In July 2019, the Bernie Sanders campaign sent an email to thousands of students, inviting them to apply for an organizing summer school. By early August, the program launch brought fifteen hundred participants to Zoom for six hourlong meetings, with titles like “Political Education and My Bernie Story” and “Creating Your Organizing Plan,” followed by homework assignments on campus organizing and Slack conversations about the Green New Deal.

Meetings began with one of the program leaders, Shana Gallagher or Yong Jung Cho, encouraging students to explain what brought them to the Students for Bernie Summer School and what a Bernie presidency would mean for them. Most often, it was Medicare for All, but also the other key issues tied to Sanders’s campaign: crushing student debt, and fears caused by the mounting destruction of the environment.

Students for Bernie leadership went through the logistics of key organizing skills — friend-to-friend organizing, contact mapping, canvassing — to be used within and beyond the Sanders campaign. But staff never touted a Sanders presidency as the natural end of all organizing efforts. “They were preparing us to be able to keep the movement going, whether Bernie was in it or not,” explains Ximena Ibarra, a student organizer from the University of Kansas.