There's a new home for activist groups from the Lansing area.

The NorthStar Center, 106 Lathrop St. in Lansing, opened last month to provide a just and equitable community.

"A big goal of the center is to offer the combined resources of the activist community to empower members of the Lansing community and reach new people," said Liz O'Brien, a member of Direct Action, a grassroots anti-war organization that helped start the center.

There is more to activism than carrying banners and signs, said Tommy Simon, a member of MSU's Students for Economic Justice, or SEJ.

"Social justice is about connecting with the community," he said. "A political movement is not just one issue — it's an entire spectrum of issues that is interrelated and moving forward together."

Community education

O'Brien said education is one of the essential ways to empower a community.

The center will hold programs such as computer literacy classes, after-school tutoring and self-defense workshops. Visitors to the center can pick up applications for food-stamp and child-care assistants, and a listing of local food banks.

And there will be opportunities for residents to work on projects that address current local, national and international issues — such as a campaign to add gender identity and expression to MSU's anti-discrimination policy, contract negotiation conflicts in the Lansing School District and the war with Iraq.

Simon said the center is youth-focused since most of the groups consist of college students working for social justice. For the most part, he said, the groups are against racism, sexism, classism and homophobia.

NorthStar Center is a space to be critical of government, said Megan Gallagher, a member of Direct Action and Phi Tau Mu, a group working for transgender rights.

"The government can't provide an atmosphere to exchange ideas, which is in a very honest and serious way," she said. "That can only happen among community members."

Closing shop

NorthStar volunteers are quick to distinguish the new activist center with Brighter Days Infoshop, a former Lansing activist meeting place that was less than a mile away from NorthStar.

Volunteers collectively decided to close the Infoshop in June 2004 because many had graduated and moved away, Natasha Bancroft, another Direct Action member said.

Also, the house where Infoshop was located was being sold, and the members did not want to buy the entire house, Bancroft said.

Its mission seemed to shift away from social justice and toward entertainment.

"Towards the end, it was a small group of people working on it," O'Brien said. "It had turned into a venue for nonpolitical music."

O'Brien and Bancroft agreed NorthStar has a much stronger focus on community education — and a better facility.

Former Infoshop volunteers and other groups, such as Direct Action and SEJ, began planning a new, more community-oriented center about a year ago.

"We wanted to wait until we could regroup and figure out what went wrong, what went right with the Infoshop," Bancroft said.

Alternative media

The NorthStar Center opened Jan. 20, and it runs with monthly donations — ranging from $1 to $50 — it receives from businesses and individuals, Bancroft said.

Also, some Lansing residents are considering housing an Independent Media Center, or IMC, at the NorthStar facility.

IMC is an online community news Web site that focuses on alternative liberal issues. There are more than 150 Independent Media Centers all around the world that represent countries, cities or regions.

Michigan's Web site closed in 2005 because there was a lack of writers, Bancroft said.

A Lansing group wants to establish a capitol city IMC for Michigan and hopes others spring up across the state, Bancroft said.

Bill Ayers, a distinguished education professor at the University of Illinois, called sites like IMC "an encouraging thing."

Ayers was the co-founder of the radical group the Weatherman, best known for staging violent protests against the U.S. government during the 1970s. Before that in 1965, Ayers had been a member of the then-nonviolent Students for a Democratic Society on the campus of the University of Michigan.

"Young people today have a different alternative media than we had," he said. "Today it's radio, documentaries, film, Facebook(.com), MySpace, blogging — all these things that were unthinkable 30 years ago, and here they are."

Changing activism

The 1960s activism is largely a myth to youth of this generation, Ayers said.

"What did we do that was so great?" he said. "We didn't leave the world in better shape for your generation at all. We left it in much worse shape."

He said the demonstrations that brought many people into the streets in the 1960s weren't the best measure of political engagement, and maybe they weren't the best way to promote social change.

Ayers said he doesn't know what a more effective method of protest would be, but that young people should be looking at other young people from around the world for activism advice — not the 1960s.

"We failed to stop the (Vietnam) War, and we have to better this time. We have to be smarter," he said. "Different times call for different responses."

He said the biggest anti-war demonstration he ever attended was Feb. 15, 2003.

Much of the activism today isn't through traditional marching or demonstrations, Brancroft said. People in the Lansing area are focusing on smaller projects, which have the potential to create a large impact.

For the size and population of Lansing, Gallagher said, there is a large presence of activism.

But, she said, activism in the Lansing area isn't as visible as it was the 1960s because the challenges people face now are different than they were then — people aren't being drafted like they were during Vietnam, she said.

"Today, people feel they have no immediate link to the war, which makes it harder to get people involved," Gallagher said.