Advocacy Toolkit

Student Chapter Organizing

Organizing an Introductory Meeting

As the leader of your PHR student chapter, you have the responsibility of coordinating the involvement of other members in PHR activities. The organizational meeting at the beginning of the year is a great way to spark interest, assign responsibilities, and generate a master plan and vision for the coming year. Please read on even if you’ve already held your introductory meeting—the following suggestions might give you ideas you can use in other meetings, as well.

Before the Meeting

• Decide on a location date and time for your meeting. Make sure the space is available and reserve the room. Try to find a room with access to a chalkboard or drawing board, so you can write down ideas for everyone to see.
  
• Around campus, post general PHR flyers and distribute postcard size sheets including the mission of PHR, the date, time and location of the meeting, and your contact information (important for those who can't make the meeting). If possible, also distribute emails to relevant campus listservs to advertise the meeting. Invite leaders of other student social justice groups to attend as well. Contact the PHR student coordinator for materials.

• Bring the following to the meeting:
  
• a written agenda
  
• PHR student brochures, postcards, PHR newsletters, and any other PHR information to distribute
  
• a page of information and suggested activities for each PHR campaign
  
• a blank calendar
  
• markers, pens, blank paper
  
• a list of past human rights activities on your campus
  
• a PHR petition and/or copies of action alerts

At the Meeting

• Introduce yourself and give a brief explanation of how you came to be involved with PHR. Write your agenda for the meeting on the board (or have copies to distribute) and briefly review what you hope to cover by the end of the meeting.

• Give a brief introduction to PHR.  Be sure to include the following points:
  
• The mission of Physicians for Human Rights is to mobilize the health professions to advance the health and dignity for all people.
  
• Members of PHR believe that human rights are essential for the health and well-being of all members of the human family.
  
• PHR is one of the leading health and human rights advocacy organizations in the world. Its work is a mix of documentation, exposure, advocacy and education.
  
• For its work in co-founding the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, PHR was a co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

• The goal of PHR’s student chapters is to educate future health professionals and encourage them to support the human rights movement and the creation of a culture of human rights in the health professions.
  
• You may want to give a brief presentation or distribute an information sheet on the links between health and human rights, as well as a description of "the right to health."
  
• Describe some of the activities that your group and/or other PHR chapters have organized in recent years. Encourage the attendees to keep these activities in mind.
  
• Review the current campaigns and issues that PHR is working on and explain that you are going to have the group break down into working groups.
  
• Before breaking into groups, ask for suggestions for  an event that the chapter would like to hold monthly. This should be an event that is very easy to plan and hold—for example, gathering petition signatures in the student center, hosting a human rights movie night on campus, or holding a health and human rights discussion group over dinner or drinks. The goal of these regular events is to do something toward the promotion of human rights awareness that can happen for an hour to two hours, even in times when you are busy. This should be a fun event that people look forward to attending.
  
• Identify someone to facilitate each of the small project group discussions. Ideally these should be people already involved with the PHR chapter.
  
• By show of hands, ask who would like to work on which issue - Global HIV/AIDS, Torture, Genocide, Asylum/Refugee Health, Youth in US Detention System, and Human Rights Day. Have the group break into smaller working groups and divide up into different corners of the room.
  
• Distribute the campaign info and ideas for action sheets to each respective group to read more carefully. Tell the groups that they have roughly half an hour to discuss what campaign activity or activities they would like to organize during the coming semester. Encourage them to be realistic about the amount of time they think they will be able to spend on the projects and to choose activities that are appropriate to their time availability.
  
• Tell the groups to decide on an activity/activities as though they were going to be the only ones planning and holding it. Tell them that they will have the support of the other chapter members, but for organizational purposes, they should plan to have a small number of people coordinating the activity. This way the activity won't fall apart if all members of the chapter are not able to help.
  
• After deciding on an activity, have each group assign the responsibilities involved in the project - for example, publicity, materials, donations, set-up/break down, follow-up, etc. (see Event Planning)
  
• Ask everyone who attends to take an immediate action while in his or her small group, for example sign a postcard or write a letter to a member of Congress.
  
• Reconvene as a big group and have one spokesperson from each working group discuss the activity or activities they decided on and the related responsibilities. Write comments on the board in one column per campaign, and then circle similar tasks required for more than one activity. (For example, circle publicity responsibilities in blue, getting a space/permission in red, etc.)
  
• Begin to develop a plan of action/calendar for the coming semester. Draw a calendar on the board. Decide on the one day per month that you will hold your monthly event. Have the group decide on how many and which campaign activities they want to hold over the coming semester. We encourage you to hold one of the events on Human Rights Day on December 10th.
  
• Schedule when, or around when, you want the events to happen. First write in exams and midterms and any holidays/breaks. Make sure that the events are spread out over the semester or are strategically placed near each other for time reasons. (i.e. creating a visual display and then later that week hosting a speaker)
  
• Once you have established the dates, plug in the events that you hope to hold over the coming semester. From there, work backwards to create due dates for planning tasks. Write the corresponding activity dates - for example, for an awareness dinner, think when you need to pick up the food, when you need to confirm that you are getting food, when to call for food donations, when to have decided on who to call, etc.
  
• Make sure that everyone leaves the meeting with something concrete to do, whether it is to approach a professor to be an advisor, talk with librarians about setting up a health and human rights resource center in the library, gather ten petition signatures, or investigate the cost/requirements involved in reserving a space for a speaker or performance, etc.

After the Meeting

• Be sure to follow up with every individual who attended the meeting. Send out emails thanking everyone for a productive meeting, with notes reviewing the decisions made and what the next steps will be.
  
• Have a debriefing with the facilitators of the small groups. Ask them what they thought worked well and what could be improved in future meetings; who in the group responded positively to the ideas discussed and how the group might cultivate those individuals for future involvement; where they foresaw trouble occurring in the future; and general opinions and comments.
  
• Make phone calls to new members, personally thanking them for their attendance and asking them for ideas, questions or comments on the meeting and PHR in general.
  
• Hold a social event, such as a dinner or a film night, soon after the first meeting, so that members and interested individuals can get to know each other and discuss their interests in health and human rights. Consider having an ice-breaker game at these events.
  
• Send out emails before the next meeting reminding members of time, date, location, and the meeting topic.