THE WPIRG OFFICE
WPIRG has had many homes over the years. While its many action groups took up space everywhere on campus and around the city, the WPIRG office has always been a central home for everyone from WPIRG staff and board, to members and volunteers, to professors and students, and anyone just passing through. It provided study and meeting space, tech resources from printers to button makers, and more. Its hallmark was, of course, the unique library which housed thousands of titles in political and radical literature.
In the early years, WPIRG had offices both on campus and in the community for certain projects, such as the Consumer Complaints Centre in Kitchener. Between 1996 and 2014, the office was located in the Student Life Centre (SLC). Between 2014 and 2019, it was housed by the Centre for Peace Advancement (CPA) at Conrad Grebel University College, UW.
WPIRG’s last move was the subject of great contention as the Federation of Students (Feds, currently WUSA) terminated WPIRG’s lease for the SLC office space, ending WPIRG’s 18-year service in the hub of student life. WPIRG maintained that the decision was not in the best interest of students, and violated Feds’ own mandate to serve and empower students on campus. Apart from being out of the way of students, WPIRG was forced to downsize the library and was no longer able to provide shared space in the office. Nonetheless, WPIRG remained committed to being accessible to students and fighting the fight when it came to claiming space for students across campus. These photos dating between the 1990s and 2010s offer a snapshot of the transformation of the spaces where we worked, learned, and built enduring bonds.
