By Aleksandra Sidorova
This year’s Black Solidarity Day social justice teach-in saw more student involvement than years prior, according to feedback the planning committee received since Nov. 7.
More students of all ethnicities proposed and hosted sessions, as did class groups, said Allison Heard, vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
“We have more diverse representations of students that participated in the day,” Heard said.
In its first year, the Black Solidarity Day Steering Committee included five faculty and staff members, including Heard. The year after, the committee expanded to include student volunteers, and this year, the department hired an intern — senior public relations major Naomi Adebayo.
As an intern, Adebayo helped students brainstorm the sessions they hosted.
About 400 people attended the sessions in-person and 856 tuned into the livestream hosted by Plattsburgh State Television. However, feedback indicated that organizers didn’t make it clear the events would be broadcast live with no editing or delay.
The committee is considering adding training sessions before the teach-in next year to help presenters feel more comfortable during live broadcasts.
One of the hits new to this year’s social justice teach-in were the cooldown zones, providing resources for attendees to unwind in-between sessions. Next year, the cooldown zones would likely move to Burghy’s Den, as this year’s feedback suggested, Heard said.
The committee established the cooldown zones in response to last year’s feedback that the schedule overwhelmed attendees, both in the number of sessions to choose from and the weight of the topics discussed.
There were also fewer sessions this year, to make the choices less daunting.
“Students want to be able to go to everything — they wish they were in two places at once,” Adebayo said.
The Steering Committee is still trying to figure out the ideal scale of the event, Heard said.
“Sometimes, going big can make you also feel like you’re not able to connect with every session,” Heard said.
Another aspect of the event that attendees said they appreciated was free T-shirts given out to session hosts. The shirts had been an idea outside of the previous year’s budget.
In the survey, participants spoke favorably about the variety of food trucks, which included the Mexican restaurant Lomeli’s.
SUNY Plattsburgh is the only university in the United States to host a whole day of conference-style sessions to acknowledge Black Solidarity Day. The occasion was created in 1969 by Panama-born activist, historian and playwright Carlos Russell — always the day before Election Day, which this year was Nov. 5.
Adebayo said, “I feel like the teach-in helps us in the sense that we’re educating ourselves on issues that affect us on a day-to-day basis.”
