“I want to get involved right away”!

On the occasion of the start of the college year, we gathered at the Cégep de Sainte-Foy to mobilize students for a possible strike for Palestine. For many of them, fresh out of high school, it was their first day at CEGEP. We’d go up to them and ask, newspaper in hand, “Do you want to stop the genocide in Palestine?” Exciting discussions ensued, almost all ending with the excellent question: “I want to get involved right away. Is there an event planned?” We hadn’t expected to move so quickly, and the question caught us off guard. So, having collected over forty names and distributed all our leaflets in the space of less than two hours, we had to draw our first lesson from the campaign: we hadn’t yet planned a single public meeting to organize the strike with all these interested people. That’s why we concluded that, from the very first week on campus, it was imperative to organize a first meeting where we could invite them, which we did as soon as the last discussion was over.