What is the VSPN Freedom School Action Camp?

Our cohort will engage in praxis-oriented training* + political education on youth & community and campaign organizing fundamentals. We are looking to engage in rigorous transformative leadership development that puts more tools in our collective organizing tool belts and sharpens our collective analysis to lay the foundation to plant seeds for transformative organizing across the state. 

We want to collectively create the conditions to scaffold and build out a mass movement here in Virginia for divestment from policing + militarism on and beyond our campuses. To do that, we need to build out a movement to scale that disrupts our current systems and reclaims power into the hands of the people. By engaging with a cohort of students who are a part of campus-based organizations, we are looking to develop organizers who are committed to: bringing what they’ve learned back to their collectives/organizations, building statewide power through deep collaboration with youth across the state, and shaping the future of organizing in Virginia. 

We want to collectively build the skills necessary to  shift  the material conditions in Virginia. We seek to build campaigns that disrupt systemic violence and organized abandonment, that disrupt cop cities + universities, divest from policing and militarism on campuses, and invest in life sustaining solutions such as housing for all. By “building campaigns” we mean “developing time-bound organizing fights” waged against particular targets that are strategically constructed to win concrete demands around the targets mentioned above. Right now, we are approaching this by developing our statewide housing campaign.