it to, say, have the right to education if the school was full of lead and asbestos and poisonous water? Your every other right is undermined if you don’t have your environmental rights protected. Environmental protection and environmental opportunity is the key to being able to enjoy every other right.

CHP: Because one of the problems with off-shoring work is fewer labor regulations, do you think environmentalism has to be a global tide as opposed to something that has to be targeted immediately in the US?

Van Jones: We have to start where we are. It’s very hard to get other countries to do things – it’s hard to get our own country to do things. Sometimes I think people will say, ‘If China won’t do it, we won’t do it.’ And I think that’s the wrong way to look at it because, 25 percent of the green house gases are from the US. … Some huge amount of the existing carbon in the air is just for our little 5 percent of the world. We just have to do the right thing and move in a cleaner and greener direction. The business community always screams and yells about regulation whenever America tries and makes them clean up their practices. And as soon as those laws are past, they out perform even their own expectations of meeting them. It’s because once you pass a law, regulating green house gas emissions for example, and everybody has to deal with it, they start competing – who can do it faster, who can be more efficient?

CHP: A lot of students of color are feeling disenfranchised and a lot of students are going to be leaving university and entering into the work force. What would you say to those students about how to address this changing economy?

Van Jones: I think that on a shared basis, on a collective basis, one of the most important things I think needs to be done is not only that President Obama needs to be reelected, but that he gets reelected based on a mandate on your generation’s needs … I don’t think we should give up on or abandon making DC act right. Closer to home, I do think we’re going to have to become much entrepreneurial … There use to be fantasy you’d get out of school, you’d ride your credit card onto a big McMansion in the suburbs and you’d buy a big screen TV and you’d be happy forever. I think that version of the American Dream is dead. I think that we’re going to have to actually help each other – gifting, bartering, sharing as a part of the strategy to make up for the shortfall of the formal economy. We have to be a nation of neighbors … The big picture: this generation could have a huge impact on the election. If you say, ‘Look, this is ridiculous. We’re the first generation of Americans being thrown under the bus economically, and there’s still no jobs program in place for my generation, there’s still no loan forgiveness program for my generation.’ If you raise hell about that, I think the political system will start to respond.

City on a Hill Press’ coverage of Van Jones’ address at UC Santa Cruz on Feb. 21

In 2011 protesters shut down Wall Street, on March 1 protesters will shut down the university, and on March 5 they will shut down the capitol. It is no surprise to the UC Santa Cruz student body that we are in a class struggle for social and economic equality.

Van Jones spoke on campus on Feb. 21 about the economic crisis and his reformation of the American dream.

Jones is a Yale Law School graduate, former advisor to the Obama administration, bestselling author of “The Green Collar Economy,” award-winning pioneer in human rights and clean energy economy, and was dubbed one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009 by TIME magazine.

Charismatic and humorous, Jones described the center of America’s struggle as an economic and cultural task. The notion of the American Dream, he said, is a confused and misinterpreted one that should be transformed to better reflect today’s society.

“There is a thing they call the American Dream,” he said. “This is the notion that everyone in American is going to get as rich as they possibly can. This is not the American dream, but it is the American dance. This dream is a dying dream. This dream is dying, and it should be dying.”

Jones is currently working on an organization called Rebuild the Dream, which focuses on community reformation through traditional techniques, like teach-ins and rallies, as well as digital services like online petitions and viral digital projects. The plan is to reestablish the American dream as something that protects and expands jobs for the middle and lower classes.

UCSC students are part of the new generation in this plan, Jones said.

“The diversity you have in your generation is a miracle in history,” he said. “You have every class, every faith, every race, every gender, and you’re even making new genders. You have all of these things, and you get along pretty well. This diversity, through your generation’s social and political movements, can and will restore prosperity.”

First-year Leilani Salvador is a member of the Cultural Arts and Diversity Program board of directors. Salvador helped organize and sponsor the event.

“One of our goals [with bringing Jones to speak] was to get a more politically diverse community,” Salvador said. “The majority of the politically active communities on campus are ethnically white students. For us to have Jones, who is a politically prominent figure, represented by so many ethnically-based groups really encourages ethnic students to participate in the campus’ political opportunities.”

Dr. Marla Wyche-Hall, director of the African American Resource and Cultural Center, one of the event’s sponsors, said Jones spoke well about the challenges and promises facing our diverse, multicultural generation.

“I think one of the purposes of his speech was to cross boundaries,” she said. “We have to acknowledge the differences between our social and ethnic groups, but, despite this ‘rainbow generation,’ we can still come together and make change.”

