On the Road
with Rachel Hendrickson

Just before the holidays, I went to Carbondale, Illinois with Agnes Smith from the NEA Education Support Professionals program to attend meetings organized by our members at the University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale.

The faculty and support professionals are both unionized affiliates of the Illinois Education Association and NEA. The folks in the two locals are concerned about membership levels. They were wondering what their local Associations should do to encourage increased membership.

Now, their membership levels aren't bad, they're just not high enough for what these local Associations want to do to improve working conditions on their campus.

Ruth Pommier and Carolyn Harvey of the ESP local are creating a cadre of new membership ambassadors on campus. As a follow-up to the meeting I attended, the membership cadre sponsored an everyone-bring-one meeting. Each activist member brought a potential new membership recruiter who then was trained to be a membership ambassador.

Our Illinois affiliate trained the new ambassadors in communication and recruiting skills, an approach I think will pay off long term with both new members and a confident, assertive cadre of activists.

The faculty are following a different path. They're preparing to go into bargaining and have begun a process to increase communications among members through one-on-one contact and to develop and hone a message.

Morteza Danneshdoost, SUIC-FA president, observed that the role of a membership committee is to support department representatives, who can sustain and energize their colleagues as the faculty heads into bargaining.

—Rachel Hendrickson coordinates NEA higher ed activities.