 Thank you all for joining us today and welcome to the fourth webinar in our Divest from the War Machine webinar series, Divesting Universities. This is part of a five-week webinar series with Code Pink and World Beyond War. And this webinar is currently being live-streamed on YouTube and it will be posted to the World Beyond War YouTube account afterwards. So just a reminder throughout the duration of the call if you have any questions for our guest speakers please just send them in the Zoom chat box because we're going to be having a Q&A session at the end of the webinar to address all the questions. So today's webinar will explore the wave of student activism that has led to grassroots divestment campaigns on university campuses all around the world and divestment is a focused actionable and effective organizing technique that enables students to make a global political impact through activism on their campuses and students across the world are currently organizing to divest their university endowments from various destructive industries that threaten the future of humanity and the planet and university administrations have started responding and as the fastest growing divestment movement in history with over 100 universities already divested and over five trillion dollars taken away from the fossil fuel industry the fossil fuel divestment movement has proven the power of student activism. And across the world students are also organizing to divest their endowments from weapons manufacturers and the war machine, private prisons and detention centers and the occupation of Palestine to demand that their schools are not profiting from companies responsible for climate change, endless war, displacement and other human rights violations and these various divestment campaigns all intersect and strengthen each other in their call for a radical revisioning of university endowments to represent student values. So today we are joined by two activists who are going to share their experiences with university divestment campaigns and the insight they gained along the way so that we can all learn how to engage in successful divestment campaigns going forward. So first we are joined by Phi Shroth Dalma. Phi is a student divestment activist from New Haven, Connecticut who attends Yale University. She is an organizer with the movement for Yale to divest from fossil fuels and cancel holdings in Puerto Rican debt and beyond endowment justice. She is also the advocacy and volunteers coordinator for a reproductive justice student organization. She is also the a staffer at her campus women's center and a member of her local sunrise movement. Welcome Phi and thank you for being on today's webinar. Hello, thank you so much. It's such an honor to be here and I'm so excited to see all of your faces just full of love and solidarity. This is so great. Awesome. Well we are also joined by Leila Kanan, an activist based in Portland, Oregon. Leila was part of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement or BDS movement at University of Oregon and she worked with Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights or Super to pass a pro BDS resolution on her campus. And since graduating from the University of Oregon, Leila has hosted a community radio show called One Land Many Voices where she interviews other Palestinians and activists and discusses Palestinian current events. Welcome Leila and thank you for joining us today. Thank you all. I'm so excited. This is awesome. I obviously love talking about Palestine so what greater audience to have. But yeah, thank you. This is great. Awesome. So now we will be having a facilitated conversation with Phi and Leila to hear more about their experiences organizing for divestment on their campuses. So first of all, could you both share a bit about the divestment campaigns that you are involved with and what are the demands and goals of these campaigns? Yeah, I can share a bit about my campaign, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition or EJC for short. We have two central demands. We're advocating for our university to divest from fossil fuels and to cancel its holdings in Puerto Rican debt. But in the last couple months we refocused lots of our energy around the pandemic and organizing resource and wealth sharing from our university to surrounding communities in New Haven. Everything that we fight for falls under the umbrella of endowment justice and so that broadly encompasses divestment from unethical institutions and practices like fossil fuels, Puerto Rican debt, the prison industrial complex and predatory lending. But it also involves sustainable, unjust reinvestment and wealth redistribution. So we've employed a range of methods. We tried to do kind of a top-down collaboration with our university's advisory committee on investor responsibility and that didn't work very well. So now we've moved on to nonviolent direct action and I've served as a wellness captain and a rally leader and a song leader and have helped to facilitate nonviolent direct action training so far. Awesome, thank you, Fee. Yeah, okay, so like Kelsey said, I was a part of a group called Super Students United for equal for Palestinian equal rights at the University of Oregon. It's essentially an organization that fights for the freedom and justice of Palestinian people who have traditionally been silenced, killed, imprisoned and have been living under military occupation since 1948. And although this group does focus on the importance of BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel, it's equally in my mind it's equally as important to draw the parallels between struggles for equality all around the world and more specifically in the U.S. So yes, the goals of Super and BDS is to bring much-needed attention to the struggles of Palestinians. Personally, my goal was to increase the awareness of how Black Lives Matter and how the indigenous sovereignty movement really all connects and all exists in the same storyline. And so yeah, I think that is essentially the goal of Super, BDS, Students for Justice in Palestine, all of it. Wow, well thank you both so