Group Looks To Link Activists

A small group of students met this weekend for the first official meeting of the Progressive Alliance in an effort to organize Harvard’s numerous disconnected activist organizations.

The new campus coalition will attempt to keep groups like the Harvard-Radcliffe College Democrats, the Black Students Assocation and the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice in close contact, said co-founder Alexandra Neuhas-Follini ’03.

Saturday’s inaugural meeting—which focused on the Progressive Alliance’s purpose and goals in general, rather than on any of their specific plans—attracted about 20 members of different campus groups.

According to Stephen M. Smith ’02, one of the group’s co-founders, the Progressive Alliance has a three-fold mission that includes “coordination and cooperation, education and training, and action and advocacy.”

The Progressive Alliance will draw some of its funding from the Undergraduate Council, Smith said, and is “pretty cheap to run...we wouldn’t take resources away from any student group...and we are not here to compete with progressive groups.”

Smith, who has also been active in the Living Wage Campaign, Har’d Corps and Undergraduate Council, began to make plans for the umbrella organization at the suggestion of Elizabeth S. Thrall ’05 about two months ago.

Smith said the group is not related to the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM).

He said the group’s only interest is in increasing communication on campus and that its purpose is not tied to any one group’s agenda.

For the past two months, Neuhas-Follini and PSLM member Gabriel A. Katsh ’04 have been meeting regularly with Thrall and Smith to develop a cohesive set of goals for the Progressive Alliance.

According to Smith, students involved in various activist organizations on campus often say they feel “lonely and isolated.”

Smith said he hopes the Progressive Alliance will provide a link between groups whose missions may overlap but who are not currently communicating with each other.

“All progressive groups regardless of their specific causes should recognize that they have something to gain by unity and a push for progress and improving campus policies,” Thrall said.

Smith said the Progressive Alliance will will include any interested organization, regardless of its political bent or ideology.

But Neuhas-Follini said she would prefer for the Progressive Alliance to “forward a liberal agenda on campus”—although she said plans for the group’s agenda were subject to future debate and a vote.