On Friday, February 14, Berkeley High School students, UC Berkeley students, and Berkeley community members marched from Downtown Berkeley to People's Park in protest of encampment sweeps against unhoused community members. According to Emma Knisbacher, a BHS student involved in organizing the event, approximately 100 individuals attended the event.
"Every couple of weeks, the city puts up a new notice about a sweep where they're trying to clear out unhoused folks in the middle of the night," said Knisbacher. "The specific sweep we were responding to is the sweep of the largest encampment, which is at Eighth and Harrison. But more broadly, [we're responding] to all of the sweeps and all of our city's treatment of unhoused folks in the last few months and years."
The event was organized by Berkeley High School Intersectional Student Activists, a coalition of BHS clubs that includes the Black Student Union, Jackets for Palestine, the Disability Student Union, Gender Expansive Youth Activists, Amnesty International Club, and Sunrise BHS. Berkeley High students also partnered with Where Do We Go, a Berkeley movement against encampment sweeps, and CODEPINK, a feminist anti-war organization with a chapter at UC Berkeley, to organize and publicize the event.
During the protest, students repeated chants including "Unhoused rights are human rights" and "When unhoused people are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!" Protesters were also interviewed by local news publications including KQED and The Daily Californian, and, according to Knisbacher, gained the attention of bystanders as the rally stalled traffic.
"Measuring the success of a rally is a little bit complicated, because on one hand, the purpose of a rally is to spread a message to get people to listen, and on the other hand, it's about building community," said Knisbacher. "Rallies don't typically lead to direct change, but they lead to the awareness and powerful communities that will lead to change. So in that sense, we were pretty loud."
Next steps for the Intersectional Student Activists, according to Knisbacher, include attending a city council meeting in support of unhoused community members, potentially attending a Peace and Justice Commission meeting, and meeting with the Berkeley Mayor and City Council Members.