As you become more entrenched in activism at UF and in Gainesville, you quickly begin to see familiar faces. It can be rewarding, but sometimes it can feel like you are the only ones organizing, and it gets rough when you need to plan action and get a LOT of things done in a short amount of time… all on top of your schoolwork, job and personal life.
For those who were around this past spring, we’re well aware of how rough it is when there are back-to-back attacks on things a lot of disenfranchised students care about. This seems to be becoming the norm in Florida and at UF — barrages of bills, university decisions and even ongoing international conflicts. Within a few months, we saw a protest on Senate Bill 846 (a bill limiting hiring of international students from “countries of concern”), a protest on a proposed halving of the RTS budget, and an encampment protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
From all this, I personally learned that a coalition of organizations that may not normally work together is helpful, and even just a network of ‘people who want to do things’ is invaluable.
A lot of these organizers occupy multiple oppressed spaces, so for many of us, the multitude of issues we stand up for are inseparable. Even just the three I mentioned — discrimination upon national origin, transportation access and discrimination against Palestinian, Arab and Middle Eastern students by the university — have a clear throughline of barring communities from being able to participate in higher education.
Stopping graduate students from certain countries from being hired effectively cuts out anyone with lower income from those places and only allows those who are self-funded to study here, also while perpetuating a sense of unwelcomeness amongst those who are already here. Once those students got here, their main access to transportation to campus was under threat — how would they have made it to class considering that the minimum stipend is not a living wage and would have created an inability to purchase a car within the United States? If any of those students were from Iran or anywhere from the Middle East, how might they have felt about UF President Ben Sasse’s statements refusing to support them, ignoring the danger and pain they are experiencing, and even resorting to calling pro-Palestine protestors “idiots”?
I’m also writing this while deep in the throes of planning an amateur drag contest with GAU, which had its announcements often result in a very supportive “wait, what?” from individuals around town. This is a perfect example of creating an intersectional space that can impact multiple groups profoundly. Our queer and BIPOC members get to see a drag show with a cast of majority queens of color, gender non-conforming members feel uplifted and celebrated within a place where they can also experiment with the art of drag. This space for experimentation will also create a safe place for folks unfamiliar with the LGBTQ+ community to learn more about it. This snowball effect is what I live for and it excites me to see the union continue to do similar events this upcoming year.
That being said, all of this is extremely tiring. It can take hours upon hours to plan speeches, get yourself ready, create safety plans, build teams, organize transportation, gather information, compile it, liaise with police, communicate with teams and decide what we think will be most impactful. You see people drop from burnout, and avoiding it has been my priority ever since my reinvigorated involvement at UF through GAU.
From doing all I can to combat burnout with the many spaces I occupy, especially as leadership, it’s been helpful to always keep an eye out for opportunities to bring someone along for the ride. Nothing I do exists in a vacuum anymore, and it hopefully means my organization will be stronger in the long run, with people who have more to start than I did and will have the chance to do better and potentially avoid some of my mistakes.
Especially coming from the perspective of a public sector union in Florida, it’s hard to prioritize things that matter. What’s made some of the amazing things GAU has done this year possible? Aside from hardworking organizing chairs, a kickass bargaining team and a membership with great ideas, we’ve been pretty plugged into the coalitions around campus.
With different activism groups sending us the causes that our members care about, we’ve been able to spread the word about events they might not know about. From organizer to organizer, just telling other trusted individuals about what’s going on is always the #1 thing you can do to help with anything being planned — whether that means more hands on deck, or even just having more people show up. As you see these people repeatedly, strong friendships can form based on the fact that you care about similar things and both understand what it’s like. The support network we all need is so intrinsically woven into the fabric of student movements, and I think that is my favorite part of it all. In the same way I talked about queer joy last fall, we all know that this work is hard. But I think we can miss out on the space we get to share to make the causes we know are worth it even more valuable through the people we get to interact with.
While intersectionality can exacerbate issues created by systems of power, it also can create the opportunity to build new systems that uplift multiple groups of people more easily.
Cassie Urbenz is a UF first-year graphic design and visual communications graduate student and GAU co-president.
