We Make the Road by Walking: A Workshop on Campus Organizing for the Long Haul

Have you ever been part of a never-ending campaign? Or won/lost a campaign, and energy fell flat? Have you ever felt like you (or one or two others) are doing the lion’s share of organizing? In this workshop, we’ll talk through concretely how to combat these evergreen organizing issues and utilize shared experiences of organizers in the room. 

The Professional Staff Congress is the nearly wall-to-wall union of CUNY workers. Noelle is a rank-and-file member of the PSC, was part of the CUNY Fired Four (but has been reinstated), and organizes with MORE-UFT, the social justice caucus of the NYC teachers’ union. Evan is the co-chair of the Graduate Center chapter of the PSC and a candidate in the history department where he writes about teachers unions.

How can campus organizers build lasting power that connects and roots themselves in surrounding communities? In this interactive workshop, we will explore how tenant and housing organizing builds its base and what challenges and opportunities arise in the process. Through using housing organizing as a case study, we will unpack the core principles of basebuilding from relationship building to collective action. Using these lessons, you will reflect on basebuilding on campus and how such movements can look beyond the university walls. This workshop will help you critically think about basebuilding, not just as theory, but as a practical grounded strategy for mobilizing people and building collective power across campuses and communities. 

The Queens Tenant Coalition is a coalition of Queens tenants fighting for a world where housing is a right, not a commodity.

In this workshop, we shall consider the interrelationship between campus struggles and community-based movements, recognizing the opportunity to expand coalition, transfer much-needed skills and resources, and ultimately support the formation of life-affirming experiments and counterinstitutions necessary to sustain local ecosystems of liberation. Rogers will move from a case study of the organizing of PoliceFreePenn (a member of the Cops Off Campus Coalition), into the project of How We Stay Free, and how the lessons gained throughout informed the ongoing development of the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction.

Christopher R. Rogers, Ph.D started We Win From Within in June 2023 as an educator and cultural worker from Chester, PA with more than a decade of experience in supporting justice-oriented arts, culture, and community in the Greater Philadelphia area. As a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, he supports aspiring movement leaders serving communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration. Through participatory and collective study of political economy, the history of global resistance movements, and the theoretical and practical aspects of social change, we aim to teach a new generation of organic intellectuals not only how to understand the world, but more importantly, how to change it.

As the Palestinian-led boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) movement has called on institutions around the globe to divest from Israel, the campaign for divestment has erupted at universities. Public universities, funded by tuition and taxes, are subject to laws that can be strategically leveraged in pursuit of divestment. Among them, the NY Freedom of Information Law makes records accessible to the public through requests. This session will focus on how we have used freedom of information requests for our divestment campaign, discussing lessons and tips we have learned through the process.

CUNY School of Law SJP advocates for justice, human rights, and self-determination for the Palestinian people. You can follow their organizing on instagram @cunylawsjp

“When social movements and social change organizations face significant external political pressure and backlash it can turn inwards and it can fracture along the lines of individual and collective unaddressed traumas.”  Prentice Hemphill

This workshop will explore Navigating Conflict in movement organizing. Conflict is going to happen in our spaces and as organizers we need to account for it as well as build the skills to navigate through it. How we approach conflict influences whether it is productive, unproductive or tolerable.  We will go through important distinctions and definitions such as harm and disagreement, as well as do some participatory activities based on the conflicts and tensions you are facing in your movement spaces. 

Yalini Dream is a cultural worker— performing artist, organizer, somatics practitioner, educator, and consultant— who reshapes reality and transforms culture, seeking peace through justice in lands of earth, psyche, body, and dream.  They draw upon legacies of cultural work to facilitate processes for liberatory futures. Yalini is the founding director of Potency has over twenty-five years experience supporting communities contending with violence and oppression in their fights for freedom and dignity. 

Potency is a consulting practice that serves movements for justice, liberation, and sovereignty through organizational support, crisis prevention, leadership development, conflict navigation, cultural strategy, strategic alignment, and leadership coaching. You can learn more at MoveWithPotency.com

Participatory defense is an abolitionist tactic and collaborative organizing model for responding to state violence and the violence of capitalism. Often organized around legal cases (e.g., a prosecution, a deportation proceeding) or specific legal actions (e.g., an eviction), participatory defense focuses on intervening to impact the outcome of cases and to connect individual cases to systems of oppression and broader issues in the community. This workshop will cover genealogies of participatory defense work, explore specific participatory defense campaigns, and discuss tips and practices to keep in mind for people undertaking participatory defense work. Participants are encouraged to bring questions or real-world issues to discuss (while being mindful that this workshop is not a vetted/secure space).

Nathan (they/them) is an organizer and immigration attorney who organizes with Survived & Punished NY, Queens Jail Support, and community deportation defense networks throughout New York City. They have been part of participatory defense teams for survivors and others facing criminalization and deportation.

Janie Williams is an organizer most days and an activist on her better days. A recovering full-time public defender turned liberation “theologian” (read: witch), she works to extract and share as much of the knowledge corralled within these institutions as possible. In this effort, she collaborates with organizations across NYC, including Survived and Punished, and continues to serve on participatory defense teams alongside and with other criminalized community members.