much. I'm excited to hear more about these campaigns. So Leila, could you elaborate more on how your campaign initially emerged? Yeah, for sure. There's a long history. So Super is actually a subgroup of a larger organization, SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, and that was established in 1993, which was around the time of the Palestinian Intifadas or uprisings. And that started in University of California, Berkeley, and later in 2004 as an offshoot of SJP, BDS was founded as an organization to specifically boycott and divest from Israeli academic and cultural institutions. And as for Super, it started a bit late on U of O campus. We started it in 2018, but has existed nationally for years and years and years. But Super and BDS as a general movement has national and international support and is one of the largest pro-Palestinian grassroots movements in the world. It's gained immense support from students, politicians, academics, really anyone that learns about it probably becomes pro-BDS. And more importantly, it has the support from essentially all Palestinian human rights groups and organizations, Palestinian trade and labor unions, politicians, so on. And so, but because BDS shines a light on the injustices Palestinians face and aims to boycott Israeli organizations, it is faced with a lot of negative pushback and people that are pro-BDS often experience a lot of demonization. And I'll get into that later. Awesome, Layla. Thank you for sharing more about it with all of us. So, Phi, in your divestment campaign at Yale, what would you say effective outreach looks like and how do you raise campus awareness around divestments? That's such a good question because raising campus awareness is so vital and the work never stops. You know, you have to raise awareness directly before and after an action and then the lulls between actions, so it just it really is part of the work. And we found ourselves dealing with a lot of that this year when we had to manage press coverage and our media narrative when we disrupted the Harvard-yield football game in November of 2019. And that ended up being quite successful because it resulted in kind of a university, like a nationwide movement and the eventual creation of the College Climate Coalition. But in order for that to happen, we had to have these skills of raising campus awareness. And so I guess to like name some tactics for any of the university students who are watching or who will be watching this recording in the future, some of the tactics that the Endowment Justice Coalition has found especially helpful is the teach-in. We are big fans of the teach-in. It's very near and dear to our hearts, just an interactive lecture style gathering that aims to educate participants about an activist cause and then hopefully to mobilize them from passive supporters into active participants in the movement. We've been holding teach-ins for years since 2018. In 2018 we held our first one that was called Inside Yale's $27 billion and now they have over $30 billion just to illustrate how much wealth is truly hoarded and how much is accumulating over time. We found that teach-ins are also most successful when they're paired with lots of publicity and lots of canvassing. And I guess that leads me to another tactic we use which is dormstorming and that's just knocking on students' doors to promote a cause. We love dormstorming. It's typically to promote a specific event like a public rally or a march and flyers are really helpful. Sign-up forms, spreadsheets are highly recommended so that you can get people's contact information and get them involved because ultimately, retainment of participants in a demonstration or a direct action is what you need to help the campaign continue to gain momentum. After that initial because retaining allows the people that you get involved to then raise campus awareness themselves and get their friends to raise campus awareness and so it just becomes this beautiful positive feedback loop. We also constantly organize one-on-one meetings to get folks involved. We dedicate press liaisons to learning how to represent our movement effectively to the media. We engage in lots of national and global coordination with other university campaigns. Highly recommend SLAC as a platform to any university students who need a platform to organize. It's wonderful and we talk a lot about coalition building but that honestly deserves its own like whole speech. We also dedicate entire working groups to reaching out to specific groups of people which I think has been really helpful for effective outreach in the Endowment Justice Coalition. We have an alumni outreach group and a faculty outreach group and a grad student outreach group and I really would emphasize the importance of reaching out to faculty for university students because lots of them will be allies maybe ones that you wouldn't expect. After the Harvard Yale game in November I had a professor who asked about my arrest at the Harvard Yale game and I was a little bit sheepish and I kind of tried to give a palatable answer about how much research we've done legally and how we knew like all the different repercussions of getting a citation or a misdemeanor and we weighed all the pros and cons really carefully and he just went you don't have to explain all that to me. I got arrested in Vietnam War protests and it was a beautiful moment so it's really good to connect to faculty, to alumni, to everybody that you can and to your neighbors in the surrounding town or city if your university has a surrounding town or city. Awesome, thank you so much V for all of that insight into how to navigate campaigning in a campus environment. So Leila would you be willing to expand more on what makes the university environment so unique for activism? Yeah, for sure. So campus activism is a very unique movement. One that is like simultaneously easier to navigate sorry and gain support for because students are learning, they're expanding their intellectual horizons but it's also one that gets a lot of pushback depending on what the movement is targeting. This negative portrayal of BDS supporters