North Carolina Social Justice Project Inc

The idea behind the NCSJP Fellows program is simple: college students identify social problems in their local community, and they learn to implement advocacy and organizing techniques while helping to solve those problems.  We facilitate this by providing training on basic organizing, media, legal, and technical aspects, while assisting the students in crafting a plan of action to remedy their local problem.  The central office of NCSJP functions as home base, providing our student teams (Fellows) the technical infrastructure they require (i.e. web site access, email address, telephone numbers, etc.) as well as the knowledge of our professional staff and central clearinghouse of local and state-wide issues.  We would be perfectly positioned to notice subtle trends of discrimination or illegality which regional organization would be completely unaware, and would have the proximity and presence to bring these issues to light.In addition to the work during the semesters, there would also be a yearly conference in Raleigh in the early summer months, which all the Fellows would attend.  The conference would consist of presentations by each of the groups about the project they worked on, what strategies were used, how successfully they were, and what they learned that can be used by the rest of the grouwhether as a part of an established community group or simply as concerned citizens. In order to facilitate this program, we plan to divide North Carolina into three geographic regions (Western, Central, and Eastern) and initially set-up one partner intuition in each zone, eventually expanding to three partner schools in each zone, giving us maximum exposure on both a geographic and population basis.  The ideal scenario would include on public, one private, and one historically black school in each region.