The Emerson College Students’ Union (ECSU) met last Wednesday, Oct. 18, to discuss how to better represent the student body and to extend and plan their upcoming Revolutionary Arts Festival.
Members of the student union had a stand this past Friday, handing out free quality condoms to encourage students on campus to join the union and their cause.
ECSU leaders Dylan Young and Amiri Rivera Sillah are planning to record a student union podcast in the coming weeks to further discuss campus matters. The group also proposed plans for a possible food and clothing drive this fall.
The union hosted a meeting on Sunday to finalize its bylaws, working out any kinks and rewriting any conflicts before the year kicks into gear. Members also discussed plans for the Revolutionary Arts Festival, which the group will host next Saturday, Oct. 28. The festival, Young said, will host musicians and artists in hopes of uniting young people politically.
“Our generation’s culture at this moment isn’t going to be strong enough to carry out a long-term social movement,” Young said. “The times we’ve seen generations be able to carry that out, it’s been after a wave of contemporary arts unifying around political dissidence and creating a new structure of how culture thinks about specific topics.”
The festival is at 1 p.m. at the flagpole on the Boston Common. Several Emerson organizations will be in attendance, and Young said they were also extending the invitation to groups outside of the college.
“We think that by putting on an annual arts festival focused on this kind of political dissidence, we can slowly start to make that culture–whether it be music, visual arts, fashion, poetry–and start to disseminate that around. That’s why it’s not just limited to Emerson; we’re welcoming all of Boston,” Young said.
The union is currently collecting signatures for their union drive petition, which is a form that the group can present to the National Labor Relations board if it is signed by 30 percent of the student population. This is one of the requirements of forming a labor union in the U.S., along with having a small council and outlining a platform. Members have shared QR codes and posted on social media to try and gain support.
At the Bright Family Screening Room on Wednesday, Oct. 25 at 7 p.m., a representative from the union will speak on a panel with members of the staff and faculty unions after a showing of “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.” The film follows income inequality and financial disparity in the U.S. The screening is free and open to the public, and doors open at 6:30 p.m.
As part of their point program, the union wants to continue tackling their main goals of raising financial aid grants and scholarships alongside tuition and inflation, advocating for collective bargaining for all students and total financial administrative transparency from the school to the students.
