Editor’s note: Starting Monday and running through Thursday, The Daily Illini will be printing a series of articles featuring lesser-known active political groups in Champaign-Urbana. Today’s story will focus on the International Socialist Organization in Champaign, a group that advocates social justice.

The socialist community in the Champaign-Urbana area is both social in their ideology and in their interaction with the campus community.

With about 15 members, the Champaign division of the International Socialist Organization, or ISO, is the local division of an organization that has nearly 70 branches throughout the United States.

Julien Ball, ISO member and graduate student, said the organization’s Champaign members are involved in a variety of social justice issues on both national and local levels.

ISO members are on the west side of the Quad nearly every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the school year, selling their ideas to the campus community as well as the organization’s newspaper, Socialist Worker, for $1.

“We work to win people to the idea that we need a different kind of society,” Ball said. The latest issue of the organization’s monthly publication, also available on Socialistworker.org, features their stances, such as criticism that the recently passed federal health care bill doesn’t go far enough to make health care affordable to everyone and is being light on insurance companies.

“We try to get involved in conversations to see what people think, and we try to reach a common ground with them to see if they can come to see our side a little more,” said John Kenealy, ISO member and junior in Engineering.

As some criticize socialism for giving the government too much power over its citizens’ lives, Ball said he thinks this is a misunderstanding of groups like ISO.

“While many people equate socialism with state ownership, that’s not the same as our vision of socialism,” he said in an e-mail. “We are for workers’ control over society, not the control of unaccountable bureaucrats.”

Currently, members are preparing for Socialism 2010, a national conference in Chicago held from June 17 to 20, which is cosponsored by ISO. They are also organizing “A Day of Social Resistance and Social Justice,” which will feature speakers and a screening of a movie based on author Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

ISO members also stood arm-in-arm with members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, or GEO, of which Ball is also a member, before and during the GEO contract negotiations and subsequent strike against the University last November.

“We’re for making it as active, militant and democratic as possible where ever we are,” he said.

Last October, some members of ISO were among the 35 Champaign-Urbana residents who traveled to Washington, D.C. to participate in the National Equality March, which supported LGBT rights. ISO partnered with eQuality-CU, an RSO that promotes LGBT rights in the campus community, to raise money so they could march on the Capitol.

“We also are involved in various protests and activist groups around campus, like the social justice groups,” Kenealy said. “We work with them and cosponsor events with them to try to build a larger consciousness.”

Eric Heim, junior in LAS, said he has been an ISO member for two years.

As one of the members who made the trip to Washington, D.C., he said he is happy with the organization’s commitment to social justice. He said his membership has helped him learn to organize people and speak publicly.