Our aim is to bring together staff and students from approximately 15 national organizations dedicated to catalyzing student action for a better world. Our target attendees are staff and students from the nation’s leading student focused organizations in the fields of issue advocacy, political involvement and community service. The summit participants will cut across the political spectrum and involve groups focused on a wide variety of issue areas and strategies.
Our goal is to build relationships and foster collaboration between major national student organizations perusing our mutual goal of successfully engaging the nation’s college students. We will share best practices, discuss how to maximize student power and voice, and examine how the university environment promotes or hinders student involvement. We will explore the student perspective on ‘civic engagement,’ its meaning, its appeal, and how we can engage students more effectively. Most importantly, we will seek to find common ground between the work of our respective movements and organizations and create concrete strategies for coordination and collaboration to directly improve our work.
Every participant should leave the conference with strengthened bonds with old and new colleagues, a clearer sense of how their work relates to others involved in the movement towards student civic engagement, and a set of specific tools and projects to significantly enhance their work in the future.
This summit is the opening salvo in a 2 year national student civic engagement campaign sponsored by Campus Compact. We will be fully funding the expenses of all participants, as well as providing mini-grants to each attending organization for follow up projects and documentation. As the host, it will be our goal to learn as much as possible from the other participants to help us design and execute our Student Action Campaign. We also hope to involve attending organizations in the Student Action Campaign in mutually advantageous ways.
