Call to Action Media Kit

Hannah Speer
Jan 3, 2019
8 min read

Updated: Feb 10, 2019

Media Alert

For Immediate Release

Call To Action to Host Weekly Dinners For Club Members

“Call To Dinner”

For More Information: Hannah Speer

Muncie, Ind. - Call To Action (CTA), the only on-campus GSRM political activist group based out of Ball State University, will be introducing an official pre-meeting dinner for club members every Monday titled Call To Dinner. From 6:30 - 7:30 p.m., board members invite perspective, current, and past members of CTA to join them in the Atrium to eat and get to know each other.

“In previous years, CTA has put a lot of attention on recruitment because we are a small organization. This semester, we want to use our size to our benefit by building up a deeper sense of family and belonging between our club members,” says Shaina Neuenschwander, current club president.

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Founded in 2011, Call to Action is a non-funded Ball State University club which focuses on political engagement with issues concerning the GSRM community. CTA can be contacted on their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/CallToActionBSU/) and their Twitter (https://twitter.com/CallToActionBSU).

Media Alert

For Immediate Release

Call To Action Opens Curious Cat

“Anonymous Questions That Need Answers”

For More Information: Hannah Speer

MUNCIE, Ind. – Call to Action (CTA), a queer political action group on Ball State University’s campus, has noticed a problem and has taken action.

Because of the sensitive nature of gender sexuality in the current political climate, it is possible that members of the Ball State student body may not be comfortable seeking information or answers to questions on gender and/or sexuality in person or through identity-revealing accounts.

To help remedy this situation, Call to Action has created an organization account with Curious Cat, “a Q&A social network that allows you to connect with your followers and know new people.”

Anyone can send a question to CallToActionBSU on curiouscat.com without revealing their identity and members of the CTA executive board will answer and/or give resources in response. Follow-up questions can be asked in response to answered posts. The members of CTA hope that this account will open up a more inclusive, questioning-friendly route for those who do not know where to begin looking for their own information or simply need help.

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Biography

For Immediate Release

Shaina Neuenschwander

“Be The Call To Action”

For More Information: Hannah Speer

In April of 2018, Shaina Neuenschwander was unanimously elected president of Call To Action (CTA). Previously, Neuenschwander served as vice-president from the 2017-18 year, worked on creative design and production for club merchandise and was an essential member to the creation of queer support group, Call To Support in 2018. They are also a Social Chair of Gamma Rho Lambda.

Neuenschwander uses “they/them/their” pronouns, a choice they have made because they are non-binary, meaning that they do not identify as either male or female. They have been ‘out’ to the public for about four years, an experience which has come with its ups and downs. It was this experience that led them to CTA, which they have been with for three years and are now excited to take to new heights in the 2018-19 year.

“I’m passionate about CTA and want to see the organization and our members grow. We want to have more community involvement and activism events this year, that’s the goal.” They said.

Shaina can be contacted at shaina.neuenschwander@gmail.com.

They have office hours in the Office of Student Life from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. on Tues. and Thurs.

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LGBTQ+ Students on Campus

Hannah Speer

September 12, 2018 By-line Article

It’s a scary world out there, for some more than others. As most people are aware, the United States has not had a history of being the most accepting nation toward the queer community – from the classification of homosexuality as a disease by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973 to the section of the Defense of Marriage Act that banned homosexual couples from marrying. As a reminder, the second of DOMA voided was only done so by a 5-4 majority. Still, it was a success! For marriage equality, at least.

But marriage equality is not the only issue that LGBTQ+ activists are fighting for, nor the only issue that non-activist individuals face, especially younger ones.

As Pride reported in 2015, “The CDC has found that LGBTQ people face sexual assault in numbers much higher than their heterosexual, cisgender peers. Thirteen percent of lesbian women, 40 percent of gay men, nearly 50 percent of bisexual people, and a staggering 64 percent of transgender people will experience sexual assault during their lifetimes.”

A 2017 article reported that “7 percent — roughly one in 15 — of the students surveyed identified as LGBT or questioning. Compared to straight students, sexual minority students had higher rates of psychological distress (26 versus 18 percent), were more likely to report academic impairment related to mental health problems (17 versus 11 percent) and reported higher overall levels of stress over the past month (63 versus 55 percent).”

With headlines like “Survey: 20 Percent of Millennials identify as LGBTQ” coming out and the attitudes of the country shifting enough that members of the queer community feel safe openly identifying as their respective non-straight and/or non-cisgender identities, it’s becoming apparent – and has been for some time – that universities and colleges are going to have to stay ahead of the game. Higher education has always been a place for students to gain independence and freedom from their parents and communities, a place for queer or questioning students to explore themselves. Unfortunately, no federal law exists to protect queer students from discrimination and, while some states may have laws in place, it is up to higher education to act first to protect their vulnerable students.

