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Student Environmental Center (SEC) is a Registered Student Organization at Southern Illinois University Carbondale dedicated to the struggle for environmental justice. Through our campaigns we hope to help SIUC become a leader in sustainability while educating the university community and providing this generation's fresh crop of starry eyed dreamers with the necessary knowledge and skills to become tomorrows dedicated activists.
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2/13/07
Two members of SEC took part in the Illinois Student Environmental Coalitio-n's Legislative Conference in Springfield, where they gained knowledge on the mechanics of the Illinois state legislature and given first hand experience lobbying their state representatives! The two day conference culminated in a day of lobbying facilitated by the Environmental Law and Policy Center that earned Senate Bill 1583 five cosponsors! The bill would mandate that manufacturers of electronics, like televisions and computers, create recycling centers around the state to meet quotas based on the amount of electronics they produce. The bill is especially significant for downstate Illinois areas due to a provision that provides an incentive to create recycling centers in under served areas where people do not already have access to recycling centers. 11/10/07
On November 2, 2007, 11 members of SIUC's Student Environmental Center joined over 6,000 young people converging on our nation’s capital for Power Shift 2007, the first-ever national youth summit to solve the climate crisis. A mind-boggling array of speakers, panels and workshops covered issues pertaining to both broad, systemic mechanisms of oppression such as racism as well as very tangible, specific contributors to climate change such as the coal-fired power plant. There was time allotted for statewide breakout sessions where SEC members got the chance to meet and stratagize with students from all across the state. On the final day of Power Shift, thousands of participants converged on Capitol Hill to show Congress and the candidates that a growing movement led by the youth of America is looking for bold political leadership on the issue of climate change. At the same time, some members of SEC helped carry out an action organized by Rainforest Action Network against a Citi bank branch in downtown DC as part of RAN's No New Coal! campaign. The demonstrators were successful in shutting down the bank for the day without any arrests! Check this video out. For more on Power Shift, check out the site. 10/18/07
Four SEC members attended a United States Student Association Grass Roots Organizing Weekend and got some mad organizing skills out of it. The GROW was co-hosted by St. Louis Jobs w Justice and USSA and covered a broad spectrum of topics from a working definition of power to building leadership and planning campaigns strategically. There has been talk of trying to get a GROW either at SIUC or in Springfield in order to develop a stronger network between environmental organizations in the state, but for now that's just a random idea... we'll see. 8/9/07
Some day in the future – after the revolution – we'll be able to look back and say we were networking and sweating our asses off in Atlanta at the first ever US Social Forum! Earlier this summer, Six SEC members were part of a delegation of eight SIU students who received a grant from Jobs with Justice to attend the USSF. The forum is an offshoot of a broader movement surrounding the World Social Forum, which first took place in 2001. The Social Forum movement is meant to facilitate the creation of alternative spaces where traditionally marginalized people and ideas are able to network and organize across individual issues. Since all of our struggles are interconnected in both direct and indirect ways, the Social Forum movement aims to help us realize where they intersect and how each can work in solidarity with all others. 8/9/07 Hey, we entered the 21st Century! You don't even want to know what it looked like before (shudder). |
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