by Jenna Chernega, HELU Vice Chair and Chair of the HELU Politics & Policy Committee
The Politics and Policy (P&P) committee is fairly large. I would guess that there are well over 20 people on the google groups list. Basically, we let anyone in who expresses interest in joining the committee, either when they join HELU as a delegate or because they heard about a project that we’re working on that they are interested in. Because schedules are difficult, though, any given meeting might have between 6 and 12 people attending. Any one person’s involvement may increase or decrease based on their availability or their interest in a particular project we are working on.
I think we pick projects based on a combination of thinking through what are the next best strategic steps and what the interests are of committee members.
As Thomas Gokey mentions in his piece, we have three main projects running right now. They are the White Paper, the Candidate Questionnaire, and the work on College for All. Here is some background on each of these.
The “White Paper” focus on labor
Since the launch of the HELU Policy Platform last May, we have been working on projects that are meant to help achieve the platform goals (knowing that is a very long-term project). Marshall Steinbaum and Andrew Elrod’s white paper, for example, was really aimed at policy wonks in the political think tank world. The launch in New York was designed to try to maximize exposure to some of the left-wing think tanks who are doing work in the higher ed area. We saw this as an important target because there are other organizations that are coming out with their own higher ed policy agendas that and those other orgs aren’t interested in including strong labor protections in those agendas. Getting on the radar early for some of the groups that have influence on DC policy writing was important. The white paper isn’t really written or designed for a broad audience, even within the higher ed world. So the launch event was designed to target it to who we wanted to influence.
The Candidate Questionnaire: A tool for locals
The Candidate Questionnaire, as another example, was designed to get politicians thinking about higher ed as a sector and a voting block that has particular interests (OUR interests) while also giving member locals tools to engage with political candidates. To get this out into people’s hands, we held a training for member unions to learn how to use the questionnaire and then did follow-up to try to secure some commitments that locals would use it in the upcoming election cycle. This training and post-training follow-up happened at the same time that my mother-in-law passed away this spring and I wasn’t able to be as involved in it because of family obligations and grief. But committee members like Bekkie Bryan, Thomas Gokey and others, did a great job with all of it. It was well-attended (based on our turnout goals).
College for All (C4A): Never give up
In terms of the C4A work, I think there are multiple goals. One goal is to help strengthen our ties with Bernie’s office. Another is trying to mobilize workers across the country to pressure their congressional reps to pay attention to higher education and sign on to a progressive (if still flawed) vision for higher education and to do so before some other organization’s policy priorities get there first. While I agree with Debt Collective that the means testing is a problem, I think HELU’s biggest concern is the lack of attention to academic labor in the bill. We’re holding an online seminar in May (the 5th) to get this info out to delegates and other attendees (I can’t remember if this one is limited to HELU member orgs or not). We’re identifying target districts (Shannon Clark from the Steering Committee is working on a database around this) will to be trying to especially recruit folks from those areas to try to increase the congressional support for C4A.
Getting the word out
We work pretty closely with our staff, Tracy Berger, on getting information about events out to the right groups and Nick Temple, our staff organizer, has been working with us on recruitment, turnout and follow-up. Marshall Steinbaum’s paper has been covered in a few different places. Thomas Gokey mentioned the Debt Collective’s series and there was an article in The New Republic and a blog post on the Law and Political Economy Blog a couple of weeks ago. It has been mentioned in a number of other places where Marshall Steinbaum has been interviewed or commented on issues. So, I think we are doing a good job of getting information out to people, especially when we have some targeted audiences that we want to connect with.