Global Warming Solutions
Statewide
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This past year was exciting for us in our fight to solve the climate crisis. In November, OSPIRG partnered with the Cascade Climate Network, the University of Oregon, and the Sierra Student Coalition to host Powershift West 2009 - the nations largest regional youth global warming conference. Over 500 students attended from 11 states including Nevada, Montana, and even Alaska.
Keynote speakers included Environment California's Bernadette Del Chiaro, State Representative Jefferson Smith, and Lane County Commissioner Pete Sorenson. Students spent three days learning organizing skills, attending panels, and planning campaigns to take back with them to their colleges and universities and strengthen the youth climate movement. The weekend ended with a huge march around campus and a rally calling for climate solutions.
Here is a great story about the conference from The Oregonian, Oregon's largest newspaper.
National and International
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Thanks in part to the work that students did in organizing Powershift West 2009, Charles Denson, OSPIRG's board chair was invited to the White House, along with two University of Oregon student government representatives, Zachary Stark-MacMillan and Rachel Cushman, for two days of meetings with Top Obama Administration officials, including three Cabinet Secretaries, the EPA Administrator and the President’s top advisors on energy and climate change. The forum included 150 young people to discuss how youth entrepreneurs, community organizers, and student leaders can drive the development of a clean energy economy. You can see a video of the meetings here: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/the-white-house-convenes-young-green-leaders/
Charles and Zach then flew to Copenhagen (with other UO students) to
attend meetings with officials and demonstrate youth support for a
strong climate treaty.
Cutting Healthcare Costs
OSPIRG’s Campaign for Affordable, Quality Health Care
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With family health care costs projected to double in the next decade, Oregonians were lucky to see the passage of a comprehensive new law in 2009 that will cut the cost of health care. The law puts Oregon at the forefront of health care reform by cutting administrative waste, limiting excessive insurance premium hikes and prioritizing preventative care that makes us healthier.
Some of the common sense recommendations include:
Streamlining administrative procedures so that doctors and consumers can use the same form or procedure for all insurance companies and hospitals. This could cut up to $400 million in waste over the next ten years.
Requiring all insurance plans to use the Oregon Prescription Drug Pool unless they can negotiate a cheaper package for their customers. This could cut up to $95 million over the next ten years.
Requiring insurance companies to streamline their administrative costs as a condition of increasing their rates, which could cut over $735 million over the next ten years.
OSPIRG and our allies played an important role in getting us to this point. Our role is a good example of how our strategy of combining on-campus student activism with professional off-campus advocates is a powerful tool for students to meaningfully participate in public issues. Here’s a little bit about what we’ve done to date:
Expertise for students and policymakers. Our advocate, Laura Etherton, spent countless hours becoming an expert on the issue. We used her expertise to help OSPIRG chapters understand the issue themselves so they could go out and educate the student body. For example, at the University of Oregon this fall, Laura sat on a panel with State Representative Phil Barnhart to discuss the benefits of Oregon's healthcare reform - over 100 students attended this event. We also used her expertise to give the members of the Oregon Health Fund Board and the Oregon legislature advice on how to best cut costs.
Grassroots organizing. Using Laura’s advice, the OSPIRG chapters conducted a major educational effort both on and off campus. We spoke in classes about the issue, we gathered personal testimonials from students, got students to sign “casts” that represented the healthcare system, and went to Salem to testify directly to the Health Fund Board.
Direct advocacy. Recognizing the important role Laura could play, the Board sought out Laura’s help in crafting the recommendation, appointing her to three subcommittees. Laura met with committee members and did important legwork to help refine the ways in which healthcare costs can best be brought under control.
Media. We were able to get OPB to run stories about students testifying before the Board, and about Laura’s research on cutting healthcare costs. OPB is the state’s most viewed media outlet, so it really helped us demonstrate how important cost-cutting is to solving healthcare. We also used media to educate students about healthcare reform.
Again, OSPIRG could not have done this alone. We worked side by side with many other organizations and the Board and State Representatives themselves. However, our work is understood as being a big factor in getting cost-cutting to become a central part of the healthcare debate.
Big congratulations for all we’ve accomplished up to this point, and let’s now do what we can to continue making the case for affordable, quality healthcare!
Making Textbooks More Affordable
Check out this letter from Congressman Wu thanking OSPIRG for our work!
OSPIRG is working to lower the cost of textbooks.
This
is a long term project that we started in 2004. We knew that we
couldn’t solve this problem overnight. We also knew that if students
were going to have a chance to be effective, we would need good
research and solid facts. And we also knew that Oregon students alone
couldn’t change the market; that we would need to band together with
students around the country. 
