Commons Campaign Portfolio: Patchwork Lincoln

Commons Campaign: End to Slacktivism

Ronaldo Carcamo, Chris Morton, Wesley Deuel, and Grant Harrison

COMM 250: Rhetoric, Media, and Civic Life

April 27th, 2017

At first, when we were told that we need to create a common’s campaign that would make a lasting impact, our group had a lot of different ideas of projects we could do. We thought of doing a campaign that would bring attention to the rising conflicts in the United States and how it is currently affecting the immigrant community in Lincoln, but we felt that that project was very broad, so we decided to narrow it down to attacking a more specific problem. Ultimately, we landed on attacking the problem of slacktivism, which is still very prominent today, in a day and age where we as citizens must be doing everything we can to have our voices heard.

While it may seem quite ridiculous that people aren’t being more civically engaged in our society today, especially those who are against many of the policies that have been put into place by President Trump’s administration, there is some logic behind it. We deduced that the primary reason that slacktivism is still so prominent among young adults and marginalized groups is a mix of people not caring, sympathizing but not being motivated to go out and help change the problem, or not knowing where to start when it comes to becoming civically engaged. Everyone wants to do something to help or make a change, but sadly most people believe that simply clicking like or sharing posts on social media is enough for them to say that they “played their part.”

Our game plan was simple: create a social media page where we would be able to post videos that promoted activism, interviews with local organizers about what exactly it is they do and how people can get involved, link pages to local organizations here on campus, and create a safe space and public sphere where everyone who wanted to get involved but wasn’t quite sure how to could voice their opinions, raise questions, and have conversations with other like-minded individuals. Therefore, we created our group Patchwork Lincoln: our goal was to reach out to the people that want to help out in the community and be more civically engaged. Patchwork Lincoln’s original plan was to tackle two main exigences: the threat to immigrants and refugees posed by the Trump Administration, as well as to help start off individuals who remain inactive despite holding beliefs that would typically prompt action.

We felt that creating our group on Facebook was a fitting response, as it is one of the most popularly used forms of social media, and when thinking about where slacktivism occurs, Facebook is usually the first place that comes to mind. So if we can go to the place in which we see slacktivism ingrained in the culture, we thought that perhaps through our rhetorical intervention we could change the way people think about simply just posting and leaving it there. We would be bringing activism to the people, meeting them in the middle then offering them easier and less complicated ways to become engaged within their society.  

While we kept our audience broad, in order to help out as many people become civically engaged as we could, our rhetorical audience that we ultimately wanted to reach consisted of 2 groups. The first group was young people, and more specifically the university students. A lot of students on campus have the power to create dialogue within our community, and have many RSO groups here on campus available to them so that they can partake in civic action, however not many of them know it. Therefore we felt it was critical to our project that we reach out to our peers and educate them on how they can be more engaged civically.

Our other target audience was anyone who was sympathetic to the struggles that immigrants and refugees face. We knew that there are many people who strongly oppose the oppression that these groups are currently facing, and that some of those people felt the need to do something to help out their fellow Americans. But just like the university students, a lot of the people who fall under this category most likely aren’t very aware of exactly how they can make a difference in their community. We planned on also helping this group express their voices.

Our approach was very creative in its use of parody and satire to construct and invigorate a counter-public; the issue of slacktivism is something that is relatively not brought up as an immediate problem, so instead of just promoting activity we would also be pointing out the absurdity that is slacktivism. While most campaigns tend to pick a specific issue and work towards bettering that, our issue is the fact that their aren’t enough people participating in general, and we wanted to find out why exactly that is and then offer solutions to fix those problems.

We also felt it was important that we apply different kinds of styles when creating our posts and videos. One form of style that really stood out is antithesis, as we compared the ridiculousness of slacktivism in order to enhance the importance of activism to our viewers. Speaking from the antithesis of the slacktivists perspective we juxtaposed their established disposition with a radically democratic one, which evokes both humor and hopefully personal reflection for our target audience. We would use metaphors in order to relate more to the average person who doesn’t normally participate in civil activity; we used similes to compare slacktivism to other ridiculous acts that don’t make much sense, in order to encourage the receivers of our message to engage themselves more often.

Planning out this project, we had to keep in mind some restraints that may hold us back from doing everything that we originally planned, as well as obstacles that may arise throughout the course of our campaign. First of all, we needed to grasp the attention of our target audience. We would need to approach people in a way that was persuasive without  overwhelming them with too much information. We wanted to show people that being civically engaged doesn’t always mean devoting hours to a local organization; that you can do many other simpler things and still make a difference within your community. In order to grasp the attention of our rhetorical audience, we decided we should make videos that are comedic while still conveying the message of being pro-activist.

