“Immediately after last winter break, WESUNITY shifted focus from encouraging groups to establish ties with other schools to coordinating activism at Wesleyan,” Smith said.

 The day he returned in January, Smith set up the WESUNITY website, www.wesleyan.edu/wesunity. The site contains news of and links to activist groups at Wesleyan and other colleges around the country.

 Initiated at the same time was the WESUNITY listserve, which sends and receives email messages for the estimated 60 subscribers, Smith said. The members include a representative from nearly every activist and student of color organization on campus.

 “It’s really gotten exciting within the last month or so, because more people have gotten involved,” Smith said.

 Smith said participation in the WESUNITY listserve increased in the last month from one message posting per week to one per day.

 Messages were recently sent by representatives of groups including the Queer Alliance (QA), Wesleyan Peace Action, Wesleyan Democrats, Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) and the Cannabis Coalition, according to Smith. Anyone can send a message to all listserve recipients by emailing wesunity-l@wesleyan.edu.

 “I think it’s been really important. Activism is really fragmented on our campus… a lot of people think there isn’t any activism here, but there is. Roger [Smith] has really helped bring it into the light,” said Meredith Lobel ’01.

 Last week, students from SFT and QA, advertising Tibetan Awareness Week and Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days, respectively, chalked the campus to promote both causes on the same night.

 “I wish the groups had chalked on two separate days,” said Sammie Kempner ’02. “It would have been more effective because people would have paid attention to the messages themselves, rather than the weirdness of reading about two unrelated issues in the same square on the sidewalk.”

 Lobel said this incident illustrated the need for a group like WESUNITY.

 “It sounds really simple, but if the groups had just informed each other of the dates of their chalkings, it could have been avoided,” Lobel said.

 In addition to assisting other groups, WESUNITY is also coordinating projects of its own.

 Smith said he is now working with the University Archives to help student groups learn about their histories. He said he hopes to lead his own student tutorial next fall, on the history of activism at Wesleyan.

 WESUNITY is not Wesleyan’s only organization dedicated to improving communication among Wesleyan groups.

 “I don’t think we need more groups on campus, I don’t think we need more super-smart people on campus, I don’t even think we need a whole lot of money. We need to know how to sit down together and solve problems,” said Chris Barber ’00.

 Barber said this realization led him to found an organization tentatively called the Community Learning Network (CLN), which had its first meeting in October.

 Barber said he conceived the idea for CLN after his involvement with the Student Group Action Alliance (SGAA) last year. Barber said although he liked the SGAA’s intent, it did not succeed in meeting specific goals.

 “We… realized that it wasn’t just about bringing people into the same room. What we lacked was a good method for speaking and listening to each other, solving problems and taking coordinated action,” Barber said.

 Barber said the group is currently in an experimental stage, but holds experiential learning workshops and organizational meetings once a week.

 CLN consists of a group of about 10 students, Dean of Student Services Michael Whaley, Assistant Dean of Student Services Christina Kishimoto, and Coordinator of the Davenport Campus Center Frank Marsilli. 

 Members of CLN are working with Marsilli to assess the feasibility of constructing an activism center on campus.

 “We want to have an institutionalized thing to make sure this kind of approach continues to happen at Wesleyan, even after [the current members of CLN] are gone,” Barber said. “We want to have a center and staff that helps to structure this kind of learning all the time.”

 Next week, CLN members and the Wesleyan Student Assembly will conduct a phone survey among different colleges with activist centers, to collect information and ideas.

 Smith agreed that a physical location for student activism would be beneficial to Wesleyan. He said Dwight Hall, Yale’s Center for Social Justice and Community Service, could serve as a good example for Wesleyan.

 “They have all these activist groups under one roof, with no real division between them,” Smith said.

 Smith said WESUNITY is helping CLN plan for an activism center.

 “It’s one of the beautiful ways we’re working together,” Smith said.
 Another WESUNITY project involves the Committee Outreach Committee of the WSA. Smith said he wants to create an on-line database of phone numbers and contacts from all student groups receiving WSA 
funding.

 Also, Smith said WESUNITY is in the progress of looking for student research that may be relevant to student activist groups, then putting it on-line and in the archives.

 Smith said he thinks many Wesleyan students conduct research that is useful to activist groups, for example Earth and Environmental Science research may be useful to E3, Wesleyan’s environmental group.

 “Often times, student research goes from the student to the professor to the trash can,” Smith said. “We need to stop that.”

 “I think in the future, WESUNITY is going to be really fundamental in bridging different groups on campus,” Lobel said.