exists pretty much in every sector including on university campuses and in my experience in my experience when we were looking for professors to support us many professors were afraid to support super because they could lose their jobs. Many students were afraid of using their real names in support of BDS because they'd be put on the canary mission list which is a list that essentially exists to black list people mainly Muslims mainly brown people and it prevents them from getting jobs from traveling or even in extreme circumstances it prevents them from living just a normal life. So as you can see this is a much larger issue than just fighting for Palestinian rights on university campuses it's it's about free speech. So when you see when we see on campuses a place that's supposed to foster free thinking and expression people being attacked for being pro BDS or losing their jobs because of it we know there's a larger force involved in silencing this movement and most student movements on campus I would say and in the BDS case it's the Israeli lobby it's the American politicians that rely on the Israeli lobby to keep them in office and its corporations that rely on Israeli businesses and so I think what we can really learn from all of this that all divestment groups on campuses all human right activism groups around the world are all fighting against the same superpower I mean and not necessarily the Israeli lobby but fighting against the people that allow such superpowers to exist which again just brings me back to the same important it's the importance of seeing the parallels between my group versus fees group versus whatever other activism group there is it's um that's also a unique part of being a student group on campus is that we can team up with other groups and we can draw the parallels um yeah it's it's it's important to see the larger picture because it does start on on university campuses but it it can grow to be much much bigger. Thank you Leila those are really excellent points and um I'm curious in the campus environment what are some uh benefits of coalition building like you're talking about um with other student groups and divestment campaigns and how do you go about doing that um V if you want to take this one. Yeah I'd love to Leila you just um characterized coalition building so beautifully just now and earlier and how necessary it is that all different groups that are fighting power structures team up um especially with the fossil fuel divestment movement it's so necessary because climate justice isn't really climate justice if it's not grounded in anti-racism and in anti-colonialism and with majority white climate action groups in my experience um Fossil for Yale which is part of the Endowment Justice Coalition is one of those they have a tendency to adopt anti-racist and anti-colonial language with the best of intentions but then without actually doing the work alongside using that language in their own marches and rallies and so I think the nature of the Endowment Justice Coalition has been helpful in combating that tendency because it's already a coalition we're composed of groups with different interests in our divestment demands um especially fossil for Yale despierta boricua and prison divest but we have many more member groups with varying levels of involvement and because of that we're quite self-reflective and self-critical we have a non-hierarch a non-hierarchical structure uh which is very useful for any university divestment movement because it means that there are no leadership roles and all working groups and tasks are open to everyone and so that makes coalition building much easier it's easier for the group's mission and methods to evolve and it allows us to self-interrogate without feeling like we're challenging any scary leadership it also protects against paternalism and corruption and defensiveness in leadership because those leaders don't exist in the first place and so this year we engaged in some really complex discussion about how to build coalitions in a way that doesn't burden anti-racist and anti-colonial groups with extra labor but that does allow our group to share its resources and platform with other movements and to become effective advocates for anti-racist and anti-colonial causes in particular our biggest fear with the Endowment Justice Coalition is that the fossil fuel divestment demand will become the dominant demand because it seems the most scary if you don't know anything about any of our causes you know the whole world's on fire everybody's going to be universally affected eventually and it's the most palatable and easily explainable to press we've seen our activism reduce to just the fossil fuel divestment demand in press coverage and we've also reached out to alumni with pledges not to donate to the university until our demands are met only to have them respond that they're interested in our fossil fuel divestment demand but not the Puerto Rican debt demand and so we have to go a step beyond simply understanding the links between racism colonialism and climate change we've made it part of our messaging to use Puerto Rican debt and Hurricane Maria as an example of how these things are intertwined because in 2015 Puerto Rico said that it was incapable of paying off its debt now um now much of it is interest which means it's accumulated over time and this was before Hurricane Maria which was made much more severe and much more intense because of human induced climate change and now the economic repercussions of Hurricane Maria are also made much more damaging because of that debt crisis that existed beforehand and so we have to fight these things at once we have to fight these power structures at once and if like it's impossible to take away the social license of fossil fuel industries if you're not also dismantling the forces of oppression and racism that allowed those industries to rise to power and take hold of our society in the way that they do now so it's it's the difference between passively educating yourself and taking action in these causes and we've been working on an ongoing solution in the Endowment Justice