What We Do
Our goal at Divest Ed is to build a sustainable student movement led by young people who have a stake in seeing their universities be agents of community good. We support students who are demanding action from their institutions through divestment, build critical awareness among each other, share resources, and who continue to be organizers and activists for social justice long after they have left school.
Through coaching, training, resource-sharing, and coordination, we equip student organizers with the analysis, strategy, and skills that they can use in their activism on campus and throughout the rest of their lives in the movement. We are helping train the next generation of young leaders through:
Campaign Coaching
Divest Ed’s long-standing practice has been nurturing the movement by investing in the deep leadership development of students through political education, fiscal support, community investing and supporting non-extractive, democratic, decentralized, and cooperative organizing. We do this via 1:1 coaching, collaborative training on organizing ethos & tactics, public learning sessions, and on-the-ground organizing.
Summer Fellowship
Each year, Divest Ed hosts its fellowship with the intention of creating an intentional community of public learning, coalition building, and intensive campaign support. We invite students from frontline communities or universities most impacting those communities in order to incite principled community building and instigate critical blows to the infrastructure of fossil fuel, prison endowments, and beyond.
Movement Connection
Divest Ed invests in value-aligned, mutually beneficial, and caring coalition spaces. These coalitions are meaningfully integrated in our work and build people power. Divest Ed is especially interested in building power with folks outside of the climate movement. We welcome mutually-beneficial partnerships; please reach out if you’d like to collaborate!
Digital Organizing
Technology is a major part of how we live our lives and therefore an important component in our organizing strategy. At Divest Ed we work with students to use digital tools like social media, targeted actions, digital petitions, and more to make their campaigns more robust and impactful. We use technology to connect with other people and our focus on digital organizing centers community connection and movement building. Digital organizing is about knowing your community and using technology to help your community build power.
We also recognize that our movement and radical activism has a strenuous relationship with digital technology. We will continue to challenge the algorithms dictated by big tech and capitalism in order to create a human centered movement based on community care and mutual aid.