So we’ve done a few things over the last 4 years.
First,
we organized student PIRGs and student government associations from
around the country into a national campaign, called Make Textbooks
Affordable. We hired a fulltime staffperson, Nicole Allen to run the
campaign. And we launched a joint website – www.maketextbooksaffordable.org – that is the central hub for the project.
Second, our staff and volunteers have authored seven reports that documented the ways in which textbook publishers drive up prices,
and how to solve the problem. Our research was so good that it has
been covered by nearly every major news outlet in the country, and in
all 50 states. This includes the New York Times, USA Today, the Oregonian, and more.
And our work was heavily cited in both the United State Government
Accountability Office and the US Department of Education’s respective reports to Congress about how to solve the problem.
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Third,
we have organized faculty to speak out again high textbook prices. Our
research has shown that faculty are the most important solution to the
problem, since they are the ones that order textbooks. So we organized
over 700 math and physics professors from 150 universities to call on the world’s largest
publisher to stop issuing unnecessary new editions of textbooks,
prompting the publishing industry’s trade journal to acknowledge that
they had to clean up their act. We then organized over 2,000 faculty to sign a commitment to adopt free, Open Textbooks instead of expensive commercial textbooks.
Fourth,
we have gotten the government to take action. When the Oregon
Legislature decided to take action, they turned to OSPIRG State
Advocate Laura Etherton (that’s her speaking to Governor Kulongoski).
And when Congress decided to finally act, they turned to called OSPIRG
Federal Advocate, Luke Swarthout (that’s him testifying before
Congress).
We advised them to pursue solutions that required publishers to disclose the price to faculty when up front.
Our research indicated that this would result in more faculty choosing
cheaper books. Now, this policy is both Oregon law AND national law.
And
although OSPIRG funds were not used to lobby for this legislation,
Congressional insiders say that it was our research and advocacy over
the last 4 years – here on campus and in Washington DC - that was the
key force that led Congress to finally act.
All of this is
starting to pay off. Faculty are starting to adopt cheaper books, and
we’re working to accelerate the pace and scale of this trend so that it
affects every single student.
Increasing the Youth Vote
In
1984, when OSPIRG launched our New Voters Project, things could not
have been worse for the youth vote. Youth voter turnout was on the
decline, politicians only paid attention to older voters, and the
health of our democracy was at stake.
We decided to do something about it and we knew we couldn’t do it alone. We formed the New Voters Project
with the other PIRGs around the country to launch what has become the
country’s oldest and longest running campaign to increase youth
voting.
Here in Oregon, we joined forces with the Oregon
Student Association (OSA) and our individual student government
associations to form the Oregon Student Vote Coalition.
Together,
here in Oregon and around the country, OSPIRG and our allies began
experimenting with the best ways to increase the vote. We ran voter
registration drives, and Get out the Vote campaigns, collecting data,
refining our techniques.
In the late 1990s, Yale University researchers began studying our work.
They found that the techniques we developed were more effective at
increasing the youth vote than anything else out there. This spawned
more interest in our approach, and more research, all of it showing that our techniques were working!
In
2000, OSA and OSPIRG took our program to scale in a big way. We ran
the largest voter registration drive in Oregon history. And youth
voter turnout increased by 14 percentage points over 1996, even though
the national youth turnout increased only by one point. Oregon youth
turnout went from 8 percentage points below the national turnout
average to five above it. And for the first time, we could feel a bump
in the way politicians paid attention to issues like higher education
funding.
We
did it again in 2004, helping to register over 52,000 18-24 year olds. Oregon
youth turnout went up by 9 percentage points over 2000. Youth voter
turnout all over the country increased as well, putting Oregon on the
leading edge of the national trend.
The same thing happened again in 2006
And
once the big national bump happened twice (three times in Oregon), we
began seeing politicians in Oregon and around the country starting to
pay a lot more attention to young people. Other politicians began
running voter registration drives just like the ones we’ve been doing
for years. And running Get out the Vote phone banks, Etc. All based
off of our methods, and the research that proved it worked.
So basically, we are on the cusp of possibly a permanent upward trend in youth voting.
OSPIRG
is continuing to work with the Oregon Student Vote Coalition to push
the envelope of new techniques and increase the youth vote, including
our new online voter registration widget and Facebook application!
Helping Student Renters
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OSPIRG has been issuing new editions of the Oregon Renters’ Handbook for over 30 years.
