When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Rachael Kuintzle emailed her fellow graduate student workers at the California Institute of Technology to say that she would not be attending work the following day but would instead participate in a nearby protest. The email subject was titled “Strike.”

To Kuintzle’s surprise, more than fifty of her coworkers showed up at the protest instead of going to work. So she and another Caltech graduate student began cold-emailing student activists across the country to gauge interest for a national day of action.

On August 2, fifty people from various campus groups and unions met to begin planning a mass student strike. At their second meeting two weeks later, the group officially formed the Graduate Student Action Network (GSAN), a collection of students and workers from high school and college campuses across the country trying to build a mass, student-led progressive movement. Although some local groups are in coalition with abortion-focused nonprofits, members of GSAN voted early on against affiliating the group with larger nonprofits to preserve its political independence.