The University YMCA and the University of Illinois Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations are sponsoring an organized retreat on Saturday and Sunday.

The event will enhance students’ knowledge of social issues, while also allowing students to network with one another.

The Organizing Change Retreat is a free event located at Lake Williamson Retreat Center. The retreat is open to undergraduate and graduate students. 

Ross Wantland, director of diversity and social justice education at the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations, said many of the people leading the retreat are advisors to student organizations who also want to make an impact on the world around them.

“We as organizers found that students were not learning how to make change in systems or institutions to solve social issues through their classroom work,” Wantland said. “The retreat was designed so students who are engaged on campus can build and practice these skills and come together with people concerned about these issues and advocate for change once they leave the University.”

At the fourth annual retreat, Wantland said the goal of sharing realistic strategies for forming movements for social change remains the same.

“In Organizing Change, the participant students will have the chance to learn about the process of taking issues that they care deeply about and developing an idea about how change might happen and about how they could work collectively with others to make that change possible,” Wantland said. “We want them to think about strategies for taking their areas of passion and bringing them to life.”

Wantland said a part of the retreat revolves around educating participants on the strategies used by previous or ongoing social justice campaigns to succeed in their desired goals.

“There’s a lot of information presented on how different social movements have operated, from the civil rights movement to the gay rights movement and other campaigns for rights and acknowledgment,” Wantland said. “There have also been some great efforts by students on campus to make change, like student movements that have demanded that the campus divests from coal, and we definitely talk about how they operated and succeeded in some of their efforts.”

At the end of the retreat, participants will develop a campaign strategy surrounding an issue they care about that they’ll share with their peers in order to refine their approaches for a future movement.

Wantland said students who had attended previous retreats and had the opportunity to network with other engaged student activists had afterward communicated feelings of intense purpose and motivation to continue their activism.

“It’s so powerful to sit in a room with other individuals who may be concerned about different issues but who all want to work to improve the world around them in some way,” Wantland said. “The other necessary outcome is students having an appreciation of all the work that goes into constructing a campaign and what their future work might realistically be.”

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