Our second restraint was to get the cooperation of other organizations to help us achieve our goal. While we were almost positive that most organizations would be on board for a campaign such as ours, we had to keep in mind that they may not have had time to work with us when we needed or didn’t see our cause in their interest. While there isn’t much we could do when an organization turned us down, we were fortunate enough to have had many organizations to reach out to for help, and surely enough, some of them were willing to help us with our campaign.

The third constraint that we faced was convincing people that change was actually possible. We had a notion that many of the people who don’t engage themselves civically don’t do so because they feel that the impact they’d make, if any, would be negligible. So we’d have to show people just how much power that citizens have when they engage themselves and work together with others. To solve this problem, we heavily stressed that fact that no matter how miniscule a change may seem, it is nonetheless still a change and still very much important -- especially if it effects our local community.  A final constraint that we had to confront was the issue of financing the video equipment and editing software. Fortunately for our group, we were able to check out gear from the library’s tech center, and one of our group members already possessed editing software, and that saved us a considerable expense.

However, our biggest restraint of all that we ended up facing was not even one that we expected to face at all, which was time. There were various factors that led to this problem. First of all, finding time was major issue, and it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough time, but rather that it was hard to work out any time to execute a lot of what we had originally planned because of each group member’s conflicting schedules. We worked around this the best that we could, sacrificing time on the weekends and between our classes, although as we will explain more in depth later on in this portfolio, we felt as if we came up short on many of our originally planned goals and had the feeling that more could’ve been done to make our campaign even more successful.  

Along with constraints, we also viewed the opportunities that would arise from our campaign. First of all, we felt that our project was a fitting response, because as previously stated, ever since the Trump administration took office, there has been a much larger inclination to act, but not many people had the opportunities or knowledge to do so. So we planned on helping our community by teaching them the importance of civic engagement and how easy it is to get involved. We also believed that through the act of promoting civic engagement throughout our community here in Lincoln we would also be breaking many assumptions and the negative connotations that people might have when it comes to civic engagement.

Another end goal was to shift people’s stance on the current situation of immigrants and refugees from a sympathetic stance to an empathetic stance. Showing sympathy is easy, but ultimately nothing gets achieved there. But through an empathetic stance, more people would be more prone to do something, as we would show people that we truly care about these Americans who are being oppressed. We wanted to achieve this by stressing the importance of making a change here locally. A reason people feel powerless in their ability to do something is because they think change needs to be a national or international change, something big that everyone will know. But our mentality was that if we could show the people that all big changes start small, by doing so we feel that it would in turn inspire others to do more. This ties into the importance of working with political organizations based here in Nebraska.

Something else we also planned on doing originally, was making a metaphorical quilt (hence the origin of our group’s name, Patchwork Lincoln). We intended on making a digital compilation of all the components of our project such as interviews, the short videos, the posts on our facebook page, and the feedback we got from anyone that we had reached out to. On this page, people will find various organizations that are doing great things here in Lincoln, as well as create a public sphere where members can actively voice their opinions, organize events themselves, and discuss current topics and issues going on in the local and national news.

Now that we’ve covered most of what our original project proposal was, we will spend the next three sections of our portfolio talking about what we did throughout our campaign, evidence of our intervention, and a reflection of everything that we have done up to the end of the semester. You’ll see the things our group did to get a start on our project, the many difficulties and problems we encountered along our way, and the exigences we found not within our campaign but rather within ourselves as group members that ultimately led to unexpected challenges. However, despite everything that we encountered, we managed to pull through and achieve great things, even if the change is small and minimal. It’s also worth noting that a slow start to this common’s campaign doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful, we still intend on helping people become more socially aware and active going forward via our Facebook page and other forms of social networking.

Our Campaign

Initially, we intended to use an internet based nexus to be able to find and share events, protests, or other opportunities to connect with the community promoted by numerous local organizations. Our choice was between a standalone website and a Facebook page. We ended up choosing the Facebook pages because it made more sense to go to where the slacktivists stayed, as opposed to expecting the sedentary to come to us. In the end, it was the wrong question to be asking. We didn’t need a nexus for content to flow through, we needed a starting point for people to grow from. The similarity of concepts made it so this change wasn’t a full reversal.

