Collective Action: It’s not easy, but it is rewarding.

As we progressed throughout the quarter, I knew that the Action Project was going to challenge me in ways that I’ve never been challenged in my academic career at UW that’s already spanned three years. For one, this was my first group project that essentially spanned over an entire quarter. As such, the number one takeaway I ended up having for this project was how important communication is not only for the success of a group project, but also as we start thinking about our professional careers after UW. I thought my group did a fantastic job with communicating. We were meeting weekly at Starbucks, and also had a group text where we’d share ideas and plan out our next steps as we progressed along with our project. As much as we were able to learn the importance of communicating with one another, we also learned that we can’t control the others around us. Our initial plan as a group was to interview FareStart as part of our topic of “World Hunger”. For those who don’t know, FareStart is a non-profit organization based in Seattle which employs homeless/poverty-stricken people in their restaurants to fight against hunger. One of our group members was able to establish contact with FareStart early, and they had told us they’d be more than willing to set an interview up. However when the time came to hold the interview, they decided to go ghost mode on us. We were eventually able to pull off a screening of another documentary last Thursday, but there was definitely that sense of disappointment that we weren’t able to pull off what we originally envisioned because of other factors not cooperating with us. I think this lesson we learned with this project can be applied to the professional world (especially being a POL S major), in that creating meaningful change in the world won’t be easy to come by… by any means. But what we did learn that’s important to control what we can control. Plus that even the smallest impacts made can at least bring awareness to others and ourselves on why looking to create positive change is so important.

5 thoughts on “Collective Action: It’s not easy, but it is rewarding.

  1. Eric Wei-Chung Lang

    I completely agree with all points that with these action projects, we learned a ton. Not only did we learn from our own groups research but I also learned that communication was the key to it all. With something like this, you are forced to communicate with people in order to have a favorable outcome, and thats the outcome of a well done project for a good grade. In order to do that, everyone needs to cooperate and communicate what each person can do, and how we’re going to get it done. With my group, we initially had a very clear-cut plan and we decided on a way to execute. The problems we ran into were more logistical, and communication was key to solving them. For one, we had a couple of group members that were traveling during the quarter, so we had to work around that schedule. Then I think our biggest obstacle was trying to reserve the HUB lawn, and when we failed the a couple times we had to find an alternative, while making sure that we were able to keep all the equipment that we needed for a long enough time. The point i’m trying to make is that with this project, this was the first time that communication was the biggest part of a group project, and that taught me a lot in terms of giving me a different perspective on how different group projects can be done.

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    1. Jannely P Pina

      Hi Benjamin,
      I’m sorry that your project did not work out the way you and your group would have liked to, it sounded like it would have been a very interesting and educational project. As I was reading your post and the struggles you went through I found them to be relatable to some of the struggles my group faced. When Professor first announced that we would be doing a group project I was not excited for that because I knew that for me it would be a struggle to meet with my teammates outside of class due to my class and work schedule. In the end we mostly communicated through a group message on Facebook. For our action project my group and I had planned to address the issue of food waste by getting restaurants and grocery stores to donate their excess foods to their local shelters. The shelters were more than willing to accept the food but we faced many problems when it came to getting places to donate food. When we were calling locations most restaurants and stores would reply that we needed to contact corporate and unfortunately there just wasn’t enough time to do that. I really liked how you said that the struggles we faced in our projects served to teach us that making meaningful change is not easy. I definitely find myself agreeing with this and it will be a lesson I will take to heart for the future.

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  2. Cindy Liu

    Hi Benjamin,

    I wanted to start off by saying that I completely understand your struggle, as I’ve experienced to some extent, the same problems that you’ve faced when it comes to waiting for a reply for something that seems like it can definitely “make or break” your grade. It is frustrating to feel as though you are so close to the finish line in establishing concrete plans for your project, but any little change could lead to an unexpected outcome which then… can lead to panic especially if there is little time to react. I like how you’ve connected your experience in your group action project with the inevitability that comes with the collective action problem. Although we wish to make change, sometimes it really isn’t up to the individual (as pessimistic as this comment seems) because the only way to make drastic change may be the reliance of the system to make a change first. But we all know that is difficult if the system and the individuals in it do not seek change because it gets in the way of their own private benefit.

    When we think about collective action problems, we can also connect this with the fact that companies emitting a huge carbon footprint through their production of goods never seek to change their ways through more environmentally friendly efforts. We can even see the collective action problem being played out in the ways that people eat—the consumption of meat has such a huge impact on the environment that there are videos telling us that if we cut down on our meat consumption to once or twice a week, we can cut down greenhouse gas emissions that drastically affects climate change. Yet we must realize that even if people individually change, nothing will actually happen until a system of people can think the same way. But you’re right when you say that awareness is important in sparking that change because without it, people would not be prompted to even consider their impact in a world full of people. But just as change happens with a system of people who think the same way, working in a group requires that same togetherness to make a change as well. Thank you for posting this!

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  3. Chloe Jackson

    The biggest take away I took from your post is when you said that creating meaningful change in the world is hard. All of us in this class probably learned this to some degree trying to implement our action projects. One thing I discovered when my group was sitting outside the hub for our action project is that the majority of people don’t want to hear about these big problems. People are either too caught up with the stress of their own lives or live knowing that ignorance is bliss. We asked everyone who walked by us if they wanted to learn about how much water is used to produce the beef we eat but the vast majority would either avoid eye contact or just say something like “not really”. This three hours made me reflect a lot about the topics we learned in class and why changing things systematically is so hard. We as Americans enjoy the cheap surpluses of food we have and don’t want that to change. We also live in a capitalist society in which maximum profit is the ultimate goal, so as we learned in class things like industrialized food are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

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  4. Marlee DeForest Blue

    Hi Benjamin,
    I had the same feeling while reading your response that I did while listening to my classmates presentation, reassurance. While I, similar to you, cooperated well with my group and loved working with them, the cooperation and availability we found from outside groups and organizations. While the work the work many of the groups we tried partnering with was amazing, we were less than thrilled with their responsiveness towards our multiple attempts to contact or coordinate with them. I agree with you that this taught important lessons that can be taken into the “real world” in terms of how challenging inspiring collective action is. I also think that it was an important reminder that we, as students, my view ourselves and our priorities as essential, however, while success in school is important it doesn’t really mean anything in the wild “real world”. Simply because of education people won’t be lining up to help us or cater to us similar to how they do in academia with the option of office hours, tutors, and similar. I thought this project was an awesome blend of working with different real life organizations while still having the structure and support of our university. Again, I loved doing this project as a result of how awesome my group was.

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