I first met OPIRG when OPIRG first returned to McMaster, and we got along famously from day one. My very first “activist” meeting of any kind was filled with tired, happy people overjoyed at just having won funding to bring OPIRG to campus and strategizing about what to do next. It was the end of my second year of a biochemistry co-op degree, and I had been doing some reading and thinking and decided I wanted to see what this whole social change thing was about. Somehow, a few meetings later, I was on the committee charged with hiring OPIRG McMaster’s first staff over the coming summer. At the beginning of the next school year, still very new and unsure of how I wanted to be involved, I signed my name to a list for the Waste Reduction Working Group. A few weeks went by. I dropped by the OPIRG office to see if maybe my name had somehow dropped off the list and I wasn’t getting the emails that had surely been circulating about the meetings that had surely been held. It turned out that nothing at all had happened yet. By the time I left the office — completely unsure about how introverted, neophyte me had been convinced that this was a good idea — I had a list of contact information in my hand and had committed to doing what I could to make sure things got rolling. I was heavily involved in Waste Reduction for the next three years.”

I also have very fond memories from that first autumn of the weekly Get Up, Stand Up! Film Festival — every week I helped out with it; every week I was rewarded by some fascinating and new-to-me blast of information and ideas; and every week I had the pleasure of walking part of the way home beside someone a little older and a little more experienced, and getting to mutually process what we had just seen. I also plunged into the print resources that the OPIRG office provides, and in my two-year term on the Board of Directors took great delight in overseeing the spending of money to broaden and deepen the collection. I got involved in other working groups, in doing other tasks, and when I graduated and drifted from a geographical identity centred around “McMaster” to one grounded in “Hamilton,” I still stayed in touch.

University can be a time when some of us who didn’t grow up facing them in our daily lives are first confronted by ideas and writing about the brutal realities of our society. These realities get named in lots of partial ways, but they add up to interlocking hierarchies of privilege and oppression based on class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability, and more, in a political economy that depends on death and suffering not only to enrich the most powerful elites but to reward those of us who have more mundane forms of privilege as well. For me, OPIRG provided some tools to start learning about bits and pieces of that, and opportunities to start taking action around those corners of the beast that I was starting to see. OPIRG is just one organization, just one set of tools, and many folk might find other choices that would better suit their consciousness, their experiences of oppression, their desires to act. For me, however, OPIRG McMaster was an important ingredient in kicking off an ongoing journey of consciousness and action.

That journey has taken me lots of other places, of course, and all of them have shaped me further, but having OPIRG available when I was in a crucial stage of questioning and searching was an important catalyst. I’m still not sure how well I understand much of anything, and make no great claims for the decisions I make about acting in the world, but my journey of consciousness informs how I function as a parent, as a partner, as a person. It is a major part of my work as a writer, both in my informal personal/political ramblings on my blog (http://scottneigh.blogspot.com), and in my central project (http://www.movement-history.ca) based on oral history interviews with fifty long-time Canadian activists. And it still takes me to meetings — thanks in part to learnings begun so many years ago with OPIRG, at last night’s direct action anti-poverty group meeting I think I was a little less clueless, a little more sure of myself and my role, a little more able to contribute.

As the Ward One City Councillor responsible for west Hamilton, including the area around McMaster University I have had the great pleasure of working with OPIRG on a number of fronts. OPIRG’s Transportation for Liveable Communities working group has been instrumental in encouraging more sustainable transportation options for Ward 1 and throughout Hamilton. In particular, we have made headway in making the pedestrian environment around the campus and surrounding neighbourhoods safer, and are working together on a new city-wide Pedestrian Committee. Perhaps of most import is OPIRG’s ability to act as a beacon for keen students, interested in using their considerable talents to make a difference in the world. I look forward to continuing to work closely with OPIRG in my time time here as Ward 1 City Councillor.

OPIRG provides strong leadership opportunities to the students and members from the community to work many issues poverty, volunteerism, leadership development, environment, social justice, art, culture, advocacy and the overall community building. OPIRG is a vibrant organization that will further grow with the passage of time.Being past OPIRG board members, I feel proud that I was part of a strong, energetic transparent and caring board.

The staff and members at OPIRG and its working groups are doing excellent job. They are fully accountable to the board and the community all the times. I wish all the best to OPIRG board and staff.

Thank you Shelley for considering me for OPIRG help with posters and a display board so I can further raise more funds to build schools in Kenya through Free The Children and to help end world poverty. The support I continue to get from neighbour’s, friends and businesses energizes me to keep going. We have raised almost $22,000 so far. I see even more potential by possibly getting one or two more people involved.  The help I have received from OPIRG in the past is still bearing fruit or should I say empty wine bottles. The posters Tings produced are still going strong in Westdale Condos garbage rooms generating many bottles and a continuous source of income.