Read City on a Hill Press’ exclusive Q&A with Van Jones

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

When it comes to protesting in Santa Cruz, James Christianson knows that things just aren’t what they used to be.

Christianson wears the ’60s revolution well with his grizzled complexion, wild grown-out hair and colorful vintage style. As a Santa Cruz resident for over four decades and an American studies lecturer at UCSC, he has witnessed political activism at its peak, and he now watches students struggle to get their voices heard.

“There’s different little groups that are doing wonderful work as far as activism’s concerned, but they’re kind of isolated,” Christianson said. “It’s not a massive organization with many people, a movement. There’s a general apathy that you see throughout the country.”

Santa Cruz’s tie-dyed footsteps of the town’s so-called defining era, the ’60s and ’70s, have been washed away with new-wave rallying.

Activism has evolved from the hippie-esque, with campus support becoming harder and harder to win over.

While the Vietnam War and the education crisis are completely separate issues, each demands a movement to achieve change.

In 1970, students burned draft-cards at the Quarry Plaza, the same place where some students now stroll past rallies against fee hikes. Today, classes are canceled in community and American studies due to budget cuts, but in 1970 spring quarter classes were canceled or reorganized to focus on Vietnam War issues.

“What we’re talking about is numbers,” Christianson said. “To be able to marshal lots of people to come together on these kinds of issues … To get a large representative of the student population to be out there … to put their ass on the line and make a righteous hue and cry about injustice, about bullshit, about corruption.”

Last year on March 4, an organized strike against the education crisis attracted enough protesters to shut down three UCSC entrances. Sustaining this passion is the strike committee’s toughest challenge.

“Once Kerr Hall, and then what?” said fourth-year Leo Ritz-Barr, a politics major and strike organizer. “How do you get bigger than Kerr Hall? We shut down the campus for a day. Then what? What is the most effective message?”

Since the occupation of Kerr Hall and the March 4 protests, students and workers have gone from large-scale action to the incremental approach of rallies in hopes of spreading awareness about UC issues. The campus demonstrations of the 2009-10 school year were, if anything, large in student numbers. But this year’s informative rallies suffer from low student turnout. Student apathy is a threat event organizers face year-round, with the main question being: Why don’t students show up?

Christianson attributes UCSC’s smaller rallies to issues that are harder to pinpoint. He spent the ’60s and ’70s in California, when the counter-cultural aspect of Santa Cruz drove change.

“You get the [turnout] numbers ‘back in the day’ because things were more clearly defined,” Christianson said. “The Vietnam war was much more clear. [It was about] civil rights. The black movement. The women’s movement. Free speech movements. Students for a democratic society. Things were more compellingly defined. [Now], there’s a malaise and abstractness about it.”

The activism that Christianson refers to such as the women’s movement brought on 700 signatures in 1972 from students petitioning to form a women’s studies program at UCSC. In 1981, the only instructor teaching Native American studies was dismissed, and 600 people marched to the chancellor’s office in response, insisting their demands be met in five days. Today, despite activist efforts, a similar humanities major, American studies, has been suspended.

Today, rallies that are large in numbers usually happen during March protest week, petering out during the remainder of the year.

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) interns like Victoria Salgado try to lessen this apathy by organizing the efforts of students and workers. Salgado is a second-year sociology, Latino studies and art major whose job is to spread awareness of union issues to students and engage them in sustaining UCSC’s student-worker front.

“It’s true — it’s like you build it up for one day and then you just disperse,” Salgado said. “So how can you keep that flow of things? I can’t really explain it to you, because I myself don’t know how to do that.”

Some UCSC workers have also noticed the lack of campus presence at rallies.

Nicholas Gutierrez is a dining hall worker at College 9. He became active in the worker’s union seven years ago. He participates in fighting for student-worker rights, but he says often five to 10 workers show up at rallies and event organization meetings.

“… There’s a huge, huge percentage of students that don’t support, or they just turn the other way or they just don’t care,” Gutierrez said. “And I’ve always wondered why, because when student fees go up, it affects everyone.”

On Oct. 7, 2010, 200 demonstrators appeared at the bookstore. In November 2009, about 150 students occupied Kerr Hall overnight. In March 2010, students shut down the campus starting at 6 a.m. Students and workers continue to spread awareness, but turnout has changed along with the tactics.

Ritz-Barr said low turnout forces organizers to try new strategies like “occasionally running through a classroom.”

