Source: tresyk – Flickr
Collective action is hard! That is the main takeaway from my group project. We choose to screen a movie in order to bring awareness of unfair trade practices. We could never find times to meet as we were all busy college students who had jobs. That inhibited creating a healthy group mind. For example, Iris and I were trying to figure out how to reserve a room. Jack arrives at the meeting and he is the only other person from our group able to show up. He tells us the he already got the room! That was fantastic, but we just had not been in communication. Thus, Iris and I did not know he had got a room. There was no healthy group mind, but no one was lazy. We were all just very busy. I learned that people’s lives can get in the way of collective action. Students like ourselves needing to work to attend University has implications for how they are able to engage in collective action
I do not think we made a meaningful contribution to the larger community. Our turnout was fairly small and mostly friends. Many people were not interest in seeing a documentary on a Tuesday in spring. I handed out flier for hours in front of the HUB but it did not have the desired effect. I learned that if you really want to get a message across you have to make it very accessible and or enticing. For example, we could have given people information about trade practices in a pamphlet or if we were able to get an interesting panel we could got people to come to our event. But we did try to get speakers to come but no one we reached out to was available.
The experience of group action made me think of La Campesina movement. These people were peasant farmers in the global south who were tired of unfair trade practices created a global food movement. I am amazed at what they have been able to accomplish through collective action. La Campesina even has a voice in the UN. We were trying to do a micro-scale version at the local level of what they have done at the global level. They must have dedicated people willing to make sacrifices for the good their fellow humans because even at the micro-scale our mission was unsuccessful.