Coalition we've created an outreach working group which highlights ways to get involved in other movements and it communicates with other groups on and off campus off campus because it's so important to reach out to our neighbors I've grown up in New Haven and now I go to Yale and that's the surrounding city and I just think it's like absolutely vital especially if your university has a history of exploitation with the community around you to team up with your neighbors because they are fighting like many of them the activists in that city have been fighting the same power structures in your university that you're fighting now and you have to take your cue from them and so our goal is to offer support as frequently as or more often than we ask for support on our own campaigns what's really key is to reach out consistently and not just when you need support on a demonstration or on a campaign because you're not necessarily doing an organization any favors by just sending them opportunities to get involved in your own projects so to build an actual mutual partnership with an organization you have to attend their meetings and you have to frame outreach with the approach of how can we help how can we be of use thank you fee those are some really great tips and I'm really excited to see where the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition leads to so as you kind of made it made clear often it takes more than student support alone to gain the attention of decision makers so in divestment organizing Layla could you elaborate on some of the methods of direct action that you were able to engage in on campus definitely um so we planned a lot of non-violent protests interactive sit-ins in which people who learn Debkay which is the traditional Palestinian Eastern dance learn how to drum the Palestinian traditional Palestinian drum or engage in conversations about Palestinian culture and politics so our goals with that was to kind of humanize the Palestinian movement and say look these are people with a culture these are people with a life and and a history learn about it and engage in it and maybe you'll care a little bit more but one of the main actions that we took was to pass the pro bds resolution on campus which would push uo to boycott and divest from Israeli companies that produce that use production that are produced in illegal settlements and a few of those companies are a Caterpillar, Motorola, Sabra, Hamas, Soda Stream these are all made in illegal settlements in the West Bank so really our goal was to just boycott these companies and cultural institutions in Israel and so we teamed up with groups on campus such as Jews Against Occupation and Muslim Student Union and presented in front of the UO Senate which we didn't think would get a lot of pushback we didn't think there would be that much of a response but we were met with very intimidating groups of frat members and sorority members and J Street members who avidly opposed the bds resolution saying that it was erasing their identity and their struggles against anti-semitism and in my experience once the word anti-semitism is used or is brought up the conversation ends it's cut off and unfortunately being anti-israeli government and establishment is conflated with being anti-jewish which as a group when we're fighting for human rights the intention is not to slash those of another we are here to elevate those of people who have not had rights they don't they are completely treated unequally um and so it's pretty frustrating because in their eyes allowing Palestinians to live peacefully meant that their existence as Israelis or even Jews in America was threatened and that was not the intention at all so a lot of our engagement on campus was just blanketed as being anti-semitic um which makes it really really really difficult to get anywhere um because of course we are not trying to be anti-semitic we are not against Jewish people living we are not against at this point we're not against even the Israeli the state of Israel existing um because we know that that's not possible but we are just trying to create an equal existence for Palestinians and Israelis um yeah so I digress but it's all of our efforts on campus seem to be met with the same resistance that all pro-Palestinian groups meet or are met with um and yeah so that was just our experience and we tried our best to kind of humanize the whole experience of Palestinians and the BDS movement but it wasn't met that with open arms let's say. Thank you Layla for sharing your experiences and Vy you were discussing the unique elements of the campus environment and one of those is obviously the limited time period that students are in college so in light of the quick student turnover on campuses how do you engage in recruitment and training to ensure long-lasting movements? Yeah yeah that's so true because the nature of a university itself is such that it's like you're almost designed to forget what the people before you fought for because you you were only there for four years or maybe maybe a few more um but we have to find ways to peacefully reject that we have to find ways to create a decades-long collective memory between student activists or we're never going to be able to draw on the movements of people who came before us and so what we do at the Adamant Justice Coalition is once a year we have an annual retreat where we engage in storytelling and movement building and skill sharing and it's really fun but it's also really really productive um storytelling is so crucial um for anyone looking to start a university divestment campaign it's been around for student activists at my university since the Black Panther trials in New Haven that was when students divide our administration to house members of the Black Panther Party in their dorms and those activists inspired the apartheid divestment activists of the 1980s in 1986 um they occupied our library's plaza in a shanty town for a year and risked arrest and suspension and now our university honors their efforts um and those activists passed on over the years through storytelling their values of non-hierarchy and radical