Counter It!

Minnesota’s antiwar youth training camp

Last summer the Pentagon was busy preparing for an ambitious “surge” in military recruitment to meet the bipartisan plan to expand the military by 92,000 troops. At the same time, young people in Minnesota were also busy preparing our response.
Twenty two young activists — high school and college students as well as several trainers — gathered for four days in August at Garden Farme in Ramsey, MN to develop our skills and strategy. Organized by Youth Against War & Racism in partnership with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Ruckus Society, and others, the “Counter It! Training” was a great success.

The camp featured seven different popular education workshops, providing space to develop a broad analysis of U.S. militarism and strategy to combat it, as well as the concrete organizing skills for students to confront it. Particular emphasis was given to preparing students to build diverse, inclusive antiwar groups in their schools and creative ideas to directly confront military recruitment there.
With the Republic National Convention coming to town just three weeks after the camp, Counter It! was also a launching pad for organizing a student walkout and theatrical demonstration on the final day of the RNC.

Most of the youth participating in the Counter It! training were students active with Youth Against War & Racism, and we came out of the camp with a more solid team of youth organizers than ever. This will prove essential as we launch our most ambitious counter-recruitment campaign yet.

The “Army of None Campaign” should be up and running by the end of 2008. Last February we pushed a resolution through the Minneapolis school board which partially restricted military recruiters access to schools and also declared that outside counter-recruitment groups had equal rights to access students as military recruiters, and that we could have our tables next to theirs whenever they entered schools. While a number of financial and logistical obstacles remain, by the end of this year Youth Against War & Racism aims to have counter-recruitment tables in schools each and every time the military comes into Minneapolis schools.

For more information on the Army of None campaign, or to donate and otherwise help out, please see youthresistance.org (website still under construction).