Johnny Brownlee II

Across the nation, our student organizations are struggling and student governments are struggling. Many seem to be on their last leg, past their prime, etc. Organizations don’t have the activism and sacrifice of students from the 60’s and 70’s, drive of the 80’s, the urgency of the 90’s or money and participation of organizations from the early 2000’s. We seek to see if it’s a generational issue, leadership issue or are other factors the problem. We examine 6 sinister problems that are costing student organizations funding, stability, sustainability, etc. We’re often taught how to be good leaders, but never how to run good organizations, revive them or save them from peril.

We’ll learn how to get diversity, inclusion, representation, funding, respect and cooperation so that we can take our organizations to levels not even imagined. We not only discuss how to grow a large membership, and obtain a large budget, but how to make a deep impact on your campus.

Part two is both the prequel and the sequel to the original workshop. We continue to take a look at the history that slavery and colonialism had and currently has on the lives of Africans, African Americans, Caribbean’s and Latinos, by taking a detailed look at who benefited from slavery. We examine the institutions (countries, governments, families, businesses, etc.) that benefitted and in some cases are still benefitting from slavery.

It’s Conference, Not Carnival is a spinoff of the Book and workshop Getting In Our Own Way: The Degradation of Student Organizations. We seek to reverse this trend and thought process of administration not seeing the value of conferences and students not focusing on the right aspects of conference, by teaching students to treat conference as a business trip; teaching them how to masterfully work the conference so that they focus on the right things, develop and can be trusted and encouraged to go to conferences. As students attending a conference is a privilege, not a birthright.

This workshop is needed so that students know how and when to request funding for conferences, how to properly plan for, cover, attend and learn from the conference; and once back at school share and implement what they’ve learned so that administrators and student governments don’t feel funds were wasted.