According to the above mentioned 2017 article, queer students are more likely to seek out medical treatment for mental health than their straight peers, but are also more likely to go off-campus for those services due to fear over eligibility and confidentiality. Harassment claims, especially against transgender students, are still prevalent.

Policies and enforcement of those policies needs to be a priority for campus officials, and not just because they’re mandated by the law. While the country slowly progresses toward that direction, it is up to higher education to be a place for forward thinking. Campuses should be places where independence and exploration is not only allowed but encouraged and protected.

Some colleges understand this already. 31% of college students say that their college administrations “thoroughly address” LGBT issues and the College Equality Index lists at least 14 colleges as “trans-friendly.”

This is a great change from decades ago, when homosexuality could get you thrown in an asylum, when people like Harvey Milk or the trans women of color who began and lead the Stonewall Riots that kick-started the LGBTQ+ rights movement were putting their lives on the line. It’s thanks to these people, political activists and allies, that the country is becoming safer and more welcoming of queer and questioning individuals. And it’s thanks to this fight that campuses today have more resources for LGBTQ+ youth and that policies on discrimination are being changed and enforced.

Sadly, the fight is not over. The current political climate still puts forth claims that queer individuals do not have the same rights as others. Be it the president tweeting “the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US Military…” or stories reporting that over half of the trans male teens studied admitted to attempting suicide, activists and movement-makers are still necessary.

How Pronoun Pins Saved CTA

Hannah Speer

Sept. 5, 2018

Op-ed

It wasn’t one of the first e-mails from Ball State University that I had received, but it was the only one that had caught my attention freshmen year: a call out meeting for Call to Action (CTA). A political activism group that focused on queer and LGBT rights and problems, I wondered if it was going to be closer to Les Misérables or to a political science class. It turned out to be somewhere in the middle – educational talks built on top of ideals of a better nation and discussions on what we could do as students. By the end of my second year, I was asked to run for PR Director and was elected.

The Call to Action executive board met almost every Sunday evening in the 2017-18 year. I remember the first meeting well; the five of us, Oakley and our VP, treasurer, secretary and myself, gathered in the corner of a sitting area just outside of the student offices to discuss the plans for the coming year.

Oakley asked for ideas on how we could bring in more money for the club. I asked exactly how much we had in the bank account to start with. When she smiled, I got the feeling it wasn’t much. She said she and Kevin (Hook, treasurer from 2017-current) would have to fill out some forms to get access for the new year, but that it was probably less than $150 and most of it would be used for the welcoming and end-of-semester club parties. Because CTA is a political group, they aren’t eligible for school funding.

Until the 2017-18 year, Call to Action had relied solely on membership dues – $5, not collected until the end of the semester and only paid by people who wanted to vote – and the generosity of the executive board members to fund any actions the group wanted to do. Transportation to events or marches was a car-pool system set up by members with cars, an ever-dwindling number as older members graduated and newer members joined sans access to personal vehicles. Every opportunity to pay out of pocket instead of accessing club funds was taken by Oakley, who had been with the club for the last three years of her college experience. The complicated process of accessing the money we did have made the prospect of being compensated for making loans to the club an unappealing idea, but most of us did it anyway.

In my time on the executive board, I did not have any personal interaction with the bank accounts or financials. That was Hook’s domain. But my work as the PR Director was effected; money-saving tactics were a must for anything I wanted to do. The launching of Call to Support, the queer support group Oakley had dreamed up in her years as secretary of CTA and had finally waded through enough red tape to green-light, was almost entirely social-media run and touted at the end of every club meeting. We had great ideas for advertisements for the club and support group but it was hard to capitalize on the rainbow or use physical print-outs when colored printing is $.25 a pop and free printed at the library is limited.

One meeting, closer to winter break, we wrote down every idea we could think of to raise funds. We settled, in the end, on two; bookmarks that Oakley and Hook would work out the specifics of and pronoun pins, which Neuenschwander and I would handle. Neuenschwander is adept at a little bit of everything, a jack of all trades, so I sketched out what I was seeing and we came up with a fair price that would pay Neuenschwander for their work but would still make a profit. They made a few sample pins – she/her, he/him, and they/them, in the design we’d finalized. We sold our first pin the first day they wore the pins to class.

Despite the club being made up of about ten people – the current exec board and the future one – by the end of the year, Call to Action still started the current semester with about $150 in the bank account. They are now selling the pins regularly and hope to bring in more revenue with an extended line of different designs, perhaps branching off into shirt designs if there is a market for it when they have the capital. The funds will go toward increasing the quality of meetings and helping club members attend more political action initiatives.

For a few weeks there, we all had a fear that this would be the last year CTA had on campus. But, a little at a time, this Les Mis/Poli-Sci mash-up of a queer political movement group keeps moving along. I’m not part of the exec board anymore and I have classes that run concurrent to the meetings, but I keep my eye out in crowds now. Looking for the little black and white button I sketched out on a piece of notebook paper.

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Call to Action Media Kit

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