KWRU National Student Organizing Conference

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come to because your liberation is bound up in mine, we can work together”

Who:
Students who are organizing around issues of Economic Human Rights on their campuses. Students are encouraged to come in groups so that they can return to their campuses ready to organize.

What:
A national student conference focused on bringing the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign to the campuses. Student will talk about what their already doing on their campuses and how we can use the idea
of Economic Human Rights to link these different campaigns and build a stronger broad based movement to end poverty.

Tentative workshops:
Economic Human Rights Awareness on campuses; Working with poor people’s organizations; Role of students in social movements; Universities: a source of resources, source of leverage; Working together, using economic human rights as an organizing tool; Right to Education; Right to Health Care

Where:
Philadelphia, PA. Students will stay in West Philadelphia with other student organizers who have been organizing with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union all summer long. Workshops will take place either in Kensington, North Philadelphia or at the University of PA.

Why :
Kensington Welfare Rights Union is an organization that believes that those most affected by poverty should be in the leadership of the movement to end poverty. Therefore this conference is not just about building a student movement but about connecting students fighting against poverty and struggling to survive themselves, with leaders of poor peoples movements whose only chance of survival is to join this fight. So often students take the position of supporter or ally in the movement to end poverty, ignoring the struggles of our own and of those that surround us. We are attending universities where we are surrounded by a captive audience (okay sometimes not so captive). Regardless, we have a responsibility to take what we have learned and organize those around us into the campaign for economic human rights.

When:
August 10th – 12th , 2001

KWRU National Student Organizing Conference
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.
If you have come to because your liberation is bound up in mine, we can
work together”