“One of the most effective ways of getting people out is disrupting large lecture halls,” he said. “You’ve got 500 kids sitting in a GE that they don’t want to be in, and you give them an option to go do something cool.”

Noah Miska is a student active in organizing rally events. He organized the March 1, 2011 event, in which around 500 students spelled out “Free education” with their bodies in an attempt to direct people toward calmer, less agitated discussions about campus issues.

“You can’t get very far by just pointing out what’s wrong, by protesting,” Miska said. “I think you need to lead by example and try to create the world that you want to see, which is exactly what I’m trying to do on March 1 with the small discussion groups that will be happening.”

Miska’s approach coincides with that of the smaller rallies organized earlier this year. These events may not be bold enough to shut down campus entrances like March 4 of last year, but their goal is to continue to create an effective dialogue about issues like fee hikes and major cuts.

“It’s important to always say what you think is right and it can be really powerful with a group of people, but at the same time … the louder you shout, the easier you are to ignore,” Miska said. “People pay more attention to someone whispering carefully chosen words than shouting everything. Shouting has a place, but shouting isn’t great for constructive dialogue, which is exactly what we need right now.”

Rally strategies have varied from dressing up as zombies to puppets and pie-eating skits. Small rallies assist strike organizers in diversifying their efforts, student apathy is still a concern.

“[Some workers] just don’t care,” Salgado said. “Again, it’s like students — they’re just very individualistic. It’s, like, screw the rest — I only care about me.”

But Salgado added that campus activism has worked when students and workers formed a united front.

“I know that a lot of the protests that have happened in the past have had effects … [like] the new contract for AFSCME workers, and the workers won,” Salgado said. “They won that contract because of the protesting. And if you speak to the workers, they will say that themselves too, that it was the students that helped them out. So it definitely does work. It’s just a matter of getting it organized.”

Last year, Salgado was not active in protests or rallies. Now she tries to convince inactive students that there is a reason to get up and do something.

“Last year it was just me in my apartment with my roommates just there, hanging out,” she said. “And I remember all of the chaos with the rallies, and I was very pessimistic. Like, what’s the point? Because honestly, it’s very difficult to actually make change, like with one rally.”

After getting over her pessimism, Salgado decided to join the rally efforts, persuading students to let go of the apathy that she once had.

“Towards the end of last year I was really frustrated with doing nothing,” Salgado said. “I kind of realized you can complain, and you can sit and not do anything about it, but you might as well channel your energy into something. So, that’s what I’m trying to do right now. Some people can say I’m not really doing anything, or what I’m doing isn’t going to amount to anything, but at least I’m trying.”

Now, Salgado faces the challenge of speaking to students who do not usually get involved in activism.

“It’s easy to get involvement with people who are active in the community but it’s really difficult to get [involvement] with regular students,” she said. “It’s difficult to even talk to them about it and get them interested in everything, because they just kind of shrug it off.”

A larger student effort is not the only problem. More UCSC workers are needed at rally events, and organizing them can be even more challenging than organizing students.

“Sometimes we have rallies on location, and there’s not a big turnout, and people kind of wait until it really counts and then they show up,” he said. “I tell them we should show up at every rally because I’ve noticed that there’s 3-to-1, sometimes 4-to-1 students versus workers, and that doesn’t look good, because the university sees that.”

Gutierrez said workers often have children or parents to take care of after work, and dining hall workers can’t leave the busy lunch shift for noon rallies. He said, many are nervous about speaking in front of crowds or do not speak English fluently.

Ultimately, Gutierrez says workers just need to put in the effort.

“Even when we come to these meetings, it’s the same group of five to 10 workers always coming to this meeting,” he said. “This is why I say it’s that laziness thing we need to work out. I think for us, that’s our biggest problem: getting people off their butt.”

Psychology associate professor Regina Langhout said that the way issues are presented today makes it challenging for students to become involved. Langhout is a member of the Faculty Organizing Group (FOG), which opposes the privatization of public higher education.

“I don’t think students are apathetic,” she said. “Instead, they are pulled in many directions, including having work and family responsibilities. Many people — including students — feel overwhelmed. When we re-frame the issue, the possible solutions change.”

Ritz-Barr reluctantly described the strategy of this past year’s rallies as “cautious”. After the diplomas of some students accused of participating in the Kerr Hall occupation were withheld and other students were fined, the threat of authorities lingers.

Lack of student support can also take the passion out of activism. Ritz-Barr, a fourth-year strike organizer, paraphrased letters from students who did not support the protests of last year.

