storytelling: we can do no less

Yesterday, we had an interesting time giving a workshop on organizing and mobilizing to campaign staff in our office and one of the prominent points that we discovered there is that as a campaigning organization that seeks to replicate ourselves in the people that we hope to mobilize for the environmental problems that we are addressing –we need to get better at storytelling.

In the session all the workshop facilitators tried to integrate this early on by sharing our first and/or most memorable experience of becoming involved in a campaign. There I tried to recall the campaigning work that I became involved with as a student activist and I remembered the nationwide walkout for the abolition of the mandatory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program in Philippine universities. Under the program all male college are required to receive basic military training and officer training for their chosen branch of service, through the ROTC unit at the college or university, there students become subject to four semesters of drills and lectures on military tactics as part of the curriculum which is intended to basic training for college students to become prepared in the event of war where they would be activated as reserve officers in whichever branch of military their university assigned them to.