Posted in: Activist Tools Top Story

Higher Ed Members Learn Organizing Skills at Emerging Leaders Academy

Tags: campaign for the future of higher education, chaffey college, community college, community college association in california, ELA, emerging leaders academy, higher education, organizing

by Mary Ellen Flannery, pictures courtesy of E. Price

When math class ended and the students of Chaffey College walked out their classroom door, Deborah Sudduth Garland walked in. Friendly and confident, she shook the instructor’s hand and said simply, “I’m here to strengthen the association and make this campus a better place.”

She wasn’t the only one.

Sudduth Garland and her 19 peers in the NEA Higher Education Emerging Leaders Academy (ELA), a nine-month program for NEA Higher Education members seeking better leadership skills, spent two days last month at Chaffey, a community college about 40 miles east of Los Angeles.

During that time, they successfully executed an ambitious organizing plan of their own design, conducting one-on-one meetings with more than 160 part-time and full-time faculty, hosting nine face-to-face events on Chaffey’s main campus and two satellite locations, and personally delivering a very meaningful message: You and your union can do great things for your campus.

As class sizes soar, as college budgets and programs are slashed and burned, and as the rights of faculty and staff to collectively bargain are attacked in states across the country, this message of solidarity resonates powerfully with NEA’s Higher Education members. It is increasingly clear—as recent faculty strikes in California and Illinois have shown—that faculty and staff must stand together to protect teaching and learning on their campuses.

That day, in that Chaffey math classroom, Sudduth Garland’s contact quickly whipped out a pen and signed a membership card for the college’s association, an affiliate of California’s Community College Association (CCA) and NEA. “I walked out of that room and was like, ‘Yesssss!’” said Sudduth Garland, an executive staff assistant at Michigan State University College of Nursing.

Many of the folks that shook hands with NEA’s energetic group of Emerging Leaders made the same decision, choosing to join their growing association. Others will meet again with local leaders, as they pursue a campaign of strength in numbers at Chaffey.

“The seed you planted will become the beginning of success at Chaffey,” wrote CCA President Ron Norton Reel. “I look forward to reporting back just how successful this campaign will become by the end of the year.”

In California, community colleges educate more than 2.7 million students a year—a whopping 24 percent of the nation’s total number of community college students. And yet, because of radically shrinking state budgets, the system turned away 200,000 qualified students last year. This year, it’ll likely close the doors of opportunity on more than 400,000.

“To me, it’s unthinkable,” said Reel at the kick-off of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education earlier this year. “We are dimming the lights of our society.”

It will take CCA and NEA’s strong, unified voice calling for the lights to stay on to make a difference in the policy and legislative decisions that impact faculty, staff, students and communities. But the strength of that voice depends on individual members, having those conversations in classrooms, shaking hands and signing on.

For the Emerging Leaders, a diverse group of tenured and non-tenured faculty, staff and support professionals from two- and four-year public institutions across the nation, it was a rewarding experience. They know they made a critical difference for California educators and students.

They also made a difference for themselves. “Organizing theory has real meaning when you have to apply it to real-time organizing experiences,” said Phadra Williams Tuitt, coordinator of the Emerging Leaders Academy, which is currently accepting applications for its 2013 class.

“It was a learning and growing experience,” agreed Sudduth Garland. “It taught me how to be a leader—how to make a plan, share a vision, and let people run with it!”

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