It
has everything you could possibly want to know about renting a place,
dealing with your landlord and everything else that could ever go wrong
with your place.
Our newest edition was updated by our very
own Consumer Advocate Matt Wallace (that's him pictured on the right).
He spent the summer researching updates to rental laws and consulting
with state officials to make this the best possible resource for
students.
The guide isn't a replacement for talking to a lawyer, but it will give you some great resources to use when negotiating a rental agreement, help you avoid misunderstandings and disputes with landlords, answer questions you may have, and save you time and money.
Boosting Financial Aid
Last October, President Bush signed the College Cost Reduction and Access Act,
one of the biggest expansions in student aid in 15 years. The new law
will increase the maximum Pell Grant award by $1,090 over the next four
years; allow borrowers to repay their loans as percentage of their
income; and reduce interest rates on student loans for student
borrowers receiving subsidized Stafford loans.
OSPIRG student
chapter money was not used to lobby for this bill. However,
Congressional insiders say that our policy and education work over the
last three years was the key force that led Congress to finally act.
OSPIRG
has been sounding the alarm about rising student debt and falling
financial aid for over a decade now, authoring over two dozen reports
describing the problem and the various policy solutions. 
OSPIRG’s
Federal Advocate Luke Swarthout (that’s him to the right) has become of
the nation’s leading experts on financial aid policy, a trusted source
for members of the media, education associations and Congress alike.
However, even as close as two years ago, the financial and political
clout of lenders like Sallie Mae had stymied meaningful action.
In
early 2005, public opinion was starting to rally around college
affordability in a big way. We theorized that we could tap into that
enough to overwhelm Sallie Mae’s clout and shift the political winds in
our favor. We launched a campaign called Student Debt Alert, the perfect “one-two punch” of student activism and professional staff.
Luke used his considerable expertise to author five reports that broke down the problem and solutions in a way that was easy for the public to understand.
He met with key Washington, DC players on this issue – education
associations, government officials, reporters and members of Congress –
and worked to persuade them to support our policy solutions.
Meanwhile,
students in Oregon and around the country mobilized, releasing Luke’s
research to the local media, packing local government hearings with
students, and collecting thousands of personal testimonies of the
problems of student debt. Our work precipitated news story after news
story about the problems of student debt and financial aid. To be
sure all this was heard in DC, Luke personally sent every press clip
and testimony to the Washington DC insiders.
Our breakthrough
occurred in last fall when the new Congressional leadership announced
that they would enact many of the very policy solutions we had been
calling for. Insiders in Congress tell us that Luke’s impeccable
research and policy arguments, combined with the impressive size and
discipline of the students’ grassroots operation made the difference.
The results? A more affordable education students. A real-live lesson in government and politics. Hands-on civic engagement opportunities for hundreds of students who volunteered or wrote their Congressmembers letters.
Promoting Recycling, Etc.
The University of Oregon chapter – led by Joel Durr - worked with
Campus Recycling to educate the student body about the environmental
and financial benefits to the university of reducing the university’s
waste stream through composting.
We found that students were
really supportive of expanding the University’s composting program,
collected hundreds of signatures and persuaded the administration to
fund a pilot composting program at UO.
This year, we will
work to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and assuming it
demonstrates its worth, advocate for the program to be fully funded.
Helping Students Avoid the Credit Card Trap
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Students have enough problems with money without having to deal with credit card debt.
So we launched a new project called Truth About Credit. Our goal is to help students not get ripped off by credit cards. Our program was recently endorsed by the New York Times.
We have several guide books for students, written by OSPIRG Advocate Christine Lindstrom. To the right is one of our campus events educating students about how to avoid the credit card trap.
We are working with our college administrators to restrict credit card marketing on campus. That’s us with our Vice President for Student Affairs at SOU after SOU signed onto our principles.
Finally, we are promoting policies at the federal level that start to reign in some of the most abusive practices of the credit card industry. Below is OSPIRG students meeting with Senator Ron Wyden on campus, and OSPIRG’s National Consumer Program Director, Ed Mierzwinski, testifying before Congress on behalf of Oregon students.
In May 2009, Congress passed strong legislation, called the “Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act” that will halt the most egregious abuses by the credit card industry. The CARD bill eliminates a lot of unfair practices, including: excessive and growing penalty fees, unfair billing practices, and unjustified and retroactive interest charges. It also restricts and requires greater transparency for marketing targeted exclusively at college campuses or consumers under the age of 21. Despite the credit card industry's lobbying to defeat or gut the bill, the Senate and the House both passed the bill with overwhelming, bi-partisan majorities.
