MSU Students for Choice

MSU Students for Choice, or MSUSFC, is an advocacy group that serves to educate students and the greater Lansing area about reproductive health legislation and activism. 

The group's self expressed wish is to "combat the voices against women's reproductive rights, strive to end sexual and domestic violence plaguing our communities, and help erase the stigma of abortion." MSUSFC argues any reproductive health decision is an important, personal choice and worthy of support. 

MSUSFC's most recent event was a vigil at The Rock on Farm Lane for the recent attack on a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic.

“I think it’s important to stand together and say that we won’t back away in fear," English junior and MSUSFC vice president Kelsey Wiley said in a previous State News article regarding the attack. 

Act Critically, Act Bravely

Act Critically, Act Bravely is a student group that aims to discuss past activism and social movements in order to better understand contemporary issues expressed on college campuses. The group intends to hold regular meetings for purposes of discussion as well as book readings by various authors.

Duncan Tarr, president and history and jazz studies senior, said the club formed after he and another student helped organize a book reading on campus titled “Dixie Be Damned,” a text that discussed the history of insurrection in the American South.

“We’re not a group that’s going to be organizing protests but as individuals we often find ourselves in those spaces and it formed more out of a desire to understand past social movements, past struggles,” Tarr said. “And so basically a group of friends wanted to meet up and read and hang out and figure out, not like eschew activism, but do a lot of analysis and talking and figuring out the best ways to input our energies.”

Slight Work

Slight Work is a club aimed at empowering black students on campus to find the right balance in maintaining studies, serving the community and still having a good time at school. The group regularly hosts parties every other weekend while also providing resources to help students manage their time efficiently. Slight Work also aims to establish a community service group called Slight Awareness, whose goal is to help people cope with diseases such as alcoholism, drug abuse, cancer, diabetes and other ailments that affect the Lansing and East Lansing communities.

The club has origins in Detroit, where founder Mykal Avery hails from.

“I had created a similar movement back in Detroit and when I came up here I threw a party and called it Slight Work,” Avery said. “My buddies and I then threw another party, then another party, then another party and we started to realize that our grades weren’t the best which made us realize that we needed to find a way to party and keep on top of our schoolwork.”

END7

END7 is an international non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. under the Sabin Vaccine Institute and the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases that strives to eliminate seven of the world’s most neglected tropical diseases. The MSU branch of END7 is the latest to join the national collective of universities and organizations working towards a cure for these tropical diseases such as hookworm and onchocerciasis, or river blindness.

The END7 club was founded by human biology senior Mallory Wilson, who was put in contact with a representative in Washington, D.C. through a mutual friend at Georgetown University. The club only came into being near the beginning of the semester, where Wilson met with the representative to begin planning how to start the MSU END7 chapter just after the second day of classes. The stated goal of the group is to help raise awareness of these neglected tropical diseases in part, as Wilson explained, because they’re relatively simple afflictions to treat.

“The interesting things about these diseases is that all of them are easily treatable, easily curable and easily preventable so its really frustrating to hear they affect 25 percent of the global population,” Wilson said.

The Stonewall Society of MSU

The Stonewall Society of MSU is an advocacy group for LGBTQ students within James Madison College. Ben Schroff, president and social relations and policy junior, hopes to use the club to bring light to the unique issues LGBTQ students face within the halls of James Madison College and throughout the rest of campus.

“I took a lot of inspiration from the DuBois Society, actually, because they’re a Madison-specific group for black advocacy and there wasn’t anything within Madison for LGBTQ people so I took it upon myself to create something for that,” he said.

Some of the issues The Stonewall Society hopes to address include the lack of course material on LGBTQ issues and the erasure of LGBTQ identity because this topic is not brought up within the classroom “or there’s no opportunity to discuss in class,” Schroff said.

W. E. B. DuBois Society

The W. E. B. DuBois Society is a black advocacy group that is specific, though not exclusive, to James Madison College students. The DuBois Society is actually several years old, though president Danielle El-Amin said the group fell off for about five years before being recently revived. Much like the Stonewall Society, the club aims to bring attention to specific issues of race within James Madison College, focusing on better ways to enable class discussion on race, bring in more faculty of color and expand courses focusing on black political and social experiences in America.

“We really wanted to hone in on the needs of black students in James Madison because we represent 79 black Madison students but there are 919 white Madison students, we make up a little under 6 percent of the population in Madison,” El-Amin said.

The goal of the DuBois Society is to provide solutions to the Dean of the college and other administrators in the hopes of addressing these issues in a timely manner.