In trying to create a nexus we had put together a list of ten organizations, operating locally, close to campus, that students should get involved with. This change was part of a larger paradigm shift, where we realized there would be no conceivable way to force people out of slacktivism. The more reasonable alternative was to create a good starting point, and content that would challenge their disengaged disposition. We went from social media pages which would share organization’s initiatives, to a poster/pamphlet of those organizations that we could use to advertise to the broader student public through their social media, and through physical distribution.

Creating that initial seed from which people could engage in their own way was a fundamental piece, but without water seeds don’t grow. Slacktivists are slacktivists because they are sedentary in their political engagement, to change this we devised a multi-faceted approach to a package of content to give the inexperienced activist the push they needed, as well as a rhetorical framework which would continue to push them. This approach used skits and citizen journalism to challenge the dominant perspective, and create a framework in which active engagement in local communities is the dominant perspective.

As we were trying to move people out of slacktivism toward activism, particularly on behalf of communities vulnerable to current immigration policies, we thought it would be necessary to demonstrate the perspectives of members of those communities. Through our own personal experiences we knew multiple people who were undocumented immigrants, and thought that through interviewing them we could provide a window into the threatened lives most people don’t think about, and have a hard time empathizing with. While we still think that conceptually this is a good idea, when weighing the likely benefits it would provide to student engagement as compared to the possible negative impacts that come with exposing or risking exposure of one’s undocumented status, we decided it would be unwise to add any additional risk to these individuals. Instead, we thought questions about slacktivism and immigration could be directed at organizations who are working on behalf of these vulnerable communities. While drawing less ethos specifically from personal experience, organizations like Nebraska Appleseed, and the Nebraska Latino American Commission, are integrated into the same vein of community activism and organization which we are trying to encourage, and have experience and specialized legal perspectives about issues of immigration. Through having people from these organizations speak to the disengaged parts of the student public, it ties a close knot between the civic engagement we promote and our goal of directing newly engaged people to the struggle surrounding immigration. We intend this piece of content to be very down to Earth, an expert giving their opinions on slacktivism, finding direction in one’s own organizing and activism, as well as what can be done locally on behalf of immigrants.

Our second piece of content is a sketch of a fake doctor prescribing slacktivism as though it were an over the counter drug. In its inception we thought that by making it mildly abrasive and intentionally a bit cringey it would generate interest through humor, and contribute to shifting perspectives. While effectively sub-tweeting slacktivists, this piece lodges a direct refutation of slacktivist lifestyles. In doing so our group intends to demonstrate an alternative paradigm within which discourse occurs. The current norm is that slacktivism is inherent and those who are involved in some capacity are special, by contributing to your community organizing locally you exceed societal expectations, as though it were some extracurricular activity to attach to a résumé. It’s our opinion that this norm inhibits young people in particular, but people generally, from asserting political influence, and contravenes a large and fundamental piece of American history; when there is an issue of popular struggle, the people must organize in order to coherently and effectively address the situation. It is fundamental in facilitating this transition between slacktivism and activism, to counter this narrative of passive disengagement and apathy. That Gandhi's, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” is a fundamental truth which needs to be reinvented effectively in the contemporary rhetorical context. In doing so we thought that an abrasive and mildly indignant tone would be appropriate, so as to draw on a larger feeling of disillusionment. This challenge also pertains to the “bubble culture” many people find themselves in. By sharing on slacktivist media these videos we’ve created, the slacktivist’s perspective would be challenged, and were they interested in answering that challenge they may find reason to self-critique. It is from this point that the slacktivist would have the opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and take steps to become involved, from a local starting point.

Our final sketch was based off of the DirectTV slippery slope commercials. Initially the thought was to take this sketch in a similar direction as the doctor sketch, where it wouldn’t focus so much on the absurdity of the slacktivist’s disposition, but would detail a political system thoroughly co-opted by business interests and political insiders whose actions are wholly detached from public opinion. This is the reality which we live in, and would have been the final outcome of the series of statements along the slippery slope, however the point was that this reality is a result of public disengagement and lack of sufficient grassroots organization. Without organized action, democratic pressures were removed from government, leading to a slippery slope of increasingly detrimental government policies, and a more toxic and polarized political climate.

