A new student organization, Students for Social Justice,was created to highlight social issues, human rights violations and political movements starting spring 2025.

SSJ made its first post under the organization’s name on Nov. 18 on Instagram, posting its mission statements and that the organization was “officially in motion.” However, this was not always the name of the organization.

In spring 2024, a group of students created a branch of “Students for Justice in Palestine” at Quinnipiac to promote awareness of the Israel-Palestine conflicts.

Two months later, the organization was not approved by the Office of Student Engagement because of “offensive language in their Day of Resistance toolkit” and the use of “paragliders in a poster,” according to the then SJP Instagram account, which has since become SSJ’s account.

“(OSE)’s entire reasoning was just that SJP was a very controversial organization, and they don’t want anyone to feel not included in that organization,” said Xiomara Saavedra, a sophomore journalism student, former president of SJP and current public relations officer of SSJ. “In reality, my viewpoint of it was just like, ‘Well, the people of color on campus (is) such a small group of people, I feel like there should be a space where we feel like we can talk about what we want to talk about.’”

Saavedra decided to take a different approach to bring an organization to campus that gave a space for students to talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict and other humanitarian and social issues. Over the summer, she created the foundations of SSJ and rebuilt the executive board, making herself the public relations officer to accommodate her schedule as a commuter and to try a new role.

The executive board made a constitution, found an advisor and met with the Office of Engagement, a process that was “a lot smoother,” than SJP’s process, according to Saavedra.

“We’re looking forward to starting up in the spring, that’s something that we’re really excited about,” Saavedra said. “It takes a while for things to come together, and for us to figure out what we’re going to do and how the meetings are going to be structured.”

Two other former SJP members, sophomore economics major Mariam Saad and junior behavioral neuroscience and film, television and media arts double major Marjae Beasley are the co-presidents of the organization.

“I came up with the idea to have co-presidents, because there are a lot of commuters on the E-Board, and we wouldn’t be able to be there all the time,” Saad said. “So it’s much better to split up the work between two co-presidents, rather than have a president and a vice president.”

Beasley became involved in activism and SSJ because she wanted to use her experiences to help others.

“I’ve always been the type of person (that) wants to give a voice to the voiceless and really seek to uplift those who maybe can’t uplift themselves,” Beasley said. “I am marginalized myself. I’m black, I’m queer, disabled, a woman like I’m all sorts of marginalized across the board, and I feel like having that experience as somebody who is marginalized has sparked a sort of empathy for such communities in that sense.”

Junior mechanical engineering major Tahira Jilu serves as the creative coordinator. In collaboration with Saavedra, she hopes to make SSJ more well-known across campus when the organization’s meetings start up.

“We’ve been working on our (social media) posts, and we’ve been working on ways we can really get people into our organization,” Jilu said. “We’ve really just been trying to figure out how to get our name out there and see people who are interested in us.”

SSJ is waiting to receive funding from Quinnipiac for future events. With no funding, sophomore health science major and treasurer of SSJ Hana Elmaghraby is taking a different approach to her role, such as giving her input into social media posts.

“(The executive board) really discusses things before putting things out because we know that we’re going to represent something on campus, and we really want to be careful with what we put out,” Elmaghraby said. “I try to give my input and help with planning. We’re all kind of just trying to pitch in and do what we can to just set things up and lay the groundwork.”

The executive board aims to bring social justice topics to meetings so students can learn about issues across the world, even if it doesn’t impact them directly.

“I hope that we can educate more people on social justice.” Saad said. “I think at Quinnipiac, there are people that are interested in social activism, but there’s not really a way to channel it, and there’s people that aren’t really educated on global situations and even local instances of social injustice and (I hope) to educate students and be able to bring people together to talk about things like this.”

College students are frequent advocates for social justice, with 40% being regularly involved in activism or social justice work, according to a survey conducted by the United Way of the National Capital Arena. SSJ’s goal is to foster an environment where students feel comfortable to learn more about these issues but to also participate in conversations.

“We really want to make sure that every member of SSJ feels included and supported,” Beasley said. “I feel like as a group, we want to host a very safe and very collaborative environment where people feel free to to really fight for what they believe in and fight for positive change and impact in the world.”