Various student groups actively campaigning for causes across campus put their efforts together Saturday at the first Progressive Student Conference, an event designed to increase awareness and help train student leadership.
With presentations from members of Muslim SA, the UN Student Alliance, UB Students Against Sweatshops and others, the all-day event offered lectures and discussions to highlight the causes different on-campus groups fight for.
The conference was run under the banner of Students United for Progress, a new coalition of UB groups looking to initiate change on campus for a variety of issues.
"I really liked Mike Niman from ArtVoice," said Jenn Testa, vice president of the Vegetarian Collective.
When she wasn't helping with her own group's presentation, Testa was one of about 50 people who attended the sessions, which ranged from a panel on Hurricane Katrina to a talk about the profiling of Muslims.
The conference also touched the subjects of pesticides on campus, civil rights, police brutality, the women's students department cutting its adjunct professors, and the salary situation facing UB's janitors.
Niman, a Buffalo State College professor and partner of the Niagara Independent Media, focused on the use of the media as a resource for Buffalo activists.
Creighton Randall, a member of UB's Engineers for a Sustainable World, said that he was impressed with Niman and with the Niagara radio station he works with, AM 1270.
"He talked about essentially how a group of the Buffalo community can get together (to form a) community radio station," Randall said. "(AM 1270) presents news stories in a way that you usually don't get to hear in the mainstream media."
Community involvement by on-campus groups was a theme that was also supposed to be addressed by keynote speaker and New York State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt. Hoyt, however, had to cancel his appearance due to illness.
According to Randall, however, the cancellation "wasn't a total wash." Hoyt has promised to reschedule and meet with the leaders of on-campus groups for a roundtable discussion about their interaction in the community. The time originally devoted to Hoyt's speech was used for an open discussion between the groups.
A panel of students who recently returned from an alternative spring break trip to New Orleans led another session at the conference in what Randall called "a debriefing and reactions from the trip." The audience, which was a mix of students who did and didn't go on the weeklong relief trip, discussed possible future plans to go back to New Orleans and other ways they could continue to help the post-Katrina efforts.
Future plans for the Students United for Progress include another conference tentatively scheduled for next fall and the publication of a "Disorientation Guide," a handout for freshmen during summer orientations outlining the different progressive groups on campus.
Testa and Randall both said the event, the first of its kind for the organization, was a success.
"A lot of people came to our workshops," Testa said. "We've created a campus connection between progressive groups."
