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.

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?”

Illustration by Rachel Edelstein.

Not all silencing is as direct as a piece of tape across your mouth. But on April 16, LGBT students and their allies at UC Santa Cruz participated in the 14th annual Day of Silence, an annual event where students nationwide wear black and tape their mouths shut to show support for queer rights and spread awareness of homophobia and harassment.

Hundreds of thousands of students nationwide participated in the event, and UCSC students rose to the occasion as well.

Juba Kalamka, an acclaimed black, gay, poet, and hip-hop artist and bondage/sadomasochism porn actor from Oakland, performed at the open mic night that kicked off the “Night of Noise,” held at Cowell Plaza. Kalamka conveyed his thoughts through poetry, and described the event as a success.

“I just think that lots of times events like these get measured in terms of having people show up,” Kalamka said. “I think what’s much more important for students and for people of the community is the fact that they’re happening, that there’s space for them to happen, and that people feel safe enough to make them happen.”

About 20 to 30 enthusiastic students attended the open mic night, during which several people shared their poetry and personal experiences with the audience. One of those performers was Tom Barden, a student who spoke about the challenges of leading a gay life.

“Especially in terms of advocacy, we have to stand up the hardest to the ones that we love,” Barden said. “That’s always going to be the hardest thing to do.”

Barden was visibly emotional as he described his experiences with homophobia with those closest to him.

“When my grandmother won’t be convinced that I can be safe and sane as a gay man, when my mom can’t be convinced that trans-people have a sane understanding of their gender identity, and when my best friends can always tokenize me … I think that the most important thing is that … we don’t let them dictate the dynamics that we progress in a daily fashion.”

Santa Cruz County Congressman Sam Farr showed his support for those present through a statement read by the emcee during the event.

“I’m proud of the thousands of students on the central coast and across the country who are joining us in this effort to end these deplorable acts of discrimination,” Farr said. “We should all be raising our voices to move towards a day when the Day of Silence is not necessary.”

Lydia Andrews, a third-year Oakes student and main proponent of the Day of Silence who was promoting the event earlier in the week in Quarry Plaza, said the event is important because it shows the public what it feels like to always be silent about your sexuality.

“In the gay community, silence is a very common trend. Everybody has to be quiet about what they are and hide what they are … hide that they’re queer,” Andrews said.

Amanda Rabe, a second-year Stevenson student, also worked at the booth in Quarry Plaza the week before the event, and said it was important to her because of her own sexual identity.

“I feel very privileged to finally feel comfortable with my sexuality,” Rabe said. “It took a long time to get to that point. The Day of Silence is for you to remember the times when you yourself had to hide.”

Assemblyman Bill Monning also sent a representative to the event, Allie Spikler. She communicated Monning’s regret that he himself could not attend and was reponsible for expressing the Assemblyman’s support for the event.

“It’s really cool to be at an event like this, being a trans-person who works for our state government,” Spikler said.

Spikler also brought the news that California has just become the first legislative body in the nation to elect an openly gay member, John Perez, to the leadership role of speaker.

Despite these advancements, Elia Martinez, the student emcee for the Day of Silence, expressed concern over divisions in the gay rights movement.

“I see it as a really divided movement,” Martinez said. “I see on the one hand there’s a very homo-normative, very stereotypical white gay male-led push for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), for organizations that are trying to be very hetero-assimilationist fighting for things like gay marriage, fighting for things like ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ to be repealed. Those are the things that we are focusing on as opposed to greater issues of societal repression.”

And indeed, the Day of Silence and Night of Noise were focused on the everyday dehumanizing acts of discrimination that affect the gay community.

The division Martinez referred to has a precedent.  Historically there have been schisms within broader civil rights movements between conservative and radical elements, like with the black civil rights movement.

The latter faction of the gay rights movement was in full force during the Night of Noise, especially the colorful Kalamka, who in one of his pieces ironically referred to people “apologizing for the least of us, the unsavory shameless bohemian elements of our kind.”

A local transgender activist, who preferred only to be identified as Lex, summed the national event up while addressing the crowd.

Lex said, “It’s important to recognize that not only are we silenced in a lot of ways, but that there’s a lot of work to be done in building collaboration across communities.”

Illustration by Patrick Yeung.

“Fag,” “Gay,” “Homos,” and “Gays Go to Hell” — these are the words that adorned the UC Davis Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Resource Center in February. Despite what some believe, the UC system is not a post-homophobic institution. In the wake of such horrendous acts as the graffiti on the UCD LGBT center, the students and various members of the UC system should reflect upon the importance of tolerance and understanding of all beliefs and lifestyles, be role models to youth, and take an active role in change.

Homophobia is an issue that has recently plagued all forms of education, from the humble beginnings of high school to the high tiers of college.

In March of this year, Mississippi high schooler Constance McMillian was not allowed to attend her prom with her girlfriend due to her desire to don a tuxedo. In an effort to mask McMillian’s sexual preference, the school administration suggested that she and her girlfriend take male dates.

With the creation of Facebook, the ability of people to show support for ideals and take sides on various debatable issues has just become a mouse-click away. For example, groups such as “Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to the Prom” have over 429,000 “fans.” These combat the dark side of Facebook groups, like “Constance quit yer cryin,” which has only 2,790 fans. Although positive in preventing cyberbullying, Facebook group activism is passive activism, and has even coined the term “slacktivism.” Though the internet has allowed for the ability to easily support ideals one believes in, it should not mean that our generation should stop actively participating in change.

In 2007, the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) released a study that nearly nine out of 10 LGBT students, of both middle and high school, experienced harassment in the previous year.

We, as students of a higher education system, need to be role models and show that tolerance and understanding can exist in a world too often subjugated to hate crimes and overall acts of violence.

More specifically, students should participate in an the Day of Silence event, which protests the silence faced daily by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their allies.

This event will begin at the Bay Tree Bookstore and last until Friday night, which will bring about the Night of Noise at the Cowell courtyard that allows those who have been silenced to speak out and tell their stories.

There is a need for change in our educational system to protect those who are LGBT, because currently schools cannot discriminate against students based upon race, color, national origin, religion, sex or disability, but not sexual orientation. The Student Nondiscrimination Act, which is currently being promoted by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would help change this. The HRC’s and ACLU’s Web sites are currently organized so those who support the act can easily fill out a pre-made letter that can be sent to members of congress.

Our generation cannot be bogged down by technological advancements, and needs to continue to participate actively in social and civil changes in our nation. To combat the increase in active homophobia we need to actively go out and speak against it, and promote discourse and equality amongst all people despite beliefs, backgrounds, or sexual preferences.