Ian Matchett is a founding member and current statewide organizer of the Michigan Student Power Network. He grew up on the west side of Michigan in Grand Haven before attending the University of Michigan Ann Arbor to study Political Science and Fine Art. He currently lives in Detroit, but makes frequent trips to schools and organizations around the state in order to support the Power Network and other work going on in Michigan.
1. Can you tell us a little bit about your organization and how it was formed?
The Michigan Student Power Network is a statewide association of young people working to connect skills and strategy across issues, identities, and campuses in Michigan. We were formed in the spring of 2014 out of a few different formal and informal networks of student activists.
We realized that we worked better and smarter when student activists were connected to others outside of their specific issue or campus silo; and also recognized the huge problem of turnover within student organizer communities—and established the Power Network to try and address these issues. Following our founding in 2014 we have worked to connect struggles across the state, serving as a resource for rapid response organizing, while pursuing our own statewide goals and messaging!
2. What’s the personal journey that led to your activism with the Student Power Network?
I think the big shift for me came out of occupy and its immediate aftermath. Up to that point I had been part of some small-scale socialist and labor solidarity work; essentially talking about ideas and showing up to things, but not taking ownership over the organizing that is required for larger change. Occupy, and its ultimate collapse, really pushed me to evaluate where I was coming from in this work. Was I here just to talk about ideas I supported intellectually, to seek a purer form of organization or feel more "right" than other folks; or was I going to grapple with reality and try to figure out how to build the power necessary for our work to be successful.
I began to connect with my ideas outside of the classroom, getting the chance directly to work with and learn from people and realities I had only engaged with intellectually. The movement became less fun, or maybe less of a game, but became more important. What had been intellectual became emotional. Socialism stopped being something I wanted to win arguments around, and became a future I wanted to fight for and make real.
Out of this transformation, I started to get more involved in spaces that built their analysis around power, and took a more coalition or structural approach. I helped organize a student unionist group through my final two years in undergrad, and just before I graduated I helped found the MSPN.
3. Michigan has a few voter suppression laws targeted specifically at students, prohibiting first time voters from voting absentee if they registered by mail or at a voter registration drive and mandating that voter registration and drivers license addresses be the same, creating a problem for students living on campus. How does work within these constraints to help students vote?
We struggle quite a bit with the rules you mentioned, though sometimes I'm so used to that being "just the way it is" I personally don't think about it too much. Michigan has no early voting other than absentee, so if you can't get an absentee ballot you have to show up between 7 AM and 8 PM on election day, at the polling place based on your driver's license.
Obviously for students, a single day of turnout, often off campus, is significant barrier to voting. We advise students to re-register at their school address to cut down on this problem as much as possible. If they're registered in a swing state, we understand, but otherwise driving home to vote is a high bar, particularly in year such as this one where students are struggling to find an inspiring reason pulling them to the polls.
Often though the biggest barrier to students is enthusiasm. Young people tend to have a lot of passion when they get engaged, to the point where many barriers can be broken; during the primaries I had multiple friends drive over an hour to go vote for Bernie Sanders, and there were small house based volunteer centers, and teams of folks coming out of the woodwork to help canvass. We've definitely noticed a shift as we move into the general election, and it's become a battle of two largely uninspiring options. Smaller initiatives like public transit millage here in Southeast Michigan are inspiring some of that enthusiasm, but that's very location specific, and can get overwhelmed in the media by the drum beat of Clinton vs. Trump. We're working some of these themes into our conversations about long-term movement building.
Discussing with students how we need to be engaged between elections in order to make sure there's something worth voting for on the ballot, but these are longer more complex conversations that can end up eating into overall turnout because of the limits of organizers' time and energy. I think the greatest turnout tool for young people is a candidate or policies that we believe in, and that's what we're struggling with right now at the national level.
4. What will victory look like to your group and how will you measure it?
For the Power Network this election is all about base building and long-term engagement. In elections we see an opportunity to intervene and start conversations that run beyond the November about our generation's values and issues. We want to mobilize as many young people as possible to get involved, and use the elections as a space to both push for positive policies and radicalize folks as they move through the months leading up to November.
We are tracking our total number of voter contacts, as well as contact info from individuals pledging to vote and volunteer this fall. We aim to engage at least 1,000 students on each campus (with some variations by size), bringing them to the polls and then continuing the discussion with next step conversations in mid November. Our primary goal post election is to engage students in joint Student Power Councils on each campus: deepening existing networks and connecting different organizations' work through shared training, strategizing and action.
5. What can Daily Kos readers do to help?
If you want to help young people in Michigan build long-term power, the easiest way is to donate to our newly formed ally 501(c)3 The Michigan Student Power Alliance. The Alliance is an administrative organization that handles nonpartisan skills training, consulting, and leadership development on our campuses, while remaining separate from the more partisan aspects of the day to day struggle. The Alliance's budget is extremely small, particularly in years not ending in an election, and as we work to support student leaders and pay people for their time we often come up short. If you support long-term movement building in Michigan please consider supporting us this fall and beyond.
This post is part of a series conducted in partnership with Movement 2016, a new campaign to fund some of the best community-based vote groups in the country. To date, Movement 2016 has raised over $2 million for local organizing. To find out more, head over to www.Movement2016.org.