Campus International Chapters

wade — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:01:09 +0000

Toronto After an early morning meeting with our friends at SEIU Canada discussing where organizing and our partnership should go, Judy Duncan and I were off to Guelph about an hour and a half from Toronto.
I had met three young and dynamic women from the University of Guelph when they happened to volunteer in the rebuilding of New Orleans several months ago. They had quickly convinced me that the University of Guelph was the epicenter of volunteerism in Canada with over 70% of the student population participating in volunteer and service projects throughout the year. They had also dangled the magic notion in front of me about whether or not we might want an ACORN International Chapter at the University of Guelph. On that slim reed Judy and I were trekking to Guelph, where it turned out that neither of us had ever visited, in order to see how we could put together the next steps.
We met our three friends — Nikoletta Papadopaulos, Deniz Ergun, and Meghan Pistchik –at the Guelph Volunteer Centre near the middle of this 100,000 population, picturesque college town. We were quickly joined by a new recruit to the cause, Leah Serafini, and after a brief meeting with the Volunteer Center staff, we were off for a cup of coffee and a chance to start taking notes and making the plan. We had definitely stumbled onto the right organizers, although all of them were on the verge of graduating this semester, they were well connected and committed to making this happen with us.
It turned out that there was an international program at Guelph as well as a Latin American department. Both encouraged and required internships, so work with ACORN International in our various offices would be a gift for both of us. As an added benefit, two of the women were from Hamilton and were interested in helping out James Wardlaw in getting this newest ACORN Canada office up and running. Furthermore, they told about a waiting list during “reading” week and at other times where students from the University of Guelph were trying to work in the recovery of New Orleans and would be delighted to get to volunteer with New Orleans ACORN on projects down there as well. We had hit the volunteering trifecta or better since this seemed to be working four ways rather than three.
There seemed to be lots of ways to go in setting up our first ACORN International Chapter at the University of Guelph. Our UG organizing team was going to check the rules but thought it was a simple matter of 20 signatures which they could get in about 30 seconds flat, but they weren’t sure we would even want to mess with the bureaucracy. We might want to simply form the chapter with their contacts, start putting out the word about the opportunities to work with ACORN International in Canada and abroad, and then go from there.
Judy and I liked the way these women from Guelph thought about the world. I asked at one point where there any men that went to Guelph? They all laughed. Not many got in the way of progress at Guelph, since the ratio was about 7 women to every man there, so they were ready to tackle the world and had all the confidence and gumption we had hoped to find, so we were ready to tackle it with them!

Maybe a Canadian?

wade — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:21:39 +0000

Toronto   The federal government in Canada recently passed legislation clearing up the fact that among other things children born in Canada or to Canadians outside of Canada are still Canada which is likely to confer citizenship on more than 300,000 folks who don’t realize they are really Canadians. There is a publicity campaign underway, including a spot on YouTube, that brings some humor the search and has someone suddenly waking up and finding out that they are Canadian. They are wrapped in maple leaf blankets and find a couple of moose, a hockey player, and a Royal Mountie standing looming over their bedroom.
   This is a different approach to immigration than one I see so often. The difference is refreshing.
   The ACORN Canada office in Toronto reflects the same kind of diversity that I find throughout this wildly cosmopolitan city. We have staff with roots in India, Tajikistan, Argentina, Tanzania, and, hey, even the US. Almost no one on staff is actually from Toronto with even the Canadians from here and there.
   It breeds a different perspective on both how integrated people are with people around the world, but also the fact that people around the world are as important perhaps as Canadians. That’s not a south of the border worldview, eh?
   I found myself trudging on train and bus the short haul to one of the neighborhoods through a cold, sloppy rain yesterday afternoon with one of the organizers for an opportunity to visit one of the local group leaders. Elise Aymer had not only listened to our organizing rhetoric and ideology about membership participation and direction, but had also absorbed the insight from her own experience in project management for tech companies that the organizers simply couldn’t do “it all” even if they wanted to, and needed the members to not only pull their load, but in fact to deeply help in recruiting other members with special strengths, volunteers, interns, and any and all available labor to make the organization able to build the capacity to realize its objectives. From that insight she was carving out her contribution from her home with her growing family. This meeting that started as simply another chance to see a member turned out to be a gift and inspiration. In less than an hour it felt like I was walking out on the puddles as if strolling on water with the feeling that anything might just be possible and being reminded even after 40 years of organizing why I continue to believe, sometimes in spite of the evidence, that our eventual victories are inevitable, if we can only marshal all of the latent capacity of our people and their unimaginable collective strengths.
   Maybe we’re all Canadians now?
Watch the Utube video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDeDQpIQFD0

Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Internships

Campus International Chapters

Maybe a Canadian?