PIRG hosted an event on Nov. 20 to celebrate the progress that they’ve made on their campaigns throughout the semester. One of their biggest achievements is that they’ve reached 1,000 signatures for the Pathways for Panthers campaign.
Photo by Julia Ferrara | The Crow’s Nest
By Julia Birdsall
Not many students get the opportunity to influence policy decisions and advocate for the changes they want to see, but with the University of South Florida St. Petersburg chapter of the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), students say, this is a possibility.
Gavin Porter, a sophomore environmental science and policy major and the social media coordinator for PIRG, told The Crow’s Nest that he was inspired to join the program because of its Pathways for Panthers project, which advocated for the Florida state government to allocate funding to more wildlife crossing corridors in the hopes of protecting the endangered Florida panther and other threatened species.
“It’s really important that we save such an important animal, especially to Florida. It’s a part of our culture, the Florida Panther,” Porter said.
PIRG is an organization that functions on college and university campuses to help students address political issues that are important to them and lobby for changes to be made.
They are located at campuses across the United States, including Eckerd College in St. Petersburg and USF’s Tampa campus.
The organization has been working to establish themselves on the St. Petersburg campus for the past couple of years, but hasn’t achieved club status.
Some of their existing campaigns handle topics like affordable textbooks, educating new voters and reducing plastic usage.
“[The campaigns] all are about their specific topics, but they all hint at this larger kind of social change that I think is really impactful and a great way to show that specific small victories can contribute to larger change,” said Natalie Smith, a PIRG career organizer.
Smith is employed to mentor and assist students in organizing themselves. She joined PIRG after becoming burnt out by constantly learning about all of the issues occurring in the world, yet feeling helpless to solve them.
“One thing about the PIRGs is that they are incredibly action oriented. You will see progress in whatever campaign you do,” she said.
Helping students organize has been a fulfilling aspect of her career, Smith said. She believes that the students she works with have become more confident through their work with PIRG.
“A lot of students come in quite shy, intimidated and unsure,” Smith said. “We train them, but we also push them to get out of their comfort zone a little bit.”
Rachel Esteban, a freshman biology major, can attest to this.
“I’m so bad at talking to people on the phone and after doing the phone banking stuff, I feel a lot more confident about professionally calling people. Same with petitioning. I think we all joked that it was a rejection therapy,” Esteban said. “But I think it made me more confident speaking to people.”
PIRG grassroots coordinator, Abiel Lubin, and campaign coordinator Nicole Bosch – both of whom are freshman political science majors on a pre-law track – said that getting involved through PIRG has pushed them to do things that they never imagined themselves doing in high school.
“You can be in classes about things like this, but it’s definitely different, learning in a classroom and actually being out there and, not only getting hands-on experience doing petitioning and reaching out to officials, but also getting connections, you know, meeting people,” Lubin said.
Porter, who joined PIRG in his second year on campus rather than his first, told The Crow’s Nest that the club has changed his relationship with the St. Petersburg community.
“It’s definitely made me feel a lot more involved on campus, specifically with our community, [by] interacting with people and talking to people a lot. And it’s made [me] as a person more confident to be able to speak to people in general,” he said.
Working with PIRG has provided experience that will be helpful to students’ future careers, all of the interviewees agreed.
More than this, though, it allows them to educate themselves about the issues that impact their community and do something to change them.
“It’s easy to get burnt out, it’s easy to get really overwhelmed,” Smith said. “But when you have that confidence, like ‘Okay, I can ask people to make change,’ and they’ll do it, that’s really empowering.”
Post Views: 59
Written by: Julia Birdsall on December 3, 2025.
Last revised by: Julia Ferrara
