Trinity's Student Chapter of the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group held its first meeting to discuss the organization's plans for the upcoming year on Monday, Sept. 18.
ConnPIRG has three major campaigns in the works for 2006-2007: the Hunger and Homelessness Project, the New Voters Project, and the Campus Climate Challenge.
The Campus Climate Challenge has a goal to have over 1,000 universities across the United States by 2008 get all of its electricity from clean sources like wind and solar power, as well to generally educate students about real solutions to global warming.
"There are two parts to doing this," Sandi Gollob '07, Campus Climate Challenge Coordinator, said at the meeting. "They are education and policy. For education, we just want to teach students about they can do to help lessen and limit their negative impact on the earth. We also have policy, which is dealing more with administration and getting them to pay attention to things like greener building design, or having better light bulbs -- very simple things."
The ideal objective of the Campus Climate Challenge would be to reduce campus' global warming pollution almost down to zero. The Campus Climate Challenge is actually a project of over 30 international, national and statewide student organizations joined together through the Energy Action Coalition. Students participating in this project will try to promote doing things like driving less, turning off computers at night, getting energy efficient entertainment, and telling local, state and national elected officials to become "clean energy leaders."
The New Voters Project aims to register, educate and turn out new voters for the upcoming November elections.
"The biggest problem that we have is that for people ages 18-24, our demographic, we have very low voter turnout," Gizelle Clemens '09, New Voters Project Coordinator, said. "Politicians do not like to spend time catering to us and to our needs and wants because we don't go out and vote. Our focus is to try to mobilize and get out there and get to the polls. We want to organize and get young people from the Hartford community to vote in November."
In Fall 2004, ConnPIRG and other state PIRGs around the nation sponsored the largest youth voter mobilization campaign in history, which registered half a million new voters nationwide. The plan is to not stop there, but to continue the trend and "end the cycle of neglect that exists between politicians and young people," in order to have a meaningful impact on the future course of our country's democracy.
Students who plan on becoming involved with the New Voters Project will participate in contacting young people through door-to-door canvassing, phone banks, outreach at public events, high school and college campus-based outreach, partnerships with local organizations and businesses, and precinct-based turnout operations.
The Hunger and Homelessness Project hopes to target the problems of those that exist without adequate food and shelter by working through education, service and action to create a "sustainable future and society."
"First of all, we will do community service and volunteer and be hands-on," Ian Hendry '08, Hunger and Homelessness Project Coordinator, said. "Also, we will have meal days, where students here on campus can donate a meal, and it will be given to Mercy House. Hartford is one of the poorest cities in the country, and you can just walk around Hartford and see all these things, including poverty, and we want to try to help with that."
Those involved with the Hunger and Homelessness Project will volunteer in shelters, raise money for food banks and participate in educational events on campus. The biggest event ConnPIRG has planned for the year is the Hunger Cleanup, which takes place each April. The Hunger Cleanup is a "serve-a-thon," where students get people to sponsor them for each hour that they volunteer on a Saturday.
ConnPIRG's mission is to "deliver persistent, result-oriented public interest activism that protects [the] environment, encourages a fair, sustainable economy, and fosters responsive, democratic government." Organizing Director Andy MacDonald, who has been working with the PIRGs for 22 years, said in last Monday's meeting that he learned that "there are a lot of people who didn't think they could get involved, but that once they took that first step, realized, 'Oh wow, this isn't that hard, you just have to know how to do it.'"
The PIRGs were originally started in 1970, "In a very similar time to now," according to MacDonald. "It does not really have the catchiest name out there, but it came about in a time when the country was in a war and people were wondering why [America] was engaged in a conflict in another country where they didn't seem to want us there. Unfortunately, that still kind of sounds a lot like today, but the PIRGs came about as a way for students as citizens to engage in democracy and take classroom experience and apply it to real-world situations, and that's still the ultimate goal today."
