Behind Some Campus Protests, a Team of Paid Professionals

Leah Hogsten, The Salt Lake Tribune

Armed with a blue and white megaphone and a poster featuring a female silhouette and the words “stop blaming victims,” Kelsey Bourgeois was at the epicenter of a large protest late last month just off Brigham Young University’s campus. The crowd assembled with the goal of persuading the university to relax its strict honor code and to grant immunity to people who come forward about sexual assault.

The cause is personal for Ms. Bourgeois. She was raised Mormon and is herself a sexual-assault survivor two times over. Donning a simple black T-shirt, blue jeans, and sandals, she looked a lot like the thousands of other people who have protested on campuses across the country this academic year.

But she’s not a student protester. She’s a professional activist.

It’s the 26-year-old Utah native’s day job to comb through petitions started on the for-profit, online platform Care2, where she works as a campaign writer, then reach out to people who spearhead a cause, and help them. Other times, as in the BYU case, she suggests the cause and helps an interested party assemble a petition. Then she coaches participants to “optimize” their demands. This can mean polishing the writing, attaching an eye-catching image, connecting student activists with Care2’s PR firm, Unbendable Media, and even providing tangible goods like printouts and posters.

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While not all of Care2’s users are students on college campuses, many of them are. And as more students than ever before say they are likely to participate in campus protests, Ms. Bourgeois and her coworkers are positioned to make campus activism more sophisticated than ever.

‘We Did It’

Consider the case of Valerie Janovic, a freshman psychology student at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. When Ms. Janovic had a panic attack this semester, she turned to the campus counseling center and called the crisis hotline for help. Both were unable to offer her the immediate services she sought, she said.

Instead of staying silent about what she saw as a lack of mental-health resources on the campus, Ms. Janovic decided to take action. She found Care2 and wrote a petition with a friend, with the goal of collecting a couple of hundred signatures from the student body, of fewer than 3,000 undergraduates.

What she never expected was that a professional would contact her, coach her, and ultimately help her attract more than 50,000 signatures in support. And she definitely did not anticipate that someone would actually mail her protest signs and ship her the 1,000-page petition containing all the signatures — which was “really heavy,” she said with a laugh.

When Care2’s online organizing strategist, Lacey Kohlmoos, originally emailed her, Ms. Janovic admits she was skeptical.

“At first I thought there must be a catch, because nothing is that good,” she said. “Then it turned out that it was that good.”

Ms. Janovic said she had always been an advocate for creating change but didn’t know how to go about it. “Then they swooped in and said, Here’s how.”

Now at the top of the page containing Ms. Janovic’s petition there are big orange letters that read, “We did it.”

Care2 has deemed Ms. Janovic’s efforts to improve campus services for mental health a success, with the online update laying out Skidmore’s pledged changes: “The school is hiring an additional psychologist for the counseling center,” the update reads, “contracting a 24-hour hotline, and exploring ways to reorganize counseling services so that even students suffering from panic attacks and breakdowns can get timely help.”

Ms. Kohlmoos, who has worked for Care2 for about nine months, said working with students like Ms. Janovic is a highlight of her job. She’s also worked with students at American University who wanted to improve the institution’s response to reports of sexual assault, and with an individual at the University of Alabama who was offended by a Confederate flag hanging in a dormitory window and wanted the flag banned from the campus.

Among the most valuable bits of assistance Ms. Kohlmoos says she’s provided: unpacking the bureaucratic language used by campus administrators. Like understanding that “we’ll take that under consideration” is not a “yes,” she said.

‘It’s Not Over’

Of course, not all student activists turn to Care2, and not all are looking for professional help. But for those who welcome it, the services are free.

Care2 is funded through advertisements and partnerships with nonprofit groups, which pay the organization in exchange for access to the email addresses of online users. (The organization’s website promises prospective nonprofit partners access to “passionate, highly engaged supporters” at a cost of about $1.50 to $2 per new lead.)

Founded in 1998, Care2 is a privately held “B Corporation.” That means it has been certified by B Lab, a nonprofit organization, as a company that meets certain social and environmental standards.

And for students who use its services, Care2 can shine a bright light on their cause. Like a petition highlighting the honor-code protest at Brigham Young, written by a student, Madi Barney, that now has more than 113,000 signatures.

“We can post it on Facebook, we can geo-target it so people in their area see it,” said Ms. Bourgeois, of Care2. “We can send it out to reporters, we work with Unbendable Media, and the big thing we can offer is we have several professional organizers who handle deliveries and protests and rallies. We provide signage, we print the petition for them.”

Ms. Bourgeois said the BYU cause is “her baby.” She reached out to Ms. Barney, who says she’s been punished under the school’s honor code for reporting an off-campus sexual assault, after feeling a personal connection to the “victim-blaming culture” Ms. Barney was experiencing.

Ms. Bourgeois — who attended Brigham Young on and off for about three years before leaving, in the spring of 2012, and completing her political-science degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — said helping Ms. Barney has been “very cathartic and very healing.”

“To see these 113,000 signatures of people saying, This is not OK, definitely feels like 113,000 people saying to me, You didn’t deserve this,” she said. “My hope is that other women and men who read the petition and hear about this also have that experience where they realize they are not alone.”

And even as Ms. Bourgeois handles roughly one new petition every day from her Illinois home, she’s still working on the BYU case — scouring the petition’s comments to compile a list of everyone who said they would either cease donations to the institution or rethink sending their children there. She hopes to publish the list to demonstrate the financial backlash the university could see if the honor code doesn’t change.

“It’s not over,” she said, noting that people on the ground in Utah are busy plotting their next step as well, with Care2 in the background.

“With student organizers, they don’t have money to spend on a protest,” she said. “But they do have the passion, and we can use that and help them assert change.”