Finding Energy in Activism

Second Annual Legislative Launch Speech by Lotte, Maine State Director

My name is Lotte, I use she/her pronouns, and I’ve just started my final semester at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. I currently work with Every Voice as one of two Maine State Directors, alongside India. 

 I want to talk to you today about energy. 

My work with Every Voice began with EVC’s remote Next Generation Leaders Fellowship in the summer of 2021, at a time when my battery for social justice was running low. Activism, for me, thrives in community and shared passion, and I felt keenly the loss of gathering in physical spaces due to the pandemic. At the start of the fellowship, I had just finished a year of online classes, my junior year of college, and had returned to my parents’ apartment in Houston, Texas for the first couple weeks of summer. I felt nervous and disconnected, but excited and hungry for what was to come. 

Joining that first fellowship Zoom meeting, I met a screenful of faces of other students and recent graduates, all of us brought together into one virtual space by a sense of urgency and by care for our communities. We shared with each other our hopes for the future and wrote them into plans of action, timelines, and emails – so many emails. Through a running Zoom chat dialogue, this community offered me laughter, organizational strategies, the occasional vegan recipe, and above all, a revived energy. 

I could not have anticipated the impact that this fellowship would have on my personal growth. I learned to speak up even when intimidated and to be kind but strong in spaces that challenge my comfort zone. It soon became clear to me that Every Voice is the community for which I had been waiting. More than that, I felt acutely that this community had, in some way, been waiting for me. By the end of the summer, I had a new appreciation for an unexpected benefit of a remote internship: the opportunity to learn and grow with students from all different states, campuses, and life experiences.

This community shared its pain and its strength and its energy with me. Every day, I am fueled by the hope and pride I have for the Every Voice Coalition. We want to see change in real time. We want to see our words, words that center the needs of survivors and students, passed into laws and implemented across the country. I am forever in awe of the energy that pulsates through every space that we occupy together. I feel it in every meeting with an outside organization, another student, or a legislator, whether that energy is growing to include a newfound ally or offering me quiet strength in a moment of opposition. 

I believe that energy in activism is found in continually convincing yourself that the moment for change is right now, that it has to be right now. So, why now? How can we find hope and energy in this particular moment, when sexual violence is clearly not a new feature of college and university campuses? Where do we situate ourselves at present, knowing that generations of strong, passionate activists have devoted energy to this cause for decades? 

For me, the answer to this question is in one part personal. As I’ve mentioned, this is my last semester at Bowdoin, and, depending on where the future takes me, possibly my last semester as a student in Maine. While my passion for Every Voice will certainly not expire with my graduation, I am finding energy in the fervent desire to leave my campus community safer and more compassionate than I found it. I want to enact change from within while I still have the privilege of doing so. While I’m here, I want to take the time to build relationships with other students, especially with those who will be there after I graduate, and lend them strength and confidence in activism, as my peers and elders have done for me. 

On a larger scale, I believe that there is an unexpected “why now” to be found in the context of the pandemic. Over the last couple of years of the pandemic, we have all been witnesses to dramatic changes to life on campus in the interest of disease harm reduction through measures like social distancing, masking, and frequent testing. The pandemic has brought so much grief and loss, but it has also brought us to a breaking point, a point of no return. This window of change is also a window of opportunity: We do not need to go on in the same way that we always have. Moving forward, I know that we can strive for something better than a return to normalcy. We have a chance to rebuild something different. Through the Every Voice Coalition, students are asking for resources that would and will change academic careers, campus experiences, and lives. 

We know what we need and deserve, and we have the energy that we need to make it happen. The time for a student revolution, the time to ask for change – more than that, to demand it, to expect it – will always be now. This student revolution has already begun, with the support of a broad network of legislators, organizations, and people both on campuses and beyond them. I have had the privilege of seeing the faces of change on my screen week after week, and of finding my “why now” within them.

All of this is not to say that an individual’s energy won’t wax and wane from day to day, or that everyone can always give equal energy to this or any cause: this community has taught me to protect my own energy, first, and to give as much of it as I can but only as much as I can spare. I know that many of those drawn to this work are survivors themselves, and I recognize and send love to them for choosing to navigate activism alongside their own healing, just as I recognize and send love to those who know that they don’t have the space or energy to engage in formal activism right now.

For those who have the space, I urge you to find your own answers to “why now?” and to find another answer tomorrow, and another the next day, until the “why now?”s stretch on into the future without an ending. And once you know your “why now,” I want you to look for your “what now.” With whom can you share your energy, so that they can be empowered to engage in activism alongside you? What conversations are there to be had, with your legislators, your peers, your campus, and maybe even with yourself? Where can you find support on your campus and beyond? 

For me, the biggest answer to “what now” is getting our bill, LD 1727, passed into law in Maine, and I’m looking forward to the day when I have to look for a new “what now” because this has already been accomplished.