OPIRG Provincial began a pilot program in 2024 to help engage our PIRGs, boards, action group members, volunteers, and the wider community. Collaboration Lunches are held monthly to help us better connect and share campaigns, actions, and research work throughout Ontario and beyond! Folks have joined from PIRGs across Kanada – including NSPIRG, APIRG and QPIRG, and we hope to continue these connections!
We’d love for you to join us in a chill online (zoom) environment, and come to share or listen to what folks are working on! Some ideas can include Cops Off Campus campaigns, Palestinian solidarity support, Free Stores, Labour organizing, environmental justice, local community work and campaigns, and so much more! Please bring your ideas, and current work, and be ready to share (in the way that feels best to you) – with folks across the province.
Access Info:
- No specific topic or preparations needed
- Safer space policy guidelines in place for sessions
- Rotating facilitator and minute takers/documentation as needed or requested
- Zoom automatic closed captions
- Breaks at any time as needed!
Full details will always remain updated here (on this current page): https://ontariopirg.org/collab-lunches
When: Date/Time
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
12-1:30 pm ET (GMT-04)
Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwscuqgrzsuHdPM59IdPVChjxUN_T5i3K70#/registration
This session will be an open conversation to discuss any ongoing work at your PIRGs and chapters, or working groups/action groups! We cannot wait to hear what you have going on and what you’d like to share with the network.
Special Session for January 2025, Student Film Screening:
Film: peace love (unicorns) & communism
Synopsis: chatting with another recent graduate, a former student activist learns about the controversial origin of a now-beloved campus group. she embarks on a journey through the recent past, weaving conversations with a vast ensemble of young organizers into a tapestry of disruption and determination. political, personal & bursting with youthful exuberance, peace love (unicorns) & communism is a homegrown chronicle of a decade of movements at McMaster University. As past struggles echo in the present, the film poses an urgent question to today’s rising generation: do you believe that we will win? (Director/Producer, Adeola Egbeyemi, will be in attendance for the screening and available for questions!)
Film Credits: Director/Producer, Adeola Egbeyemi, Editor, Yasith Weerasinghe
Follow the film on Social: www.instagram.com/peaceloveunifilm
We will watch part of the feature film together, and then pose questions and open conversations on PIRGs as a vessel for collective memory (campaigns, lessons, etc), issues with student unions in organizing, repression and conflict, ways that University institutions disrupt student organizing: tactics of delay, recuperation and pacification but also, trying to find hope amidst all of these issues!
Upcoming sessions
Schedule – First Tuesday of every month, for 2025 dates will be: January 7, February 4, March 4, April 1, and May 6. The OPIRG Provincial Board will assess these sessions during our annual meetings in early 2025, to determine if they will continue in the same format/dates moving forward after May 2025. Future dates/updates will be posted sometime after April 2025. Please register for as many as you can attend!
Background
The OPIRG Provincial Network is a decentralized body that provides support for, and facilitates collaboration, and sharing of resources and builds/strengthens relationships between individual PIRGs in Ontario. We are comprised of a series of Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) based in communities across the Province. These PIRGs share similar mandates and policies but function autonomously in their everyday workings, and work to provide tools, resources, and support to their student and community members, and Action Groups (in the form of, but not limited to funding, space to hold meetings and organize, outreach, and volunteer recruitment with events and actions).
Many PIRGs link their action groups to the wider community and other student and community groups working on social and environmental justice issues – and often, intersecting – campaigns. These campaigns and events thematically highlight the most pressing issues of our times so as to keep our communities engaged with the social justice landscape of our communities and cities.