love and inclusion and as our movement grows and evolves we hope to inspire future generations that are just four years long and pass on those skills and those resources as well um we know from storytelling that occupation works um because you know Yale eventually divested from apartheid as did other universities across the nation and so we're wondering if maybe in 20 years there will be a plaque at our football stadium honoring our arrest at the Harvard Yale football game there might be if history is circular enough uh in addition to storytelling we also use the retreats to build power maps to theorize about our ideals and strategy and that type of movement building is not the time for practicality i recommend getting like as big and as idealistic as you can with your visions of anti-capitalism and equity it's also time to care for each other to teach each other protest music um i love being a song leader and it's so much fun to lead music at retreats and pass that on as well and it's also important that your zines and your power maps and your artwork and everything that you make during this time live forever in a shared google drive folder or something that's accessible to all for future four-year generations we try to bring an endowment justice alumni as well because many of them have stayed consistently involved with our campaigns so they love to tell stories and to advise us and we're also constantly organizing one-on-ones to recruit new members to share skills like effective research and medical coordination of all our different tasks um i ultimately think that recruiting and educating new people is just as important to combat student turnover as remembering the past because you have to kind of think non-linearly and live non-linearly and let both the past and the future inform your action strategy thanks v that's really great insight and for the next question um leila i know you mentioned that these campaigns can stir up a lot of polarized opinions and opposition on campus so in the case of pushback from people on campus um how would you advise uh responding and framing your campaign narrative accordingly yeah so throughout the whole the whole process of um of pro bds super movement we received a lot of pushback from people on campus especially uo president president shill he he has given us the most back of anyone and has used his jewish identity to to act as though he's threatened by us trying to pass this resolution um we received pushback from the liberal group j street from frats and sororities like i'd said before from the republicans on campus um from just normal people on the street so we realized that if we frame it as an israeli issue or as a jewish issue it wouldn't be taken well because people react poorly when they feel that their identity is being challenged um and as a side note that is one thing that israel has done really well it's made jewish americans feel a very deep connection to israel even if they haven't stepped foot on the land um or have very little connection to their jewish heritage which is just another way that um palestinian identity is erased but anyway we found it most effective to frame it as a human rights issue um most people can agree on basic human rights people deserve to live in a safe environment people deserve to have access to food and water and social security and jobs um and we tried to humanize the palestinian struggles such as pointing out that in gaza 95 percent of fresh water is toxic um they only have access to four hours of electricity a day or that in the west bank people are have to pass through checkpoints with armed soldiers that are ready to shoot and kill or frequent home demolitions children are being arrested frequently um and in the past two months since coronavirus has started there have been 300 arrests of children that is palestinians under the age of 18 that have been arrested so this is not just an issue of palestine versus israel of jewish versus muslim this is an issue of of human rights um and so we we had the most success when we framed it in that way um and yeah so it's it's not a movement of trying to erase jewish identity because we can all acknowledge that jews have gone through an unbearable amount of pay but what we can also acknowledge which does not erase the jewish history or does not erase jewish identity is that palestinians are going through something similar and have been for the past 70 plus years and so in our attempt to humanize it we once again are painted as being anti-semitic and my goal with with being an activist being a palestinian activist my goal is to draw the lines and say listen these are issues that are happening everywhere and you of all people israelis should know that um so yeah i think in any circumstance humanizing or just focusing on the human rights issues and climate change people are being affected by this if they're not governments they are not numbers they're not statistics they are people so it's i think that is step number one and trying to get people on your side is just creating a story and creating a narrative um and that's the most effective way that that i've i've felt to get my point across thanks leila i think that is some really really really insightful advice that applies to a lot of other movements too um just this idea of broadening the perspective to um really make the issue more universal i feel like that could apply to weapons manufacturer divestment campaigns private prison divestment campaigns and um so thank you for sharing your experiences and um leila i know you were also able to pass a bds resolution on your campus so i'm wondering fee do you have any experience working with your student government for divestment at Yale yeah yeah we do um this year something exciting actually just happened relating to student government um our college council has unanimously voted to support our demands of fossil fuel divestment and cancellation of holdings in Puerto Rican debt and that means they also officially became a member of the endowment justice coalition we've even had the wonderful president of the college council joining us in meetings which is really cool