Below are some of the most important wins Bread & Roses members have led or been a substantial part of in YDSA.
San Francisco State University
SFSU YDSA organizers played a crucial role in various campus movements over the last few years. In 2024, YDSA members helped lead SFSU’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment: the only one in the country that won divestment from university administrators. SFSU YDSA was also central to building the SFSU Student Union: an organization that became pivotal to two struggles. One was the Palestine movement. The Student Union became the driving force behind the SFSU encampment in the early days. The other was the anti-austerity movement. The Student Union organized countless rallies of hundreds of students against tuition increases and mass layoffs of lecturers.
In 2025, SFSU YDSA connected the on-campus fight against austerity to the fights against Trump and capitalism with various political education events. We also mobilized students for a Day of Action for Public Education at SFSU, bringing hundreds of students together to voice their displeasure with a university system that continues to prioritize its balance books over its students.
Columbia University
Following the Gaza Solidarity Encampment during the 2024 spring semester and brutal summer of university crackdown and draconian reform, Columbia YDSA began the 2024-2025 school year by endeavoring to help rebuild the shaken base of the student left. We hosted routine community dinners and meetings in the fall to attract and foster cooperation amongst various student organizers and groups, encouraging socialists to encounter, inspire, and engage with each other. We worked in the fall to build and develop new organizers, recruiting students who were sympathetic and unorganized. Particularly, amongst new students, we worked to identify and motivate younger organizers to participate in and join YDSA. Three of those freshmen organizers now sit on our steering committee.
Columbia YDSA played a critical role in building and launching the Columbia University Student Union, which held its first mass meeting at the beginning of the spring semester. Borrowing from a breadth of YDSA resources and knowledge, Columbia YDSA organizers helped to write and determine the Student Union’s constitution and mission statement, as well as facilitate multiple mass meetings and planning meetings. Much capacity in the spring was put into building a wider base of the student left, something that Columbia YDSA cultivated in driving and developing the Student Union as well as separately through YDSA itself. The Student Union, in its first semester after launch, has held multiple mass meetings turning out hundreds of students, held actions and practice pickets, and — most importantly — organized novice and apathetic students into the student movement. Further in the spring, Columbia YDSA hosted tabling and petitioning sessions and aided in new New York State voter registrations for the Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign.
This summer, Columbia YDSA is hosting a summer poli-ed series entitled the People’s Classroom, working to ensure a socialist education does not stop over the summer, dedicating much programming towards strike preparation for both our labor and student unions. Undoubtedly, we continue to meet and plan for our recruitment and campaigns in the fall, and continue to stay engaged with Zohran Mamdani’s race for New York City mayor.
University of Oregon
This year, Bread and Roses members at the University of Oregon were part of the 10-day strike and the campaign to win a contract. We also mobilized students around free speech on campus; in response to code of conduct charges, we held a rally where almost every attendee got on the mic in solidarity with students with code of conduct charges. We also mobilized for ICE off campus and started building a strong sanctuary campus campaign for next year.
YDSA National
Bread and Roses is proud of our principled and political commitment to YDSA. We recognize the strategic importance of YDSA to the socialist movement through its unique ability to reach people at a point in their lives when their politics are most malleable. When YDSA members graduate, they will go on to organize in their workplaces and communities, expanding the size of our cadre layer and the power of the socialist movement.
Since 2017, Bread and Roses has run dozens of candidates for YDSA National Coordinating Committee and brought numerous proposals to YDSA Convention. B&R Co-Chairs and NCC members helped grow YDSA from an organization with 15 chapters to one with 130 chapters from 2017 to 2020. Members of our tendency pushed for an emphasis on labor organizing through the Rank-and-File Strategy, and our cadre played significant roles in the Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee, University of Oregon Student Workers Union, and the launch of the Red Hot Summer program.
Because of our principled commitment to YDSA, Bread and Roses has staunchly fought to defend and expand YDSA resources. We led the charge on the NPC to hire a second YDSA staffer, a position which briefly existed from 2021 to 2023, and consistently brought resolutions to YDSA and DSA conventions demanding a budget for YDSA, which did not have its own budget before 2021. Over several years, we fought for stipends for YDSA NCC members, which have made national leadership more accessible to members who otherwise would not have the time or capacity to serve on the NCC. In 2022, Bread and Roses whipped votes on the NPC to have an in-person YDSA Conference (the first in-person DSA national event since COVID). Most recently, during the DSA budget crisis, Bread and Roses fought to defend as much YDSA funding as possible, and succeeded in safeguarding stipends for NCC members.
Bread and Roses’ politics and victories have played a significant role in building YDSA into the organization that it is today, and we are excited to continue growing YDSA’s size and power.