After a successful retreat last year for Community College Council (CCC) members, Jennifer Shanoski, Northern California vice president of the CCC and a member of Berkeley’s Peralta Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 1603, got in touch with CCC members, asking them if they’d like to do it again. After an enthusiastic response, another retreat was held in San Diego right before the semester started.

The topics people wanted to focus on included running effective meetings, getting involved with local elections, and building a bench of leaders in their locals.

Trainings on all those issues happened during the retreat. But a big focus for organizers was to have the CCC members meet and talk with one another in a way they can’t at the official meetings with an agenda. To make that happen, the organizers decided to mix things up so participants would mingle with people they didn’t know.

“We were pretty intentional about it, and we actually assigned people to tables depending on what we were talking about,” Shanoski said. “So, when we were talking about local elections, we had people sit with their own local, but when we were talking about how to build a bench and how to build up a leadership team, we had them sit with people from different locals.”

Kelly Mayhew, an English instructor at San Diego City College, vice president of Local 1931, and chair of CFT’s Labor and Climate Justice Education Committee, says that made a big difference.

“People who come to the CCC, don’t always have a chance to actually talk to each other or to learn a lot from each other,” she said. “The best thing about this whole training was that we were assigned tables, and we were mixed up two or three times, so that we were constantly able to talk to new and different people.”

For James McKeever, the president of Los Angeles’s AFT 1521, getting together with people from different community colleges meant a chance to discuss statewide issues— such as AB 1705, which requires almost all students to be placed into transfer-level math and English. Critics say this doesn’t serve vulnerable student populations.

“We’ve seen that it’s affecting some of our students and that some of our students are not able to pass college level English and math, and because of that, they’re dropping out,” he said. “We talked about an unsure state budget and what that is doing to our administration and the way they’re approaching enrollments. Some districts are doing better in enrollments and have rebounded face to face, while other campuses have still struggled with their face-to-face enrollments.”

Mayhew also found it helpful to hear what her colleagues across the state were doing. 

“We could see how other locals were organized, their relationships with their districts and their administrators, how they handled contract negotiations, how they handled board elections, how they handled morale, servicing their members and all of that,”

she said. “I think that was really useful for a lot of folks to be able to have those conversations.”

Mayhew and her partner and fellow union member and teacher, Jim Miller, are involved in political action, and they worked to elect the members of the Board of Trustees for their community college districts.  She shared with other locals at the retreat what a difference that made.  

“In some of the conversations I was having with people, I would ask them, ‘Did you find someone to run for this?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you endorse people?’ ‘Well, they’re both not great, so we’re just going to see what happens after the election.’” Mayhew said.  “If you’re just in reactive mode, that’s so much energy, right? If you don’t have a Board of Trustees that is student and educator focused and you haven’t helped pick them, then that makes your union life that much more difficult.” 

McKeever was glad that a lot of people attended. He says it lets everyone see themselves as part of a group.

“It gets us out of our silos and allows us to see ourselves as a bigger part of a force for the state and the issues for our students,” he said. “When we’re looking at statewide issues of housing, statewide issues of funding, not just for community colleges, but for CSUs [California State Universities], and so on because we want our students to be able to transfer and not take on a lot of debt. This allows us to kind of look at other districts and see that we’re part of a bigger movement. That’s one of the biggest and best things about it.”