um and we had to do a little bit of re-evaluating as a coalition you know i saw um i would meet people in a meeting and then next week they'd be across the bench for me asking me questions um as part of the disciplinary committee which was honestly really cool to know that we had allies everywhere and that like our support was growing um but it was fascinating to interact with and to welcome people from student government into the coalition because the environment that they're familiar with and that they thrive in is highly structured and it has these tiers of leadership and we have a non-hierarchical just absolutely wild horizontal organizing structure where projects just get completed through voluntary task delegation and we all trust each other and we all have to rely on each other equally for guidance um and the non-hierarchical model has its own drawbacks too but somehow i found that we managed to get more done than lots of the more organized and tiered student organizations that i'm a part of because we're all just so invested invested is a bad word but we're also passionate um about the work that we do that the work gets done and we're all willing to share our skills and our resources with each other and because anybody can just step up regardless of prior involvement and learn a skill or get involved in something they haven't done before kind of the possibilities are endless and there's so much more people power to get stuff done um so it's only when we bring in folks from student government that we appreciate that non-hierarchy that non-hierarchy for how accessible it is um we found it helpful to explain our structure and our meeting norms at the beginning of every meeting and now we do that at every single meeting because it's good to orient new members and it's also good to ground returning members in our own philosophy our meeting norms include a rotating facilitator or two who guides us through the collectively built agenda um and we make sure that that facilitator rotates so that it doesn't seem like there's any one leader we're any five leaders and we have kind of like the antithesis of robert's rules which is maybe what the people from student government are used to like language like motion to adjourn but we you know if we have a new point we go like this and if we want to build off of what somebody's saying we go like this and this is a moral veto um we also have the jargon giraffe which is really fun if you don't understand a term or if you want an explanation about context we use the jargon giraffe so it's just it was really disorienting to a lot of student government people but we love them and we're so glad that they're part of the coalition now awesome wow i'm very excited to see how uh your collaboration goes and um i'm also curious if the current pandemic has been affecting well i know it's been affecting the organizing so i'm curious um how the current pandemic is influencing your campus organizing and what are some ideas for adjusting um divestment campaigns accordingly yeah organizing in the pandemic is like tough and unprecedented and none of us have dealt with it before um but it's possible you know it's it's possible and it requires like a level of empathy and care and love that we knew we needed before all of this happened that we grounded our activism in beforehand so it's really activists who are the most prepared to engage in mutual aid and to care for each other now um we are having so many zoom meetings every single week and that presents an issue because it's a pandemic and not everyone has the time and capacity or even the literal bandwidth bandwidth of the wi-fi in their house to come to our zoom meetings many college students are caring for siblings or older family members some have taken on new jobs as essential workers some are in very different time zones and some households are struggling to get by with layoffs and the economic impacts of the pandemic and some people have been sick with COVID-19 themselves in the coalition we've had folks get sick but we always record our meetings for folks in different time zones and we always take care of each other with one-on-ones and calls to check in and I hope you know that that never stops even if we fully get back to normal we start every meeting now the round table update on how everybody's doing physically mentally emotionally and that's been really helpful um I also hope that that continues but it's not just the methods of organizing that need to change we also have to change the content and the goals of our organizing because we're in an emergency and it's okay to acknowledge that and to redirect our energy to support our communities so we have partially reoriented the Endowment Justice Coalition to facilitate mutual aid efforts both local ones for folks here in New Haven Connecticut and remote ones for people far away um and we've been advocating for our university to use its own wealth to better support the surrounding communities and that's part of a newly emerging campaign called Step Up Yale which makes three demands of our university to repurpose its facilities to provide housing and food for our neighbors without shelter during quarantine to stop custodial arrests by our campus police and to stop rent collection on yellowed properties for the duration of the pandemic because they own about 500 residential properties in New Haven and we're still um also holding direct actions regarding this campaign and demonstrations so in a pandemic direct action has to be modified to accommodate spatial distancing measures you might have seen the footage of car honking protests online which are so cool and I love them um but they don't suit university students very well because most of us don't have cars and most of us are quarantining far from our universities so we have to be creative and one of our most recent actions actually consisted of locally based students taking photos alone by the university gates um with face masks and with signs that said empty shelter here we've paired that with a social media campaign which allowed everybody to participate in the circulation and the escalation of our