Transgender High School Campaign

Team Assignment Part 2: Direct Action Plan (including a Media Strategy)
For this portion of the assignment, you will develop a direct action plan that would pressure the target of your campaign and write up a plan to implement it
and garner news coverage about it. Your group will develop a single document that should be approximately 3-5 pages and include a “run of show” or a
minute-by-minute breakdown of the action. It should include:
● A brief review of your campaign outline: your strategy, your target, and your demand
● A discussion of how this particular action will put pressure on your target to meet your demand
● A minute-by-minute table with the breakdown of your action (what will happen at what time
and who will do it)
● A discussion of the participants in the action and their positionality and how this affects their
participation (e.g. documentation status, work schedules, childcare responsibilities etc.)
● A Safety & Security plan
● An outline of your media strategy:
o Which outlets will you contact? Why?
o Who is your audience?
o What is your key messaging? What story are you telling with the action? o What social media will you use? How will you use it?
Include a short (only a paragraph long) press release
1. Define community organizing and explain it in one paragraph between 5-10 sentences. Use an example from the film “The Hand that Feeds”. Also cite from
slides.
2. Review PowerPoiunts attached, primarily focusing on 5-10. 5, 6, and 7 are critical to understanding Community Organizing.
3. Read the advocates for youth toolkit attached. It is developed for youth and youth organizing
4. You must develop a strategy and power analysis for a campaign. This is different than program design. This is NOT a program design.
5. The attached paper does a great job creating a program design but that is simply not the assignment. The assignment is to develop a campaign. In a
sense it’s an educational campaign. But it is not a community organizing campaign.
6. Keep the topic from the previous paper. Just adjust it. I’m requesting heavily the same writer.
7. Focus in on NE Queens in NYC.
8. Use examples of LGBTQIA organizations in Northeast Queens
9. Reference five other campaigns you are pulling from. You must use the Black Lives Matter trans movement as one of them that you pull from. There are a
lot of other things impacting the trans movement. Pull from them. She likes the Audrey lorde reference. More like that.
10. Your target is not the people. It is the decision maker.
Create an original power map using the following:
Primary target: superintendent
Secondary target: our decision makers put assembly members in queens and possibly the mayor
Voters and funders
PTA
Education Associations
UFT Teachers Union
Violence against trans women in the school system
Demands are focused on the curriculum
1. One book with transgender content written by a transgender person/people each year of high school – As a way to address the violence, address
cisnormativity in the curriculum
2. Include writings by and about trans people in the curriculum
3. Ze/zir/zirs taught non binary pronouns in high school curriculum
5. He or she pronouns. Students can sign up using preferred pronouns, not birth certificate gender
NE Queens
District 26
Organizing people to bring them together.
Who are you organizing? high school students
Audrey lorde project that you mentioned
Target aren’t the people
Target is the decision maker
We demand that our leaders change this policy
If you want to focus on education, this trans related content
In which case
Board of Ed
Superintendent primary target
NE Queens
District 26
Organizing people to bring them together.
Who are you organizing? high school students
Audrey lorde project that you mentioned
Target aren’t the people
Target is the decision maker
We demand that our leaders change this policy
If you want to focus on education, this trans related content
In which case
Board of Ed
Superintendent primary target
of the
district and our school board
Funders –
NYC – government of NYC
Financial – Comptroller
District leaders
NYC Assembly
Mayor
Follow the money
Who funds the money?
MAKE SURE TO USE Transformative organizing
Organizations that align with our values and impacting people on an individual level
Good campaign
Community guidelines
Focus in on the primary text youth advocate toolkit. Lots of pictures. How to develop a strategy. How to do a power analysis.
Have your targets. Have your demands.
One on ones with the students.
What are you doing at the meeting
Get involved in the organization
Facilitating
Supporting them in that process
How change happens
You’re organizing them
In order for them to create the change
Develop strategy together
Leap of the faith
GSA – Gay Straight Alliance already exists in the school. Go in. Hear from the students themselves about their struggle. Brainstorm ideas and inspire them to
align with your campaign strategy for the curriculum.
You were brought in as an organizer
This school has a couple of folks You’re brought in to work with this group of youth. Youth leaders. Develop an organizing campaign to start focusing on
creating change. Just one school. Bigger section on spreading to nyc schools. Focus in specifically on that school but don’t get too lost in the details of that
school
Often times happens one school at a time
We are Addressing cisgenderism and to have gender inclusive readings in all schools. Gender inclusive readings
Long term goal
Immediate demand : I am going to focus in on my school to mandate that all classes read a minimum of one book by and about trans folks
Papers have to be gender inclusive non binary language
Work with students
Students have these demands
Sick of not being included