Center for American Progress proposal

By: Harry Waisbren

This last week I attended three conferences sponsored by Campus Progress at their national headquarters in Washington DC. This included a grassroots training day, the Campus Progress National conference, and the National Youth Journalism conference cosponsored with the Nation. I will be providing added analysis to all three in posts of their own soon enough, but despite how phenomenal I found all the conferences to have been, I believe that I benefited even more from the networking ability these conferences provided me.

Specifically, I was able to present my proposal for integrating Mad Progress dramatically more with a variety of projects from the Center for American Progress. Campus Progress is one such project, as it is the student arm of CAP, and I have been so impressed by the work that they do that it not only inspired me to start my own chapter of Campus Progress but also to take a semester off school to intern for them (which turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life).

We will be discussing my plans to work increasingly more with Campus Progress and CAP alike on the latest editition of Forward Forum coming tonight, and below I am pasting excerpts from the proposal I presented to a variety of colleagues regarding this project:

Project Description

Mad Progress is a blog that is designed to act as the virtual headquarters for campus activists. The blog will provide both an analysis of pressing political issues as well as the ways activists can take part in the campaigns designed to solve them. This will be accomplished by utilizing a variety of mediums (including print, radio, and film) to properly cover and create this work, all of which will be centralized on the Mad Progress blog. This process will enable progressive academics to directly strategize with activists in regards to what sort of activism would be most appropriate. Furthermore, media produced in this project will be designed to be of the greatest possible use to the progressive blogosphere, as many of these blogs provide a wide enough viewer base to achieve a vastly increased audience and general effect for the activism. Madison’s chapter of Campus Progress is dedicated to crafting such newsworthy and educational media for the blogosphere and is currently in the process of creating a sustainable infrastructure to produce video, audio, and print content for this project.

Call for Collaboration

The Center for American Progress has many ties to the blogosphere which, if utilized for this project, could enable campus activists to directly strategize with prominent bloggers regarding the content that would be most beneficial to be produced. Furthermore, there is any number of CAP employees who could provide great assistance in crafting and creating such content by being guests in any of the mediums at Madison’s chapter of Campus Progress’ disposal. This would also entail the added benefit of further publicizing their work to a progressive niche audience as well. Collaboration regarding how such material can best be created and spread would not only be appreciated, but mutually beneficial as well.