In the end we decided that this would sound more like a diatribe than an appeal to action, though these are certainly not mutually exclusive. We thought that this sketch in tandem with the doctor sketch would lead our core message to a more negative tone. What we wanted was a mixture of positivity in the form of humor, and negativity in the form of interpersonal critique. In order to balance these tones we changed the skit to a more mild version which continued to emphasize a change in personal actions. Associating slacktivism with condescension and pretentiousness, we altered a commonly held public attitude, that pretentiousness should be looked down on, by attaching slacktivism to it. This critique is based on the idea that slacktivists are willing to externalize their political leanings for catharsis but won’t take substantive action to support organizations which will advance their interests. Slacktivists are pretentious in the sense that they lack authenticity in discussing political engagement. Additionally, by directing more focus to the individual level we emphasize the need for personal politics, and de-emphasize the idea that the system is too large and too broken to be addressed in a cogent way. Putting responsibility on the person contributes to creating a better rhetorical framework for how to view organizing and activism, and additionally emphasizes the necessary role which individuals play.

Evidence of our Intervention

For our campaign, we employed the tools of rhetoric to persuade the average college student to beat the vice of slacktivism in favor of a more active approach to civic engagement. To accomplish this end, we made videos -- typically, the tools most often employed by the slacktivist, reinvented as a medium intended to prompt substantive action. Our shorts used humor, parody, and satire to pull at the moral heartstrings of the viewer, making their hypocrisy apparent, and prompting change. The evidence of this action is as follows.

First, our videos have been shared on Facebook and uploaded to Youtube. These are mediums which lend themselves to virality and widespread acclaim, which we would be only so lucky to achieve. In any event, at this moment in time, it is impossible to say what the full extent of our impact will be; nevertheless, we know we have reached at least those in our own personal networks. We can also infer that at least some of our content has been seen by individuals who are interested in this area. After all, someone who stumbles upon our YouTube videos, or our Facebook posts, will have only continued with the video if they were interested by its content and message. In this way, we hope to reach those who might have an inkling of their responsibility to civic action, but simply needed that final push to actually enact change. We also hope that our actions had reached individuals without the initial desire to enact change; in those types, we hope that our videos perhaps persuaded them of a different mindset, or at the very least challenged their dispositions, by highlighting the hypocrisy and laziness of the slacktivist position.

Another way by which we can measure our impact is through those who have responded to our posts on our “Patchwork Lincoln,” Facebook page. We asked individuals to give us reasons why they do or do not participate in their local community. Through this, we were able to gauge where people felt they could, or could not help the community. The responses we got allowed us to encourage people towards real activism while understanding better the pitfalls people fall into when attempting to take civic action.

Another impact we have to look to is the interviews we conducted. Our work with Nebraska Appleseed gave us valuable information, and a useful perspective into the struggles currently being dealt with by that organization and the community. Its content will be useful to someone wanting a local perspective on the most important issues at hand, and how to solve them. This, also, is content for the internet, with its fair share of views.

Of course, these shares, play counts, and comments are the only empirical metric by which we have to judge our impact. Were we to take on a different campaign, perhaps with a more concrete goal like getting signatures, we could point to a more solid number. This is indeed part of the pitfall of this chosen method of civic action; were our videos to be shared widely, or to change the minds of those in the community, it would be near impossible to quantify that impact. Nevertheless, if this course has been about anything, it has been about the importance of things which are not so easily described by numbers and pure rationality; therefore, let us take into our estimated impact those things which are harder to pin down.
If we are speaking of evidence of an impact which is nebulous in nature, then let us discuss those ideological contributions we make. Our ideas are not novel in nature, but instead add to the momentum of a set of ideas which we hold as fundamental axioms for a proper society to function. In this way, we contribute to a larger, continuous body of ideological work. Foremost, our work is inherently radically democratic, because it rests upon the assumption that there is a system which can be changed through civic action; mostly, we conceive of civic action to mean contacting elected officials, marching, or otherwise engaging in typical democratic forms of working towards systemic change. Thus, we can assume that every person who watches our video who has sympathetic views of democracy will be ever so slightly nudged further into believing in the worthiness of the system, their agency in that system, and in the rightness of civic action as a means to an end. This same line of thinking can apply to all of the other assumptions we make in our video, which we hold as good, and which the viewer will be subtly influenced to accept.

Some of these assumptions are that the viewer has agency in the system and should use that power to act; that the means of enacting change should be rooted in the community which that change will effect; that those individuals who profess one thing must also act in accordance with these expressions of belief; that the act of sympathetic feigning of interest or consideration is not just unhelpful, but wrong and self-serving; that the internet, while an effective nexus for enacting change, has inherent limitations for prompting meaningful civic action; that the current zeitgeist of the culture slacktivism is wrong; and that satire and parody are proper and effective tools of highlighting moral and logical inconsistencies in a belief, and motivating individuals towards behavioral change.