In this workshop, organizers from the Medgar Evers Community Coalition and Brooklyn College will discuss the building of coalitions on and off campus in Brooklyn. Rooted in an analysis of the state of the movement in this current moment, they will facilitate a discussion about building mass movements in a climate of repression and counterinsurgency. They will use their organizing experience in Brooklyn as a case study to share about connecting campus struggles with abolitionist community organizing and movements of internationalist and anti-imperialist solidarity. This workshop examines how shared histories and collective memory can be powerful tools for social change. Participants will examine the ways communities remember and retell their histories, and how these narratives shape identity, inspire activism, and drive movements for justice. Through discussion and practical activities, attendees will learn how to leverage collective memory to build solidarity, challenge dominant narratives, and mobilize for revolution. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Define collective memory and its significance in shaping community identity.
2. Discuss how collective memory influences social movements and activism.
3. Identify strategies for preserving and sharing community histories.

The Medgar Evers Community Coalition is a revolutionary Pan-Africanist coalition of NYC-based organizations committed to advancing unity, empowerment, socialism, and revolution. Our coalition comes together to provide accessible political education at Medgar Evers College, welcoming both students and community members to deepen their understanding of critical issues. Through active outreach and coalition-building efforts, we strive to establish a united African front in New York, fostering solidarity and collective action. Guided by principles of self-determination and grassroots organizing, we prioritize accountability and growth through ongoing self- and collective-criticism, ensuring our work remains responsive and effective in meeting the needs of our communities. 

Students at Brooklyn College have built powerful coalitions against policing on campus and in the surrounding neighborhood, resisted the surveillance of the Islamic Society, stood in solidarity with the Fired Four (adjunct professors fired for Palestine solidarity organizing), practiced mutual aid and urban farming, and developed anti-imperialist campaigns in solidarity with Puerto Rico and Palestine..

In this session, organizers from the University of Michigan will discuss their 2022-2023 graduate workers strike and its lead-in to the subsequent TAHRIR coalition pro-Palestine campaigns. We’ll recap the 2023 strike and give an overview of two divestment and anti-repression campaigns that followed 10/7, identifying the strike lessons that carried over into these campaigns, how we applied long-haul strike tendencies in our Palestine organizing, problems that continue(d) to evolve, and the struggles and successes of coalition building across, within, and outside of campus groups.  

Ember (she/her) and Michael (he/him) are former graduate workers at the University of Michigan. They were officers during the 2022-2023 Graduate Employees Organization strike and were active in both labor and Palestine organizing at the University of Michigan throughout the last 5+ years.

In this session, we will discuss why anti-repression work must be central to any political movement, especially in the context of a rising far right, but also a rising student movement that calls for the liberation of Palestine and is currently mobilizing against ICE. Drawing on the example of the CUNY Fired Four campaign and the campaign against the suspension of Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik, which won the reinstatement of three of the four fired adjuncts—we will explore the need to unite students, faculty, staff, and the broader community in this struggle and to build power at the rank-and-file level.  We will also address the challenges and obstacles involved in organizing effective campaigns against repression. Our goal is to offer concrete examples and practical tactics that can be applied on other campuses, as well as strengthening the campaign to end Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik’s suspension, to free Tarek Bazrouk and reinstate the fired fourth.

Corinna Mullin teaches at CUNY and organizes with CUNY for Palestine. Tatiana Maria is a member of Left Voice. Corinna and Tatiana are both contributors to the CUNY Fired Four Campaign, an ongoing effort to reinstate four adjuncts who were fired for Palestine solidarity at Brooklyn College.

As recently as the 2024–25 academic year, unionized grad workers at Columbia found themselves unable to respond effectively to a series of major and well-publicized attacks on students and workers, from the breakup of the Gaza encampment earlier in 2024 to the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, among others, in 2025. Today they are on the precipice of taking strike action as part of a contract campaign with the rights of international workers forefront. 

This workshop will work through this recent sequence with a small group of militant organizers. We will analyze together the incapacity to act and the orientation of these organizers to build up cultures of collective decision making and solidarity in their departments and labs, reflecting on the transformations that they have observed in the process. Throughout the workshop, we will seek parallels and resonances in the organizing efforts of other participants.

Student Workers of Columbia, also called SWC, is a student workers union in UAW Local 2710. We have been legally recognized by the National Labor Relations Board since 2017. There are over 3,000 members in the unit, making us one of the largest student worker unions in the country.

We all know about student debt. But did you know that your college is also in debt? And that students are paying off that debt while taking on their own individual debts? In this workshop, learn why and how colleges borrow money, the way this debt shapes the student experience and faculty and staff’s working conditions, and how students and workers can organize against campus debt. 

The Coalition against Campus Debt is a group of higher education workers and organizers who help put together Campus Debt Reveals and support efforts against campus debt. We co-authored the book Lend & Rule: The Shadow Financialization of Public Universities. Sofya Aptekar and Jason Wozniak are members of the Coalition. Sofya is a CUNY professor and the co-chair of the Graduate Center chapter of the CUNY union, PSC. Jason is a West Chester University professor and an organizer with the Debt Collective.