“My day was interrupted by the students marching through the center of the intersection, and it took me three hours to get to class,” Ritz-Barr read. “They should be punished to the fullest extent of the student conduct and be kicked out of school.”

Christianson, a UCSC lecturer, relayed how the need for students that go out on limb for a cause, or “adventurists,” as Fitz-Barr calls them, is the main issue.

“There’s plenty to be outraged about. At least as much as they had back [in the ’60s and ’70s],” Christianson said. “It’s just how do you stir up, organize, drive people to commit, and then sustain it? Not just for a one day kind of gesture, because the people in power are willing to let you have that. Because they’re patronizing they think the students are children. ‘Let them have their day. They’ll be back in class tomorrow.’ And sure enough, they’re right.”

Journalist Maria Hinojosa was the keynote speaker at the César Chávez Convocation last Thursday night. Photo by Morgan Grana.

Award-winning Mexican-American journalist and author Maria Hinojosa captivated the audience at the Seventh Annual César Chávez Convocation. She touched the crowd with personal stories relating to Latino culture and reiterated the great need for social activism in light of the recently passed laws in Arizona.

Hinojosa helped to honor the memory of one of her heroes, civil rights activist César Chávez, and his formation of the United Farm Workers (UFW) last Thursday at Colleges Nine and Ten. Hinojosa presented Chávez as an example for activists, commending his passion for social justice. Many in the UC Santa Cruz community have taken notice.

“[Maria] asks the difficult and probing questions, and is at the same time dedicated to documenting important issues affecting Latina and Latino communities with a keen sense of compassion and dignity,” said Rosa-Lina Fregoso, professor of Latin American and Latino studies.

Hinojosa is anchor and managing editor of National Public Radio’s (NPR) Latino USA, a weekly national program reporting on news and culture in the Latino community. She also has her own talk show in Boston called “One on One with Maria Hinojosa.”

Hinojosa’s efforts have been recognized by various groups, including the National Council of La Raza, which awarded her the Ruben Salazar Award, and the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors, which gave her their Lifetime Achievement Award.

At the convocation, she spoke of personal experiences as an immigrant from Mexico and of her struggles growing up in Chicago, Illinois, as well as working as a Latina journalist. She recalled feeling “invisible,” partly because of her ethnicity, but soon discovered the value of her voice as she discovered the power in sharing interviews from individuals whose stories are seldom told.

“My role in journalism was to be visible and not to be quiet,” Hinojosa said.

She has interviewed a wide variety of people throughout her extensive career, including influential politicians, white supremacists, and even gang members. However, she focuses the majority of her attention on stories and issues affecting the Latino community and surrounding immigration rights and reform issues.

Hinojosa also spoke of the need to fight for undocumented people’s rights, especially after the passing of the SB 1070 law and the banning of ethnic studies in the state of Arizona. She said feelings of self-doubt and a lack of belonging are occurring among Latinos in the United States as a result of these current events.

“We are living in a moment of history that is frankly quite devastating,” Hinojosa said in her speech concerning the future of immigrants. “This is a dramatic situation. There’s a lot of ignorance, and this ignorance has been reared into hate. That’s where it gets really ugly.”

Some audience members said that the convocation and the content of Hinojosa’s speaking could not have been more appropriate in light of what is going on in Arizona.

“I thought the event was really inspirational and that the message [Maria] was giving everyone, particularly the youth in the audience, was very motivating,” said Wendy Baxter, associate college administrative officer (ACAO) of co-curricular and college programs at Colleges Nine and Ten. “She stressed the urgent nature of what is going on in this country right now.”

The event attracted many who wanted to honor Chávez and listen to Hinojosa speak.

“This is one of my favorite events that I look forward to all year,” said Helen Shapiro, provost of Colleges Nine and Ten. “The spirit and energy is incomparable.”

The event was planned by Shapiro, College Ten co-curricular programs, the Chicano Latino Resource Center (El Centro), and CARE: Community and Resource Empowerment. The groups shared the task of planning and setting up for the event.

“Everyone was working double and triple-time,” Shapiro said. “I’m pleased people are still working to make this event possible.”

Throughout her speech, Hinojosa continually urged the people in the crowd to continue fighting for immigrants’ rights, and considered the ability to promote dialogue invaluable.

“To be an American is to question and participate,” Hinojosa said. “It is the simple acts of protest that ignite the fire. Activism is organic, you have to trust it.”

Attendees were engaged by Hinojosa’s words and said the journalist related well to the audience.

