Where did the kittens go on the class trip? -- to the meow-seum.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of making a visit to Grinnell College to see a dear friend. She took me on a bit of a tour and showed me their student activist common area (I guess you could call it). Its a mad cool place with a large work/meeting room, a smaller room with a little library and then a locker room that I think would be used mostly for storage. Now granted its a very small-very liberal school (about 1500 students I think), it seems like its a great place for like-minded people to gather in one centralized place and I bet the environment that stems out of that is really invigorating. As I related this back the structure of our school's student group complex, it became clear that the size of this university is both a determining positive and negative factor in terms of coalition building amongst similar goal oriented groups.

We have a ton of groups here so theres a lot of potential for broad coalitons to make resonant social and political progressions but at the same time sometimes I feel like we are too diffused. I feel like theres not enough of a centralized calendar or events/meetings/actions etc. and also a lot of times cosponsorships or coalitions are more so in name or a kind of 'removed' support than anything else. That is to say, if I was to cosponsor your event or become a coalition member it would consist of me 1. supporting it, 2. advertising it to people, and 3. potentially showing up. But, maybe in order for these cosponsorships/coalitions to really become dynamic movements there needs to be a strength of force in numbers at all stages, not just a show of solidarity by way of a shout-out on a phamplet or something like that. I am speaking solely out of my own individual experience on this campus and I don't want to make claims that are bogus or anything, so I am posing two questions sort of. One being: how do you feel about the environment of student activism within the University of Illinois? The second being: do we need a more centralized space to bring people together or with so many people, is it better to just work hard in forming connections by sending people out to different meetings/events to establish familiar ties thereby making it easier to overlap/piggyback onto each others' activism?

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, because I really believe coalition building can be foundational in the evolution of a movement. Ultimately, we are affected and potentially oppressed intersectionally and right now it makes sense to me to see activist movements stemming from such oppressions working most efficiently when we can enlist a cross-section of groups. Maybe if our identities are constituted through a number of intersectional forces and networks, it then also makes sense to use an intersectional approach in how we resist/reflect those identities through our activism.

word. let me know your thoughts.