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220 Profile: Abigail Singer AYoung Organizer in Appalachia Abigail Singer was interviewed six months into her first full-time job as an organizer . She was the Coordinator of Organizing for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance in Tennessee. As the book goes to press, she is still an organizer, now with Katuah Earth First!, a campaign to stop mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. I grew up in a suburb just north of Chicago, in Winnetka. I lived there until I left for college. I went to Pitzer College in Claremont, in southern California. I majored in social justice and sustainable development. I designed my own major. After I graduated, I stuck around in the Los Angeles area for a while and then did some traveling. Then I moved to Knoxville to take an organizing job with the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance. If you know Winnetka, you know that it’s a fairly White, conservative, uneventful place. I didn’t really know what activism was, growing up, until I went away to school. I’d always been an environmentalist, but that is about it. The college I went to was pretty progressive, so the professors would teach things like critical thinking. My freshman year I took a class called Resistance to Monoculture. So I had things like that to facilitate the direction that I was going in. There were a bunch of things going on in Claremont while I was there. There was a lot of police brutality. The dining hall workers were organizing to have their union be recognized by the contractor at our college. I was working on a campaign to save a biological field station that was indigenous land and an endangered ecosystem. It was also some of the last open space left in Los Angeles County. It was being threatened by development, by a corporate-backed biotechnology institute. So I started working on that my sophomore year. I probably put more time into that campaign than into my schoolwork. Most of my friends from school are in organizing in some way. I went Profile: Abigail Singer   221 to a pretty progressive school, so it’s probably not representative of most colleges. I’d say a good percentage. Maybe not organizing specifically, but lots of people went into some kind of non-profit work. You know, working with media or education. We had a lot of internships with communities in our area and nonprofits . For most people it takes doing research on your own to really find out what’s out there. I guess you have to be clued in to some extent already in order to find out about all those opportunities. It helped to go to a private school that could afford to give its student organizations money to pay for stuff like that. For me it wasn’t as big an issue as it probably is for other folks. It’s definitely an issue. I was lucky. I got my school to fly me to protests. I got flown to the Hague to be part of the Greenpeace Student Climate Summit. I think it’s great that there are schools that are willing to do that kind of thing. Travel is a huge expense. If organizations that are trying to be conscious of racism, classism, and all kinds of oppression really make an effort to provide scholarships for travel and make their fees not so expensive that helps people gain access. I got linked up to STARC [Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations] by chance. I was visiting a friend in Eugene, Oregon over the summer and STARC was having their national conference there. I ran into someone I had met at one of the mass actions. She said, “Oh, we’re having this conference. Are you coming?” and I said, “Oh yeah, that’s this week. I guess I could stay in Eugene another week.” So I did, and it was a really great conference. So I got involved with STARC that way. With my major, I didn’t have very many marketable skills other than organizing, and I guess in a more general sense, organizing to me is one of the most effective ways to confront the crisis we’re facing on a global level and all the crises that make up the situation we’re facing now. It seemed the only appropriate response for me. It’s something I know I can do, and at least be somewhat effective, hopefully. After...

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