By Clare Fiala, Contributor
Nestled in a corner on the second floor of the McMaster University Student Centre, the cozy office that is home to the McMaster Ontario Public Interest Research Group can be easy for a rushing student to miss.
Despite financial cuts propagated by the Student Choice Initiative in September 2019, the grassroots student-run organization has continued to act as a hub for many social justice and environmental causes on campus. The McMaster Students Union referendum in March 2020 affirmed OPIRG’s place at McMaster University as 60.2% of respondents voted to keep the organization funded by maintaining its $5.50 optional fee. However, some students may not be fully aware of the organization’s important work, especially incoming first-years.
A major component of OPIRG’s activities is centered around Public Interest Projects, which aim to advocate and fundraise for a variety of different causes ranging from countering the “fast-fashion industry” to feeding the hungry and beyond.
Currently, OPIRG supports eight PIPs, all run by McMaster undergraduate students. Some projects have been around for several years while others are newer, such as Warm Soles, the PIP I co-founded this school year. Even though our PIPs are different in many ways, we all strive to affect change and advocate for an issue that we believe is relevant to McMaster students and the wider Hamilton area.
Warm Soles seeks to provide socks for people experiencing street homelessness in Hamilton. Surprisingly, 20% of medical issues among this population are foot conditions. Good quality socks protect the feet and help prevent these debilitating conditions, yet they are the least donated item to clothing banks. Thus, a simple item that we often take for granted could have a significant impact on someone’s quality of life.
With OPIRG’s support, Warm Soles set up sock donation boxes in the OPIRG office and the Arts and Science Program Offices, to collect new socks or cash donations (since most people don’t carry around brand new pairs of socks). All socks will be donated to the Good Shepherd, a large non-denominational shelter and social services organization in downtown Hamilton.
Among the types of equipment OPIRG provides their PIPs for free, OPIRG has two high-quality button makers of different sizes. Warm Soles employed this resource to make a variety of different buttons, which we sold to raise money in order to purchase socks for donation. The button-makers and associated materials are also available for other McMaster student groups to use for a small fee.
All OPIRG PIPs have innovative and unique ways of raising funds and awareness. However, disruptions imposed by COVID-19 have required another pivot. For example, Bleed Free, a PIP focused on ending stigma about menstruation, conducted their popular annual fundraising raffle online. OPIRG moved their public Annual General Meeting to virtual platforms and maintained an active social media page. Here, students can find helpful online resources for dealing with the pandemic, free webinars, and relevant updates about the causes supported by the group.
More than ever, in these difficult circumstances, there is a need for organizations that prioritize humanitarian and environmental wellbeing. I encourage all students to visit the OPIRG website to see what aspect of its mission interests them. Together, we can all play a little part towards a brighter world for McMaster students, Hamilton residents and beyond.
[thesil_related_posts_sc]Related Posts[/thesil_related_posts_sc]
By Adeola Egbeyemi and Caroline Bredin, Contributors
One like helps clean one beach. Repost on your story to plant 100 trees. Share to save the bees!
Slacktivism is a new and trendy form of online activism that, according to the United Nations, involves “people who support a cause by performing simple measures [but] are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change.” Slacktivism looks like reposts, retweets and shares on social media with no deeper commitment to the issue at hand. It’s being used increasingly often for social movements.
Slacktivism has developed because of the usage of Web 2.0, a shift to a user-centric internet, allowing individuals to create interactive profiles and share their thoughts, likes and photos. This internet evolution has fostered the growth of opinion leaders, who receive information from media and pass on the content, with their interpretation, to a reachable audience. This is exactly what we see with slacktivism, where large, branded accounts are believed to be opinion leaders and trick a considerable number of individuals into thinking they can passively support a good cause. As Web 2.0 is carefully designed to maximize shared content, it’s not surprising how fast spreading these accounts can be.
To be clear, sharing posts about social movements or global issues does raise awareness of those issues. It may even reflect a deeper desire to create positive change, regardless of whether this desire is actualized outside of social media.
However, there are negative implications of slacktivism that seem to be overshadowing the good. Instagram accounts that claim to be helping an issue can often be deceptive. The Instagram account @plantatreeco, boasting nearly 580,000 followers, is one example that has been subject to scrutiny. In one popular Instagram post, the account promised to donate one dollar for every 100 people who shared the post and followed the account.
Last week, the Huffington Post reported that a number of Instagram accounts promising to donate money to Australian wildfire relief efforts could not prove that they had actually made the donations. Hours after Huffpost reached out to @plantatreeco about allegations that it was a scam, the account provided what appears to be a $3,173.00 receipt of donation to the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. However, HuffPost did not receive immediate confirmation of the donations’ authenticity from the NSW Fire Service.
@Plantatreeco also constantly post stories, urging people to visit its website, where they sell jewelry, with no indication that this money is donated anywhere. Additionally, the account has erased all its Instagram content, starting over multiple times. Lastly, the account does not seem to have partnerships, or any other external source of money. These are good indications of fraud because the account is able to jump from planting trees, as their name suggests, to the next popular issue like the wildfires in Australia. This allows them to constantly maintain popularity and page traffic. With no identifiable source of money or partnerships, there is no tangible evidence that they are receiving resources to do what they claim. The account has not issued any statements responding to these concerns. Yet, we see individuals still sharing stories with posts from this account.
It’s a scheme that seems paper-thin, but the fact that we are seeing it occur time and time again says otherwise. Last June, for example, the Instagram pages that sought to increase awareness of the plight of Sudan were, at best, simplifying the complex political issues in the nation. At worst, they were using tragedy to garner social media traffic. Sudan Aid accounts, such as the now-deactivated @savesudanpeople and @sudanmealproject, claimed to donate to Sudan through, for example, one meal for a Sudanese person per like on the post.
But, according to the BBC, “there [was] no evidence that any of the ‘Meal Project’ accounts were going anything at all.” The Meal Project accounts did not respond to these allegations, but are now shut down. Misinformation spread by “Meal Project” accounts was then disseminated by individuals who thought they were promoting positive social change through their shares and reposts.
In the case of immediate disasters, like the current wildfires in Australia, taking time to educate yourself and donating money directly to established causes is your best bet to help. However, after Australia has contained its wildfires, we’ll see slacktivism move to the next issue — beach clean-ups or tree-planting — with a disregard for the reasons why we are seeing fires more often globally. Donating to solve an issue like the wildfires does not prevent it from happening again because does not address the pervasive source of the problem: climate change. Thus, in the case of systematic problems, we should begin to consider supplementing large social media movements with consistent environmental engagement at the personal and local level. Examples of this are volunteering with Zero Waste McMaster, Fridays For Future Hamilton, The Sustainable Future Program or leading an OPIRG project. There’s even a fourth-year Communication Studies course at McMaster that explores the role of media in social activism.
Slacktivism is becoming more prevalent and although awareness is necessary, it is hardly sufficient for change. McMaster University is ranked second in the world for global impact. This ranking means that, as students and navigators of today’s Web 2.0, we should hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to how we deal with social issues, taking care to read up on issues, being critical of social media pages and looking for local opportunities to effect meaningful change. The most significant threat to modern activism may not be the issues it fights against, but the passive and indifferent “share it and move on” attitude we see forming towards them.
[thesil_related_posts_sc]Related Posts[/thesil_related_posts_sc]