cause regardless of how far away they were and we're also holding a teaching which it makes me so happy that teachings are still possible but they are um the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition is holding a teach in this Thursday and it's titled what does a just Yale look like and if anybody in the webinar is in the New Haven area affiliated with Yale or just interested in learning um about Yale's tax evasion in history of exploiting the city and wealth hoarding um and all that good stuff I can send a link to the chat um about our teaching unless somebody already has somebody already has thank you so much Carly yeah so that's taking place this this Thursday and it's the first of its kind for us we've never done a virtual teach in before um it's the first digital adaptation of this model that we're now quite accustomed to so we have to try especially in wild and dire circumstances like these and ultimately I just I have so much optimism which I know is a weird thing to say because everything is falling apart um but the fact that we're continuing right the fact that we're still organizing and adapting our methods shows how much resilience we have and how much we can do when we care for each other awesome thank you Fee those are some really awesome next steps and I'm really glad we're able to continue organizing at this time and to all of our viewers out there if you're interested in starting your own campaign like the ones you've heard about today our team at Code Pink is here to support you and I personally would love to help you get started if you're interested you can send me an email at kelseyatcodepink.org and also make sure to check out our newly released university divestment guide because that will also help you walk through the process and um we are putting a link to the university divestment guide in the zoom chat but you can also find it on our website and so now it's time for us to open up the discussion to our Q&A session with our audience members and as a reminder if you have questions you can type them in the chat box and Cody will be facilitating our Q&A session so Cody do you want to take it away we'll do thanks Kelsey and thanks so much to Fee and Layla for such a great panel everyone give a big muted a round of applause for our two panelists I'm gonna walk through some of the questions that were raised during the webinar it was actually cool seeing how there was already sort of a chat discussion going on but I wanted to pose these questions to our panelists one question our first came from Chuck that is has the has BDS been successful in divestment at the university level yet what seems most promising currently so I think that could be applied to any particular university or the general university movement as a whole yeah definitely so I think the way to look at its success is it is an international organization but you can also look at the fear that Israel and the US has so they have pushed back they have silenced they 26 states out of 50 in the US have passed anti BDS legislation meaning that you need to sign a contract before you get a job in one of those states before you speak at a university at a public university there so they're passing all this legislation and all these policies that are anti BDS so that means that something is working it is raising awareness to an unprecedented level that we have we haven't seen before and the fact that it is as widespread as it has become is very indicative of its success so although specifically at U of O it BDS initially passed the resolution it wasn't passed after the senate which was unfortunate but it is still successful at university campuses I mean most university campuses have some form of students for justice in Palestine or super or pro BDS student group so yeah I think I think there aren't like specific things that you can point to to say yes it's been successful or no it hasn't but I think that you can look at its response from Israel and its response from the people that it is targeting or the groups that it is targeting and realize that it's doing its job and it's making people realize that there are major injustices happening that the US is very very very involved in I mean 10 million dollars of military aid goes to Israel every single day so just the fact that we're even having the seminar and I'm able to talk about BDS I think speaks on its success um so yeah I think it's it's been very successful if that answers your question sorry excellent thank you Leila uh we're coming up on time so I'm gonna keep on going through and I'm gonna pose this next question to Fee first I'll put this question from Fahim I'll repost it in the chat it's a bit of a longer one but it's regarding divestment from fossil fuels has it been easier sell on campuses without technical programs or in states that do not have fossil fuel investments already or is the existence or non-existence of these technical programs um in a state with significant investments does that have an impact this is such an excellent question and I wish I could speak to it but I don't know if I can compare um different universities levels of success with fossil fuel divestments since I only have experience with my own um but it's a really good question and my guess is probably that I guess depending on a university's relationship to the state it would have um an influence on yeah on the success of a fossil fuel divestment movement if it's surrounding surrounding city surrounding government is also tied to the same fossil fuel industries yeah if anybody else wants to share you awesome and would totally open that up to other members of world beyond war or code pink here to see if this question about technical programs or on fossil fuel divestment has come up in y'all's work but if not I could also move right along thank you so much for you for answering the question the next question was related to um university divestment from nuclear weapons um and I know we um big shout out we had a Susie Snyder from don't bank on the bomb on our second webinar which you can see on our youtube channel um talking about divestment research so that's definitely