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Cynthia Oka: Why SFPIRG is important to SFU students and the community

Commentary from the Georgia Straight online.

by Cynthia Oka

Many people may not be familiar with the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group and the influential role it plays in our civic life. But if you’ve ever attended a social or environmental justice event at a Simon Fraser University campus or in the city at large, chances are you’ve been in indirect contact with SFPIRG. And if you were the organizer of that event, chances are you’ve received support from it in the form of training, materials, room bookings, donations, research partnerships, or the latest information about political issues and movements—from B.C. ancient forests to Palestinian human rights.

SFPIRG has been around since 1981, when student organizing at SFU led to its establishment as an autonomous, student-funded organization specifically mandated to advocate for social and environmental justice. For the past 29 years, it has built deep relationships of alliance and solidarity with various progressive movements on campus, in the city, and beyond.

Today, it is one of SFU’s major contributions to its student body and to the community. This is not because every student at SFU chooses to access the organization’s resources or, heck, even likes it, but because SFPIRG offers an essential training ground for fresh generations of progressive, dedicated, and capable community leaders.

It’s kind of like the public university—everybody pays for it and not everybody chooses to go, but those who do go become equipped to take much greater responsibility in and for their society. SFPIRG is not like the public university to the extent that it is much, much more accessible (a full-time student is charged $3 a semester and a part-time student $1.50 in levies that they can opt out of), and there is plenty of support and mentorship available for folks who want to take initiative to develop themselves.

I made my acquaintance with SFPIRG in 2006 as a second-year political-science student eager to connect the research tools I was learning with real social issues. If I got anything out of my studies then, it was a realization that fundamental shifts in society are brought about only by incredible violence or incredible movements. Barring access to weapons of mass destruction, it seemed like the latter was a more plausible pursuit—kidding.

I was a young single mom and extremely isolated as a student. I experienced the institutions of power I was studying as distant and oppressive in their utter neglect and disregard for women like myself. I was attending school full time, raising my son on my own, and working three minimum-wage jobs at the time. But I was ambitious and diligent; I understood that without class, race, and gender privileges I needed more than formal education to help shape my community.

Over the next two years, SFPIRG created opportunity after opportunity to challenge and develop me as a critical thinker, an organizer, a scholar, and a human being. I started off as a volunteer researcher in the Action Research Exchange program and afterwards held work-study positions through which I gained invaluable skills, including public outreach, workshop design, facilitation, consensus decision-making, and policy development. In my last semester, I became the interim ARX coordinator, which later allowed me to transition with relative ease to a full-time program coordinator position with Vancouver Status of Women.

SFPIRG also offers a bike tool co-op; office space, funding, and training for student action groups; and the Letters for the Inside research initiative. But my favourite program there is the Social Justice Lending Library, which is constantly getting updated. It’s a magical place. I used to supplement every course syllabus with readings from the SFPIRG library, which provided a sanity-restoring counterweight to the white, male upper-middle-class canonical figures of academia. Through SFPIRG, I began to access thinkers like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Andrea Smith, Lee Maracle, and bell hooks—thoughtful, courageous, and visionary women of colour who I could relate and aspire to.

The staff, volunteers, and lifelong friends I made at SFPIRG got me through university—the hardest, most backbreaking years of my life. They protected my right to dream. SFPIRG is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I have loved and struggled with this organization and run the whole gamut of emotions in my relationship with it. But the point is that it is a very real relationship, with a very real community of people who have all committed to growing together and leading each other into a world with less hate and less violence, a world where more of us have voice, dignity, and meaningful choices.

Cynthia Oka is a community organizer, poet, and proud alumna of the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group.