“I felt really lucky to be there,” Wendy Baxter said. “She was so brilliant and thoughtful and personable, and connected so effectively with all of us. It felt like you were listening to a friend. I think she is something special.”

As the convocation came to a close, Hinojosa stressed the importance and need for openness and compassion in humanity. She said that, when people see each other equality, mutual respect and understanding will be the result.

As she stated, “This is the vision that I have for America with activism that comes from the heart.”

Illustration by Louise Leong.

GIIP Interns learn from Paul Lubeck that designing a project plan for social change is not an easy task. GIIP students have interned in countries from Keyna to Malaysia, India to El Salvador, teaching technology skills learned in the classrooms of UCSC. Photo by Morgan Grana.

Photo by Rosario Serna.

Photo by Rosario Serna.

Located on the corner of the third floor of Social Sciences 1, the Global Information Internship Program’s (GIIP) office is small and easy to miss. The office, a single room about half the size of a small classroom, is filled with old swivel chairs and computers. On the wall hangs a topical world map with little red stickers jutting out, marking where GIIP’s members have traveled.

The room is a hub for student interns involved in a new era of activism, one that combines the passion of a community organizer with the know-how of savvy tech-junkies. New technological innovations have allowed nonprofits to expand their support and fundraising across the globe. And GIIP interns at UCSC are leading the way.

Pronounced “jeep,” GIIP is an internship and class for UC Santa Cruz students that teaches students about global developmental inequality, and then sends them out in the world to solve a pressing problem. Some students have trained nonprofits in Africa in useful technological skills, while others worked in central California building links through digital storytelling between first-generation American children and their immigrant parents.

“It takes internships to an entirely new level,” said co-chair of GIIP’s Global Advisory Board Dana Priest, a UCSC alumni and two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post.

“You’re creating your own program, you’re responsible for finding money,” she added.

GIIP is the brainchild of Paul Lubeck, a sociology professor and the current director of GIIP.

“We try to show the interconnectedness of global social networks and technology networks,” Lubeck said, explaining the organization’s mission, “and how the two can work together.”

Lubeck, who has sandy grey hair, a goatee, and square glasses, explained that the organization stemmed from student complaints about a sociology class that he was teaching in 1998, World Society.

“The student evaluations for the class said ‘This is a great class. It changed my life, but it’s so depressing. Lubeck should provide Prozac,’” Lubeck said. “Others said I was a hypocrite for not suggesting an alternative [solution] for students.”

Lubeck reacted and formed the idea of getting students involved in order to address these changes using technology. “In ‘98-’99, we began to imagine a civil society project to train students to use information technology to democratize globalization, to advance social justice,” he said.

After 12 years, GIIP has transformed from an idea to a full-fledged academic program. Last summer, GIIP became a major and a minor. The sociology department now includes an honors major and minor, Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES), that is modeled after GIIP. Lubeck said that this program was lucky to come into existence, as it was approved right before the beginning of the large budget cuts across the University of California.

After spending time in the program, many GIIP students take a leadership role in the organization, becoming what GIIP calls “Fellows.”

“Fellows … are selected by existing Fellows, and commit five hours [a week] of unpaid labor to building GIIP,” Lubeck said. They hold office hours, organize the program’s administrative tasks, and some teach the tech skills they have learned to other students.

All UCSC students are eligible to get involved with GIIP, not just those who desire to become Fellows or students who declare the GISES major or minor.

Every year, GIIP offers a three-quarter class series called Sociology 30A, 30B, and 30C, which are taught by faculty members and GIIP Fellows.

“Each quarter, we teach something a little different,” said Cat Priestly, a second-year politics major from Cowell College and GIIP Fellows coordinator.

Students learn about the different types of social activism, how to write project proposals, and tech skills like web design and managing mass text messaging campaigns.

“The first quarter is mostly the theory of social entrepreneurship and the sociology behind helping people,” she said. “There is so much more that goes into it than showing up and giving someone a computer.”

After studying global economic underdevelopment and examining its causes, GIIP students are required to write their own plan to implement social change using technology.

Plans can be based anywhere in the world, and students spend the next two quarters refining and developing it. They then learn the practical skills to implement this project by writing a detailed project plan, heavily critiqued by GIIP faculty and Fellows. The next step is writing grants to fund their project.

“If you work in any organization, you have to learn how to write in this really concise way to get your point across to funders, and have to learn how to use their language and their framing and structure,” said Cat Priestly, describing the technical details of a grant proposal.

To finance their projects, students can receive some money from GIIP, but also must pitch their ideas in the form of grants to other nonprofits or foundations.

