This year, OSPIRG students at the University of Oregon took action towards tackling plastic pollution, ending food waste, protecting our oceans, lowering the costs of textbooks, and helping students register to vote! With over 150 volunteers and student leaders, OSPIRG has continued to lead the way advocating for a greener, healthier, and more meaningful future for students statewide.
Protecting Our Oceans
The Oregon coast is part of what makes our state such a special place to live. It’s home to sandy beaches, rocky coves, and an astonishing variety of wildlife along the shore. But, our oceans are suffering due to human action. This year, OSPIRG students advocated for increased funding and resources to protect our oceans, from our critical eelgrass meadows to our rocky habitats along the coast. We got thousands of students on campus to take grassroots action in support of this work, collecting over 2,000 petition signatures in support of the campaign. This November, we brought over 100 students from 10 campuses across the Pacific Northwest together for the inaugural Oregon Youth Oceans Summit!
Tackling Food Insecurity and Ending Food Waste
Our country has a waste problem. In Oregon, 968 thousand tons of food went uneaten in 2022 alone. That would fill enough garbage trucks to line up along I-5 from the Northern to the Southern borders of Oregon almost three times. There is no reason why we should be throwing away so much food while Oregonians are going hungry everyday. So, this year we advocated to get Oregon state leaders to require large restaurants to responsibly dispose of food waste and standardize labeling practices to reduce consumer confusion. OSPIRG students held a lobby day this spring that spoke to over 50 legislative offices in one day about our work to tackle food waste.
Tackling Unnecessary Plastic Waste
We’ve known for a long time that single-use plastic bags are wasteful. They create plastic pollution in our communities, threaten our health and the environment and can harm wildlife. Nothing we use for a few minutes should threaten our health and pollute our environment for hundreds of years—especially when it’s “stuff” we don’t need. In 2019, the Oregon legislature passed a ban on single-use plastic grocery bags. Unfortunately, some so-called “reusable” bags have shown up in the form of thicker plastic film bags at checkout.
We need to fix our bag ban law to actually get rid of all plastic film carryout bags. This year, OSPIRG Students has been out advocating on this campaign in full force: collecting over 1,500 petition signatures and photo petitions from students, writing dozens of letters to our representatives, holding local lobby meetings with the city council, and getting the Mayor of Eugene to write a letter of support for the campaign!
The Oregon Senate passed the better bag ban with bipartisan support, and is currently being reviewed by our state leaders in the Oregon House.
Making Textbooks Affordable
Textbooks are WAY too expensive. The college board estimates that students should budget an average of $1,200 a year for textbooks and course materials. But they don’t need to be that expensive. This year OSPIRG is continuing to advocate for expanding open educational resources (OER) on campus. We partnered up with the UO Libraries to host our annual “OER Oscars” celebrating a dozen professors on campus that utilize open educational resources, and building momentum to expand their implementation across campus.
We then headed to Washington D.C. where we spoke to the Oregon Congressional Delegation about continuing funding for the Open Textbooks Pilot Program. To date, this program has granted more than $50 million to open textbooks programs across the country and funded projects that are projected to save students more than $250 million on course materials.
Promoting Civic Engagement
Our generation is the largest and most diverse group of potential voters in the country, with our own values and our own ideas. Yet, our generation isn’t showing up to vote in high enough numbers. This year, one of our top priorities was increasing civic engagement on campus by helping students register and make a plan to vote in the November election. Through tables, class announcements, phone calls, text messages, and online outreach, we helped register over 500 students across the state of Oregon to vote and made over 5,000 personalized peer-to-peer get-out-the-vote contacts, reminding students of important voting deadlines and providing resources to make sure their voices were heard.
Our Vice Chair, Kali Kleven, was highlighted in the Oregonian for our work to turn out the youth vote!
Expanding the Right to Repair
We should be able to fix our stuff when it breaks. However, too often, companies use their power to make it harder to repair the things we already own, restricting access to the parts, tools, and information needed to do so. After helping pass Oregon’s landmark right to repair law in 2024, we are working to expand these rights for more necessary resources like wheelchairs. We collected over 200 photo petitions from students who support expanding the right to repair, which we delivered to our state leaders at our lobby day this winter! The bill passed out of the Oregon Senate with overwhelming support, and we will continue advocating until it reaches the finish line!
Training the Next Generation of Public Interest Advocates
Every year, we get thousands of students on campus to take action in support of our campaigns, mobilize hundreds of volunteers, and train dozens of student leaders on core advocacy skills from grassroots organizing, to working with the media, to lobbying their elected officials, and more!
This winter we held a regional organizing retreat on the Oregon Coast where we brought over 30 students from Oregon and Washington together for a weekend of skills training, briefings, discussions, and campaign actions to continue to build our student leaders from across the region.
All made possible by the OSPIRG fee!
All of this campaign work is made possible because of the students paying the OSPIRG fee. For over 50 years, students have voiced their support for funding our organization through a $2.11 per-student per-term refundable fee. Students pool their resources together to hire staff, such as advocates, lobbyists, and organizers, to work with students on issues that they care about and represent students where decisions are made—in Salem and Washington D.C.
Looking towards next year, OSPIRG has plans to vastly expand our impact, expanding our training program, making social change at the local, state, and federal level, and continuing to represent students’ interests in places where decisions are being made.