In the beginning of June, four UW Seize the Grid campaigns came together to brainstorm and strategize for the upcoming year. It was everything a meeting should be: raggedy, engaged, creative, productive, fun. We set up shop in an open area in a campus art building (shout-out to UW-Stevens Point), started with some quick introductions, set up the Google hangouts with hopes that technology would hold out for us, set norms, shared campaign updates, and then jumped into a visioning session.
We discussed the things we saw for Seize the Grid in the UW System: a consistent, unified, and cohesive movement that is socially sustainable. A movement of young people that involve people from diverse backgrounds, build a community around just and renewable energy, and form coalitions with other fights in the UW, in Wisconsin, and the Midwest, like Tar Sands Resistance and Fossil Fuel Divestment.
We foresaw challenges: the structure of our administrations on campus and at the System level doesn’t encourage action to happen quickly, as well as the Board of Regents purchasing policy, which essentially makes it very difficult for UW institutions to move to 100% renewable energy. We also talked about how we can use Student Government to the best of our ability, and how sometimes there is a significant divide between student governing bodies and the rest of the student body, whom they are supposed to be representing. With these thoughts in mind, we set 3 SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound) goals for the upcoming year:
1. Have all 4 year UW institutions pass a resolution in recognition and support of the Seize the Grid movement by the end of Fall 2016.
2. Have a campaign at every 2 year UW institution by the end of Spring 2017.
3. Research the Department of Administration and Board of Regents purchasing policy and create a power map to identify a target person or group in order to better understand the complexities of fossil fuel usage in the UW System.
We identified some of the challenges that accompany these goals, like transparency of the UW System, communicating the technical writing of the policy to other leads, logistical difficulties, campus political climates... But we also identified plenty of strengths and resources to help us move past these challenges, like existing connections, coalition building, and people power.
With these things accomplished, we were just about halfway through the day.
The rest of the day, we brainstormed a lot of ideas for Fall Kickoff event possibilities, outlined (and finished, shout out to Ethan Fuhrman) a Student Government resolution in support of Seize the Grid, and discussed ways to enroll and recruit people to the movement from both on and off campus. We wrapped up with a discussion of what went well that day and what we would have changed for the next time around, and then went to play around in nature at Iverson Park. There’s nothing quite like dipping your feet in the water with a bunch of great people after a day full of high level planning, especially in the summer! We look forward to see what the Fall brings!
TAKE ACTION -- https://www.addup.org/campaigns/seize-the-grid-at-university-of-wisconsin-stout