Of course, these are nebulous things to measure. Our videos implicitly either assume these ideas or argue directly for them. Regardless, the spreading and remixing of these ideas help continue their existence as cultural memes, and are certainly pieces of evidence we can look to for proof of impact. Again, this fact rests upon the idea that evidence can be non-empirical in nature; this class, and by extension the tradition of ancient Greek rhetors, would certainly point to this being a valid assumption and method of weighing impact.

However, we would be entirely dishonest if we did not admit some shortcomings of our campaign. If ours was an effort to encourage real activism, we did not encourage our viewers and followers to share with us how our posts prompted them to change their behavior. Had we focused more heavily on this strategy, perhaps we could point more firmly to, say, someone’s remark that we had gotten them to participate in a given networking event or march. Without that subtle encouragement, someone may have taken our message to heart, but never thought to share that impact back with us. Such a lack of encouragement for responding and giving feedback is an error which we wholly acknowledge as regrettable.

We don’t think that there is a fundamental flaw in our approach, only that because of our constraints, we remained unable to fully realize the ambitions our plan laid out. If there had been a more focused campaign on media from the get-go, and we had the capacity to flood content similar to the small amount which we produced just in larger quantity, we would have been more successful in addressing the problem of slacktivism.

We also understand that the extent of our impact did not dive so deeply into the community as we would have liked. While initially, there was a focus on the state of the immigrant and refugee community in Lincoln, and addressing the hateful rhetoric of the Trump administration towards it, we ultimately were less able to secure solid connections to organizations in that community. Most whom we contacted either didn’t reply, were unwilling to conduct interviews, or were unable to do so in our time-frame. We reached out to various organizations and leaders, including UNL professors, the local ACLU offices, the director of the Latino American Commission, Nebraska Appleseed, and El Centro de las Américas. While we had some success in establishing contact, ultimately it seems a longer, more sustained effort by an actual Recognized Student Organization (RSO) at UNL would have generated better responses. Nevertheless, the experience of reaching out to said groups was valuable, and each is an essential resource for enacting real change.

Wholly, the evidence of our impact is not one hundred percent quantifiable. It is had within the minds of our viewers, anonymous as they are on YouTube, and those friends and contacts whom we reached through our Facebook page. The evidence of our impact is also, we freely admit, not as extensive as it could have been, given better planning and circumstances. That being said, there are clear markers of our impact. There are the play counts on our videos, and there are the likes and shares on our Facebook posts. These point to a non-zero impact on the community and its tendency to promote action over inaction.

A Reflection: What Went Well, and What to Change

As a whole, what we ended with as a group is something of which we are proud. It not only will inspire others to get involved in their community, but it also pushed us as group members to work harder and get more involved ourselves. By acting as a middle-man and being the voice to express the concerns surrounding “slacktivism,” it forced us to ask ourselves, are we doing the same thing?

One of the reasons why we wanted to do this project specifically was to offer ourselves an opportunity to get educated on what is going on in our community. When we started, a few of us had ties to local organizations and an understanding of local legislation; however, we knew that there were many people our age who had little to no knowledge on these topics. It is very common for young people to be disinterested, or uninvolved with local politics because they believe it is too hard or they don’t like it. While we cannot force everyone to be interested or want to evoke change, what we can do is educate others -- and in this case, even ourselves -- on what is going on. All we wanted to do was show others, and ourselves, that it isn’t as hard as one may think, it only requires a bit of effort.

Initially, our project had a slightly different vision. Our original goal was to post the videos that we created to a Facebook page as a way to get our information to the public. While that is still part of our end goal, we decided as group that this way of communication can quickly become somewhat hypocritical; as that itself can fall under the branches of “slacktivism.” As a result, we had to adjust our plan and use the Facebook page as more of a stepping stone in the grand scheme of things rather than the end point. This was beneficial for us as a group because it forced us to analyze our actions more critically, rather than go with our first instinct. No idea reaches its final draft during its inception. It takes multiple drafts and revision to become the most effective; and yet, we ourselves are still searching for what will work best for the future of this campaign.

