On Saturday, November 9, members of a range of progressive activist groups on Princeton’s campus met in Whig Hall for an interactive workshop called “Grassroots Organizing 101,” the first of a three-part inaugural community organizing training series. Two local activists, Antonne Henshaw and Alexis Miller, spoke about their experiences in organizing, including working within coalitions, horizontal leadership structures, and centering the voices of directly impacted individuals. Henshaw, a formerly incarcerated activist and master’s candidate at Rutgers–Camden, organizes through NJ-CAIC (Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement) and is the vice president of Wo/Men Who Never Give Up. Miller, a J.D. candidate at Rutgers Law School, is a lead organizer with the Patterson, NJ, chapter of Black Lives Matter. The two main organizers of the series are Amanda Eisenhour ‘21, co-president of Students for Prison Education and Reform and a junior in the Department of African American Studies, and Rafi Lehmann ‘20, a leader with the Alliance of Jewish Progressives and senior in the Department of History.
Groups involved in the event include the Alliance for Jewish Progressive (AJP), the Princeton Environmental Activism Coalition (PEAC), Princeton Students for Immigration Empowerment (PSIE), Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR), and the Young Democratic Socialists (YDS).
At the workshop, the students and local activists discussed how to form partnerships between students and other communities, how to work with partners’ individual strengths, experiences, and privileges, and how to organize without co-opting. Miller recounted an instance when white allies formed a human chain around black activists at a protest, preventing law enforcement from reaching them and decreasing the aggression experienced by the protesters. She stressed the importance of sharing responsibility within an organization, particularly in representing the group to the public. Sharing the role of group speaker helps diffuse the potential risk of targeted violence amongst the whole group and presents a larger-seeming front to the public as compared to one or two delegated representatives. In addition, it reduces the risk of the movement’s message being co-opted and distorted by one or a few individuals.
Both local activists continually reaffirmed the importance of communication, since community organizing is fundamentally about working with other people, who each have their own connection to an issue. Henshaw advocated outside activists begin relationships with directly impacted communities by asking whether anything the outside activists are doing is hurting them or making things worse, since people who are directly impacted have firsthand knowledge of the situation. He also discussed his experience organizing towards achieving anti-carceral legislative gains in the New Jersey Legislature, which has involved navigating relationships with a variety of people.
Members of the progressive organizations present also discussed with each other and with Henshaw and Miller the challenges they currently face in their work, coming up with solutions together.
“A lot of students are doing a lot of organizing work on campus, but they’ve never done formal training and feel uncomfortable calling themselves organizers,” Eisenhour said in an interview after the first event, describing the intent behind the workshop series as “creating a space for ideas and collaboration to thrive.” She added, “Students have a much bigger influence when they’re working together… because a lot of the stuff we’re trying to work through, trying to do, has been done by someone else before.”
The first workshop also represented an initial step in strengthening ties between progressive groups on Princeton’s campus, with the goal of establishing an interorganizational framework, called the Coalition of the Progressive University Community.
“Even if our movements all look different, there are universal skills and challenges… that we all share,” Lehmann said. “It’s a matter of [saying] let’s actually create an organized group… to create robust relationships.” Referring to the challenge of organizing student-activists at universities when one quarter leaves each year, he added, “Because of the rapid turnover within progressive groups, we’re in a constant state of recruitment and training… we often don’t have a chance to step back… If we form this coalition, that already quintuples the number of people exposed to these ideas, ideally.”
“I don’t think it’s something that can be led by any single person,” Eisenhour said of the Coalition. “My vision for it… is a space where people can share knowledge about organizing work on campus… So many of the things that we work on are interrelated.”
“I’ve felt even since freshman year that this is something that needed to happen,” Lehmann said. “We’re building real power with this coalition.”
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