Rocky Mountain Voice

Tag: Rank And File Strategy

A union pipeline DSA built on college campuses
Rocky Mountain Voice, National, Top Stories

A union pipeline DSA built on college campuses

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice DSA's youth section trains students to organize on campus. What happens after graduation is its own story, one its own members describe directly. "YDSA's job is to train socialists on campus and create a pipeline into DSA," Dare Cima, a University of Louisville YDSA member, said at the organization's national conference this spring. "We should be preparing members to enter strategic sectors of the labor movement after college. That means encouraging people to become teachers, nurses, engineers, logistics workers, and preparing them to organize in those fields." More than 400 people attended that conference.  Gerica Noerdinger, cochair of YDSA's Youth Labor Committee, said more than 65 percent of them signed ple...
What DSA teaches college students, and the environment it operates in
Rocky Mountain Voice, National, Top Stories

What DSA teaches college students, and the environment it operates in

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice DSA's own internal survey shows something specific: more than 80 percent of members 25 and older who responded hold a bachelor's degree. DSA's youth section has spent the last decade building a structured campus operation, with its own curriculum, its own labor strategy, and in at least one Colorado classroom, a university course built to recruit. That operation runs through Young Democratic Socialists of America, DSA's youth and student section.  Join YDSA and you're automatically a DSA member too. It has grown rapidly over the past decade and is, by its own account, the place where a lot of its future organizers get their start. YDSA has grown from roughly a dozen chapters in 2016 to more than 150 today, s...