Issue Coalitions
Coalitions are groups of individuals working together to support progress and change-making in the realm of a specific issue area. There are five active Issue Coalitions affiliated with the CCE with email listservs and also meet quarterly during the academic year. The CCE also supports five additional Issue Coalitions with active email groups. The overarching goal for each of these coalitions is to promote, support, and integrate the existing community work being done on and beyond Colorado College's campus, and so we invite all of our community members to participate in the coalition programming!
Quarterly coalition meetings are facilitated by Issue Organizers. Issue Organizers are CCE interns who work collectively through the CCE Co-op and each have an issue-based coalition that they oversee. They are designated peer connectors for students, staff, faculty, and community partners who either want to find an on-ramp to work in that issue-area or who have relevant events, opportunities, and knowledge that could be shared and built upon.
Issue Coalition Email Groups
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Relationship-Building: Cultivate intracampus and campus/community relationships to lay a foundation for collaboration.
- Collective Identity: Enhanced shared identity among students, student organizations, community partners, and staff/faculty within issue areas.
- Co-Creation: During COVID times, connect campus change-makers (students, staff, and faculty) to community-based virtual project needs submitted through the PEAK Inquiry Project platform. Small groups within the coalition co-create these capacity building projects for local organizations. In the future, this work of co-creation may be expanded to include campaigns and/or awareness initiatives.
- Awareness Raising: Increase awareness of existing partnerships and projects related to the issue-area, to better connect interested students to existing opportunities.
- Co-Learning: Establish learning communities in an effort to learn together and from one another about issues areas, deepening informed and intentional engagement.
- To transform ideas about change into actions
- To sharpen skills like:
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- Community organizing
- Volunteer management
- Event planning
- Public relations/communications
- Qualitative research
- To gain research and project-based experience
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- Potential foundation for a senior thesis or capstone project
- Ideal experience for certain job applications
- Useful skills for students interested in studying/working on public policy
- To access campus & community mentors
- To earn hours towards CES and Bonner requirements
Anyone can get involved! Click on the link above to join the Microsoft Team coalition spaces that interest you, and check out the bios of Issue Organizers through this link.
- Students may reach out to Gillian Lasher (g_lasher@coloradocollege.edu), CCE student intern - Student Director of Coalitions, for additional information about getting involved.
- Faculty may reach out to Dr. Jordan Travis-Radke (jradke@coloradocollege.edu), CCE Director, about getting involved.
- Community partners may reach out to Niki Sosa Gallegos (nsosa@coloradocollege.edu), the Community Partnerships Coordinator at the CCE, about getting involved.
We have been building the foundation for this current coalition structure to exist over the past three years, to foster a culture of collaboration on campus. Issue-based coalitions affiliated with the CCE started back in the summer of 2018, under the guidance of CCE Director Jordan Travis-Radke with support of the Assistant Director and Paraprofessional at the time, with five main coalitions: Prison Project, Refugee Alliance, Education, Political Advocacy, and Sustainable Community Development. The first two coalitions, Prison Project and Refugee Alliance, are both student organizations that continue to serve as examples for what an integrated coalition focused on a single issue-area can look like, while the last three were newly formed groups. As this was the first year of the Co-Op, the main focus was on connecting students within each designated issue-area, and on thinking through what relevant campaigns or projects could be hosted that would support the mission of the coalition.
In 2019-2020, only the three newly formed coalitions (Education, Political Advocacy, and Sustainable Community Development) continued with CCE supervision, and had two Issue Organizers each who were responsible for holding weekly coalition meetings and attending a Community Organizing adjunct class to inform their leadership. While no formal projects were completed by the groups, events such as "Incarceration Nation" and "The Basics of Community Organizing" were held, as well as Open House events that involved phone banking and letter-writing for the Political Advocacy Coalition, asset-mapping and research sessions for the SCD Coalition's project on Martin Drake's early closure and consequential neighborhood development plans, and finally, events with the superintendent of Colorado Springs and other guests for the Education Coalition to help student organization leaders understand the context of K-12 education in Colorado Springs.
We are deeply grateful to all of the past student leaders, volunteers, faculty and staff members, and community partners who have helped inform the direction of this Co-Op structure, and are looking forward to many more years to come of the growth of this student-led operation.
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