"Calling All College Students":
Texas Right to Life Is Activating Campus Pro-Lifers

By Kathleen Sweeney, NRLC Outreach Department

The college students of today will be the leaders of tomorrow. Current statistics indicate that college-age women have one out of five abortions. This is a critica population to reach with pro-life truth and action. In a country as large as the U.S. and containing an enormous number of colleges, the challenge of college outreach for the pro-life movement is huge.

Texas Right to Life has recognized that the only way to reach this large, critical population is for each state affiliate to concentrate on reaching out to the colleges in its own state. For the last three years, this NRLC state affiliate has developed an organized approach to contacting, motivating, and training students to lead pro-life efforts on their respective campuses.

A central event facilitating this effort is the annual College Leadership Conference held early in the fall semester each year. This year, the second such conference, with the theme "From Small Beginnings Come Great Things," was held Saturday, September 11. Twenty-one student pro-life leaders coming from six different colleges, 21 student pro-life leaders, and one faculty advisor participated in an intensive day of workshops.

The goal of this conference, according to Texas RTL's College Outreach Coordinator Jude Nguyen, is "to motivate and equip students to spread the pro-life message, providing them inspiration, ideas, training, and relationships."

"What we want to do," she added, "is encourage mature pro-life dialogue among students who could then bring that energy back with them to their campuses and encourage that kind of conversation and development there."

The conference included sessions on how to organize a campus pro-life group, the kinds of events and meetings the group could sponsor, fund-raising, publicity, leadership and participation, and dealing with obstacles such as pro-abortion opposition, busy student schedules, and media problems. Presenters included Julie Harrison, the college coordinator at Texas Right to Life for the previous two years; Jude Nguyen, who is a third-year English major at St. Thomas University as well as this year's college coordinator; and Michael Fitzgerald, vice president of Baylor Bears for Life and a former intern at Texas RTL. The College Leadership Manual, with detailed guidance for campus pro-life groups, a major training tool, was provided to the students.

One special highlight was a presentation on adoption made by Kristy Moore of Buckner Adoption and Maternity Services. Students were very moved, according to Nguyen, by Moore's testimony about dealing with women who made decisions to choose the adoption alternative rather than abortion.

Establishing relationships and contact information is key, Nguyen said. The fall conference, both last year and this year, began a network of pro-life groups from different campuses across the state. Follow-up from the conference included mailing out a directory of contact information which facilitated communication among the groups and between them and Texas Right to Life.

"Students keep us posted about their activities, send us samples and literature from events they hold so we can keep updated on their status and their progress," Nguyen told NRL News. She said that last year the affiliate worked closely with Baylor University, exchanging information and establishing a relationship. This year the conference took place at Baylor, hosted by the Baylor campus pro-life group.

Web site information is a great tool for posting college events and group contacts. The Texas Right to Life web site (www.texasrighttolife.com) has a college section that lists names and contact information of the campus pro-life groups with which the affiliate is in touch. Career fairs also have offered Texas Right to Life an opportunity to share information about internship and volunteer opportunities.

"Young people have a lot more hope and energy than, say, people in the corporate world. They have more optimism," Nguyen pointed out. "Some students will just jump up and say, 'What do you need? I'll do it.'"

At a fundraising banquet, "Celebrate Life," that Texas Right to Life held September 23, the majority of volunteers helping with it were college students. Then they got to attend the banquet free. They listened to guest speaker Janet Parshall and to legislators who supported the state's Parental Notification Act.

"They see that people of different ages, different careers, and different objectives support the right to life cause," Nguyen said. "It made this battle more real to them."

Petitions are being provided to the student groups by Texas Right to Life as a way to raise funds for their groups. This year the students passed out the "National Petition to Pass the Child Custody Protection Act."

For each sheet of petitions accurately completed with 10 names, the student group earned a dollar. The students were loaded up with petitions to take to churches, to professors, to fellow students, and so on.

Activities the student groups sponsor vary according to the interests of each particular group. They can include providing action alerts on legislation, putting on educational events that feature a noted speaker, participating in a Life Chain, providing support for pregnancy help centers, or meeting with the legislative representative for the district.

"College students are the key to changing the secular perspective that lacks respect for human life," Nguyen said. "On campuses, if we build a relationship together­students are familiar with each other's faces, know each other's names, laugh and talk and build up friendships during the fall conference-it will be easier to call each other up and gain support for each other's events. There is a cohesion­they build and grow together as opposed to building and growing apart."

This vision of Texas Right to Life's college outreach is only three years old at this point and still faces many challenges and difficulties. One major difficulty all such campus outreaches face is the turnover of students.

To address this problem, the affiliate sent a letter to the campus pro-life groups in its network urging them to keep Texas Right to Life notified of changes in leadership. Most elections of officers are at the end of the spring term. Since virtually no one is on campus during the summer, and it is hard to reach students during end-term exams, it is important to establish contact early in the year.

Holding leadership conferences in the first weeks of the fall term has been helpful in contacting the leaders early, facilitating passing on practical experience from past years, and getting the students going right from the beginning of the year. Also, the College Leadership Manual encourages establishment of stable groups.

"Our collegiate outreach wants to help the students as much as possible with whatever avenues we have or resources available," Nguyen stated. "If, for example, a group needed a speaker on euthanasia, we could research this for them and provide the contact." But the only way an affiliate can do this, he emphasized, is by having regular channels of communication.

"Education and development is more than textbooks, lectures and teachers," Nguyen commented. "It is also standing up for your ideas and the beliefs you hold to be concrete, worthy of respect, and true. If anyone is seeking to have a well-developed education they need to expand beyond words on a paper, to see that there is an extensive matter involved in life issues­and that is life."