an organization that um I know we'd like to um prop out there um but wanted to pose it to both fee and Layla in your divestment work on campus um have you maybe in done coalition building with any divestment work around nuclear weapons I personally haven't um so maybe fee you should take this one me neither unfortunately it's such a good question though and we're always looking to expand um our reach of divestment campaigns we're always finding new information about our university's dirty money there's so much out there I will pose the question um to deli uh who sent me a message saying she could uh respond um to measure if deli will be able to mute or unmute themselves oh great somebody unmuted me thank you that's excellent um hi everybody um I didn't run a divestment campaign uh specifically on nuclear weapons but uh it's for the previous question about when is it easier I think it has a lot to do with the definition of success uh with many of the bds campaigns that we've been running the success was passing a student resolution and in none of the colleges did the university itself divest uh so it has a symbolic value and when you run a symbolic campaign and which which has a huge impact the symbolic is important when you run a symbolic campaign it really doesn't matter what the university is or isn't investing that's the truth when you want the resolution to actually be implemented then it it makes a huge difference it really does because uh the university administration will not pass a decision to implement without the buying from their investment staff and so they need to actually support it and be reassured that it will not have a detrimental effect on the returns and many times when you run a campaign and when we have run campaigns that also ask for implementation what we did was to run an inside outside strategy so the outside strategy is putting pressure on the administration using the student senate using a faculty senate using you know direct action whatever we can and at the same time running a more quiet internal campaign trying to inference decision makers usually in a very different language reaching to them through professionals trying to convince them that this will not be very expensive for them uh that they can actually do that easily that they don't need to put in a lot of research and so I don't know if I answered your question but that's what I know excellent thank you so much Dalit from American Friends Service Committee and Dalit will be speaking on our final webinar next week too so please plug in to hear more of Dalit's lessons um I think we're cutting up on time but uh I know one question I wanted to post to both of you this goes a bit more into the the coalition building but I think both of you spoke about like what it was like to organize with student with student government some of the faculty that would support or would not support I'm wondering if you could talk more about have any of your organizing united with say like campus workers then because I know that that's another big struggle on campuses is for workers rights and I'm wondering if in any of your divestment work if you linked up with any of those workers struggles on campus as well I have like a tangentially relevant answer so I can take that one unless Layla wants to I guess we both can um we haven't engaged with campus workers but we have engaged with off-campus unions um and actually just yesterday um yesterday was Monday oh my goodness um yesterday there was a Board of Alders meeting in our city um and members of the Endowment Justice Coalition testified along with people from Yale Yale Fair Share and New Haven Rising um which are both off-campus groups um that have been at this for so long um trying to get Yale to pay taxes because currently our university would be paying 146 million dollars in taxes per year um if they did but they don't um and so tax evasion I think is like so so so critical and also so easy to criticize in a moment of emergency like a pandemic that it's maybe more effective for us to seize on that than to seize on divestment right now um as a way to save lives um of the people who are right here in our community we didn't pair up with uh campus workers although that would have been smart um but again it's just it's a struggle against the man if you know it's we're all fighting for the same thing we're all fighting to be treated equally and fighting for justice for each other and um so yeah I mean you can draw parallels between any and all human rights groups minimum wage workers um immigrant workers it's it's all the same struggle but so I I can't speak personally on building a coalition with them but I see the connection no doubt awesome well thank you so much to everyone who asks questions um thanks again once again to both of our panelists today we are coming up at our time for this webinar so I'm gonna pass it off to Greta from world beyond war to finish it us up with some next steps thanks Cody and thank you everyone for joining us for tonight's webinar on divesting universities my name is Greta Zaro and I'm the organizing director with world beyond war world beyond war and code pink have been putting together this five week divestment webinar series and next week is the last webinar in this five week series on Tuesday May 19th at 6 p.m eastern time we'll be concluding the series with talking about coalition building which we've touched on a little bit tonight but we'll be expanding that with a one-hour discussion really talking about how you can build an intersectional campaign and draw these cross connections between issues using divestment as a tactic that brings them all together so we will put the links in the chat for the next webinar so you can register uh we'll also be sending a follow-up email to all of the registrants with the recording link from tonight's webinar and additional resources and other ways that you can get involved so i think that's everything for now but we hope to see you next week thank you so much everybody thank you thank you thank you this has been great goodbye have a good night bye everyone have a good night everyone peace and love