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This vision document was passed at the 2007 National SDS Constitutional Convention.

1. We want a participatory democratic society.

2. We want the end to restrictions on free expression.

3. We want the basic needs of all people be met.

4. We want an immediate end to all forms of oppression and domination.

5. We want an environmentally sustainable society.

6. We want a proper education.

7. We want a non-hierarchical society.

8. We want transparency and involvement in community interactions with businesses and other institutions.

9. We want the end to all wars of aggression, imperialism and the socio-economic and political structures that support and profit from them.

  • Welcome to Denton SDS!

    What is SDS?
     
    Students for a Democratic Society is a radical, multi-issue student and youth organization working to build power in our schools and communities.
     
    We are entirely student and youth-led and have over 100 active chapters in high schools, colleges, universities, and cities all over the country.
     
    OUR TIME, OUR MOVEMENT
     
    We are living in scary times. Everywhere we look there are huge economic, environmental, and political problems that require urgent solutions.
     
    Many of us want to do something to help, but the problems can feel overwhelming.
     
    What can one person do to have an impact? Where do we start? Our generation holds tremendous power to change our world in crisis, yet many of us don't know where to begin.
     
    As Students for a Democratic Society, we know that change happens from the bottom up. Building a strong organization is all about combining our individual power into something much greater than the sum of its parts.
     
    SDS is committed to building a strong organization and growing a popular movement for student power to unite the youth of America and save this country from disaster.
     
    We are going to take back our schools, our communities, and our nation - and we are going to win, because millions of people are stronger than millions of dollars. This is the fight of our life!
     
    ORGANIZE FOR STUDENT POWER!
     
    SDS is about being an organizer, not an activist. We wrote a document, "Who We Are, What We Are Building," to give us vision for the organization and the popular movement we want to build. It reads,
     
    "Activists are people who take action to make change in society.
     
    Organizers are activists who also work to bring many other people into movements.
     
    They help build organizations and spaces that engage and activate new people.
     
    As organizers, we try to meet people where they are, listen to their concerns, and help to amplify their voices.
     
    SDS will build a culture of organizing, in which we are always reaching out to people, working with them, building alliances, and creating empowering spaces to make change together."
     
    An organizer creates spaces for other people to become organizers - and the cycle continues until we win our campaigns and change the fundamental institutions of society.
     
    Why is organizing so important? Because we need lots of people working together to win!
     
    We're up against people with tremendous power and privilege, people with much wealth and little sense of responsibility to anyone but themselves.
     
    If we're going to bring them down, we need people power.
     
     
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  • Student Power!

    OUR VISION FOR DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

    We believe the campus must be opened, and the character of both university and education in society fundamentally changed from its historical role as the "Ivory Tower" bastion of privilege.

    We are committed to the fight for access to education and higher education, because they are not privileges but rights, and because reparations for bias in admissions owing to systems of oppression are long past due.

    We further believe that universal education is not enough. Our education should be run by the people involved in it and so we are committed to making our educational system a democratic one, where students, teachers, workers and community members all participate in the decision making process.

    We are committed to listening to, learning from, and amplifying the voices of oppressed communities and their allies.

    In our schools, we will prioritize worker's rights, gender justice, affirmative action and other issues relevant to oppressed members of our communities.

    We commit to changing the function of the university, to ensure that the university is not above the community but an accountable part of it, and to ensure respect for worker's rights, for freedom of inquiry, and for the rights of students.

    THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY

    SDS is a chapter-based national organization. It is made up of over 150 local chapters, some as small as 3 people, some as large as 100, who organize locally around local issues.

    Together, these chapters are building a popular student movement. Each chapter specializes in issues that affect their community; whether it is accessible and quality education, immigration raids and detentions, climate change and climate justice, ending war profiteering, or other issues.

    Out of our many issues will arise one strong youth movement for peace and justice, led by a generation of experienced, trained student leaders who learned their organizing skills as students.

    OUR PLACE IN THE MOVEMENT

    Students for a Democratic Society is dedicated to making the connections between students and peoples struggles, and between issues and the bigger systems of which they are a part.

    We ground our work in an understanding of how our issues intersect, how our struggles are connected, and how to actively question and creatively approach those things that separate us.

    We recognize the importance of fighting injustice on multiple fronts. We know that individual struggles are never won alone.

    We are struggling to change a society which depends upon multiple and reciprocal systems of oppression and domination for its survival: racism and white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism and transphobia, authoritarianism and imperialism, among others.

    In order to create enduring change in such a society, SDS takes on these systems by nourishing interconnected and mutually sustaining struggles of liberation.

    We aim to consciously and effectively target systems of oppression through collaborative struggle rooted in concrete organizing.

    We expand our understanding of issues often viewed as singular to include a more complex analysis of how people's struggles are related and interdependent.

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