Establishing NOCASH: A Crusade for Affordable Education

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Mabroumi 1 Mabroumi 4 Hala Mabroumi S.
Sharifian GOVT 2305 04/09/2017 NOCASH Disturbed by the constant increasing costs of attending college, me and a few other students at North Lake Community College decided to create an interest group called the National Organization of Collegiate American Students Needing Help or more extensively known as NOCASH. As explained on The Social Studies Help Center’s website, “An interest group is any organization that seeks to influence public policy.” Our group is a single-interest group and our main addressing issues are:
· To restore education and make it affordable and open to everyone · To protect the human right to knowledge and education.
As we want our interest group to cater to every student, we decided …show more content…

The advertisement team at NOCASH decided that the best place to start advertising our interest group was on campus. North Lake College has over 10.000 students, and hundreds of employees that could be interested in supporting our cause. Our first step was to create flyers, create an ad on the school newspaper, and to promote an event in which we would talk about the issues we want to address, and how we are planning on make our voice heard. Brochures have been made and put in every single office and classroom in campus, and the event has been organized.
At the event, once presented our goals to the prospective members of NOCASH, we started thinking about how to raise money. Starting with a balance of zero dollars, we thought that our best shot was to apply for foundation grants to foundations such as the Ford foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, or even the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. We are also hoping on receiving some private donations, and we are currently planning a fundraise. We will advertise the fundraise on local medias, such as television networks, social medias (Facebook/Twitter), and the radio. We are also planning on bringing our issue to court, mainly to get more visibility and to gain credibility as we are seriously committed to finding ways to make education accessible and affordable to …show more content…

A similar interest group is the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group (NJPIRG) at the Rutgers University. According to studentpirgs.org, NJPIRG students have been “working in conjunction to help lower the financial burden of college students.” Researching the issue, NJPIRG students found out that students pay around $ 1’500 per year for textbook. They so decided to create a program (OAT) to incentivize professors to switch to open textbooks. “The program awards 32 grants worth $1,000 each to faculty and instructors across the university who chose to adopt, remix or create a free or low cost textbook, as an alternative to traditional course materials.” The OAT program saved students a total of 1.6 million in solely two

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