Additionally, in the beginning we were rather ambitious. Due to the potential stretch of this project all of us had really big ideas; things like starting our own rally, or getting policy out and into the legislature were two of many borderline impossible ideas that were proposed. While grand plans such as this are not entirely impossible, due to the scope and timeline that this project entails, they may not be the most tenable. However, having more ambitious ideas was not a complete mistake. Sure, it did stall the momentum temporarily, but presenting these ideas to the group was also able to motivate us to do something of which we can be proud. This project is no “policy that could change the world,” but being in the political and social climate that we are in things such as an outlet to get involved, especially one geared toward young people, may be more important than we know.  

Furthermore, there were also things that we had to cut from our original plan. When we started we wanted to have about four or five skits and about two or three interviews. However, once we started writing we decided as a group it would be better to write two good skits rather than have three or four mediocre scripts, and the interviews were more out of our control than we anticipated. We contacted about five different organizations across Lincoln (both on and off campus) and we still have only heard back from three, two of them not being able to meet with us before the deadline of this portfolio. While we still intend to meet these individuals; they unfortunately will have to be after the deadline. They will still be cut together and added to the Facebook page in order for others to watch and get informed, which at the end of the day is the intent of this campaign.

One of our biggest internal conflicts was communication. Due to each member having their own commitments outside of class we knew going in that there would be time conflicts. However, what we did not anticipate would be conflicts regarding communication. Throughout the entire project we had a group chat in order for us to be able to communicate to all group members more easily, but this may not have been the best way to communicate. In it, we would often discuss things such as the original proposal, ideas for skits, who we should contact for interviews, etc. or more blatantly, things that should have been talked about it person.

If we were to do this again, we would most definitely plan times to meet in person to discuss more important information that may not be well articulated over multiple messages. For example, when we were planning for the proposal, we did not plan a time in person to write sections together, rather we wrote our own sections on our own time. This caused problems because some people would write something into the Google Doc while another member may come back and delete the information they had written without telling them. Some other problems included things like repeating information without knowing, things that were not relevant to the proposal, or even ignoring topics that need to be discussed completely.

Tied to this constraint it is also worth mentioning that our work ethic wasn’t the best throughout the majority of this common’s campaign. Finding time to get together was already a problem enough for our group, but even when we did get together, we tended to do a lot more planning than action. We acknowledge that the execution of our original plans were well possible within the time frame which we were given to work; but ultimately we failed to dedicate the sufficient amount of time into realizing everything that we wanted to achieve.

Nevertheless, the group message worked well to plan things such as when to meet to film skits, or a few off hand ideas that we wanted to run by the others before we started writing, but it should not have been used as our only form of communication. In the end, everything did work out. We got everything done that we needed to without the world exploding. However, who knows if the process may have moved slightly faster if we were to have set aside times during the less busy parts of the semester to discuss what we needed to face-to-face, rather than over a message.

One thing that our group did do well was use each of our unique skill sets to accomplish a goal. While each one of us is similar in some aspects, throughout different stages of the process certain aspects of people’s personalities and skill sets became more central to the task at hand. Whether it was an inclination toward planning and management which came in handy toward the beginning, or leadership and skills of motivation toward the end when every member was losing steam, certain people had their shining moment at different times. Every person was of use, and we truly did not realize we were doing this until all was said and done. For a group to work you can’t have the same person replicated four times; you will never get new ideas and fresh perspectives. By having four rather different personalities at play we were able to make the best of it all, by accentuating each other’s talents and filling in where each of us were lacking.  We were able to create a campaign that could tackle the issue of slacktivism and make a framework for a solution. Having unique perspectives and diverse bodies with different life experiences we were able to patch that all together and create something multidimensional.

This project didn’t cure the problem of slacktivism; nothing ever will. However, as a group we were able to create something that we were happy to put our name on. Before this project many of us may not have known the best steps toward taking action, and while we still very well may not know we are all one step closer to being the change that we want to see. Things in our political sphere are scary and the steps that need to be taken will be difficult, but the most rewarding experiences are the ones that come the hardest. Whether you agree with what is happening or you vehemently disagree, everyone’s voice has power. Every voice has the potential to make change and it is our job to figure out how to use it. Right now things are hard, but getting involved and having your voice be heard doesn’t have to be. Your voice can and will be heard; organize, make noise, and you will make change.

Links to Our Work:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzQbuGoUbJv_OERkSXY1Rzk3XzA
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzQbuGoUbJv_VEpZOHk0SDYydHM
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzQbuGoUbJv_M3pkQU5NdUllMDg
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5PnIvmR8JhcejhaMGlOc0FTNG8
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eKXnvsZnxKpvGAPz_xMi3HBIUi9pWFsQ7ZD7m5sBJhE