Each quarter, classes meet twice a week. In one class, students work in a tech lab, learning skills like website design, organizing computer data, and digital story telling. On the other day, students learn the empirical approaches to social activism, flesh out their proposals, and learn grant-writing techniques.

“I feel like I’m getting something done and doing something important,” said first-year GIIP Fellow Anna DeChant one afternoon while holding her office hours. DeChant is currently designing a project to help set up online medical records.

“The classes give you tools that are actually useful,” DeChant, a health sciences major from Merrill College, added.

Text-knowledge-y

GIIP is a model for training a new generation of social activists. While carrying the same passions for justice and sustainability, these new community organizers do not hold a clipboard or hand out pamphlets. Instead, they communicate through text messages and e-mail, and connect through websites, blogs, and Twitter. Now, an iPhone or an Android phone can do what mass mailings or a telephone drive could only dream of. An online presence for nonprofits like a website or social networking page can allow for possible donors and followers worldwide to stay tuned in.

This new community organizer is not only passionate, but technologically sharp, able to create websites, use social networking tools for mass communication, and then blog about the work.

Ian Anderson, a third-year GISES and mechanical engineering major from Cowell College, is a GIIP Fellow and co-teaches a GIIP class about text messaging and other communication strategies. Last summer, he traveled to Nigeria on his GIIP-sponsored project to teach nonprofits how to utilize new technologies. While in Nigeria, Anderson collaborated with several other nonprofit organizations, including the Santa Cruz-based International Health Program.

“I used different technologies, and showed what technologies they could get online for free or with minimal costs,” he said.

“Many nonprofit organizations in Nigeria had little or no money,” Anderson added.

By using the internet, these organizations could download programs cheaply to build a web presence for an organization, organize a mass text messaging campaign for medical care, or create electronic medical records systems for the local Nigerian communities.

“[I taught] blogging with WordPress, or, more generally, how to set up a Web site and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook,” Anderson said.

Anderson also taught these organizations how to mass communicate through cell phones, using a similar lesson plan to the one he is currently teaching to other GIIP members.

In many developing countries, cell phones have become an inexpensive way to communicate. In most countries, there are no cell phone plans, like in the United States, but many people can buy calling cards that are relatively cheap. In 2008, the New York Times reported that there were over three billion mobile phone users in the world, and the number is rapidly growing. Much like the ones used by college students in the United States, many of these phones have an essential function: text messaging. This source of almost instant communication is beginning to be utilized by organizations and governments to distribute information to vast quantities of people.

“There is a whole group of mobile applications — [like] FrontlineSMS — tools to help you manage text messaging campaigns for education,” Anderson said.

He continued, “You can send out information to AIDS patients, telling them when to take their drugs, send text messages to everyone in a certain area saying this is what services a clinic offers.”

Anderson credited GIIP with opening his eyes to a world of activism. “I didn’t even know this kind of world existed of tech-related nonprofit,” said Anderson, who has been in GIIP since he came to UCSC.

“GIIP gave me the foundations. Either through the classes or through the connections I made at GIIP, I learned everything,” he said.

The Price of Going Global

Sending students across the globe is not easy, and it sure isn’t cheap. On April 29 in Washington D.C., GIIP will launch its first endowment campaign. The kickoff event is a speech by Dana Priest at the University of California’s Washington D.C. campus about emerging technologies in politics and journalism.

“I’m going to be talking about the nexus between technology and social change in Washington,” she said. “I hope to talk about my own work in journalism and how 2.0 investigation tools help print journalism.”

“It’s definitely a Washington view of social change,” Priest added.

The endowment campaign is an effort to raise $10,000, which will be matched, in full, by a donor.

“It’s our big deal right now,” said Cat Priestly, the GIIP Fellows coordinator. “[The campaign] would make us sustainable — we’re all about being sustainable,” she said.

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign is the most recent and successful example of the melding of social activism and technology. The campaign used text messages and e-mails to raise millions of dollars and to excite its supporters.

“[Obama] had a spectacular model of community organizing and a very storing network base of fundraising at a micro level,” said Professor Lubeck.

This model has proven that it works well, but it has also enthralled those involved in it.

“It’s kind of addicting,” said class co-teacher Anderson, in GIIP’s small, out-of-the-way office.

“Once you start spending your time on social causes, it’s almost hard to justify not doing it,” he added. “I could be going to these classes and try to get a job making a lot of money, but how would that be more successful than doing something that’s going to help other people?”