Designed to allow students to have their voices heard, Students United is a new club on campus created with the intent of bringing people and their view points together in harmony.
The club will be having a call-out meeting at 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the Helene G. Simone Hillel Center.
It was created a few weeks ago when Jennifer Nelson Williams came to speak to students at Hillel about becoming more engaged as citizens. Afterwards, when students came to her with the desire to help create a campaign in Bloomington, she agreed to work with them.
“It’s just increasing the respect and awareness of people amongst those who are different from you,” Williams said.
Williams, the president of A.R.N. Funeral and Cremation services in Zionsville, helped co-found a group called Women 4 Change Indiana.
The group was founded as a direct response to the election of President Trump, Williams said. The organization’s platform is focused on increasing civility, allowing women access to the health care they need, engaging women in the political process and running for office, and teaching women how to become more active citizens.
The creation of Students United came in response to the conversation Williams had at Hillel, she said.
“What we really want to do is invest in the emotions of our members and control hateful rhetoric and bring people together again,” Students United founding member Abe Shapiro said.
Shapiro, a freshman studying history at IU, said the idea for the group came from wanting to bring people together again after Trump’s election. He said hateful rhetoric on campus in the wake of election season was one of the reasons why the club was created.
“It’s not about anarchy or smashing windows of the local Starbucks,” Shapiro said. “It’s certainly not about using violence to create change. We are a pacifist organization seeking to make a name for ourselves in wanting to bring people together.”
Shapiro said the group aims to be non-partisan by providing a stance of neutrality in order for opposing viewpoints to be acknowledged.
“I think they would feel that it had been a success if they were able to reach students in the IU community that are marginalized, that don’t feel heard or seen, and increase the civility on their own campus,” Williams said.
The club’s first campaign, called “We See You,” is intended to mediate conflict between people of different races and ethnicities, immigrants and those who have been recently attacked, Shapiro said. The club is waiting until after its call-out meeting Thursday to make more set plans regarding the organization and what it wants to do.
“Even the smallest acknowledgement of someone — friendly, of course — can bring people together again,” he said. “And that’s what we want.”
