Nick Martin
Nick Martin is a Lancaster Pennsylvania activist.
Old Occupiers for Bernie
Sanders' 2020 senior adviser Winnie Wong, national organizing director Claire Sandberg, California grassroots director Melissa Byrne, national field director Becca Rast, and deputy national field director Nick Martin were all on the ground for Occupy, in one city or another, in 2011.[1]
Open Letter from RWU to the President
In November 2022 Nick Martin signed the Open Letter from RWU to the President .
SDS
In 2007 Nick Martin was a member of Lancaster Students for a Democratic Society.[2]
Students for a Democratic Society: National Convention
Students for a Democratic Society: National Convention & Action Camp Reports By: Nick Martin (Lancaster SDS), Madeline Gardner (University of Minnesota SDS), Daniel Tasripin (Hunter College SDS) and Beth Blum (Philadelphia SDS) Left Turn magazine November 01, 2007.
Iraq war vigil
Reinvented and reignited in January 2006, the new SDS spawned a Lancaster chapter that held vigil on the courthouse steps September 2007. And while those steps are the platform for various community groups to protest the Iraq War at least once a week, Friday's group brought energy and vibrancy as only youth can.
"I feel like we can learn a lot from older people, but this is our generation, and we need to work at it now to make a difference," said SDS member Amber Nitchman, a senior at McCaskey, where a handful of students joined the Lancaster SDS chapter at the start of this school year.
Students at six other schools - Penn Manor, Manheim Township, Warwick, Lancaster Mennonite, Hempfield and Lancaster Catholic - also are participating.
Friday's vigil was sort of a coming-out party for the local chapter, which took wing in February. SDS member Nick Martin said the chapter recently elected to join in the Iraq Moratorium, a national monthly time-out of sorts for those opposed to the Iraq War to take action and make their opinion heard whether by protesting, calling an elected official or just putting a sign in their window.
"In the '60s, a lot got accomplished (by SDS) on campus. A lot of students' rights issues have changed since then," Martin said. "Even if we don't end up ending the war, there are a lot of other things that could be changed for the better."[3]
Back to Lancaster
Nick Martin came back too after years of social justice work, including organizing against mountaintop removal in West Virginia. Back in Lancaster, he became a leading organizer with Lancaster Against Pipelines before he starting as the regional field director for the Bernie Sanders campaign.[4]
Lancaster Stands Up/old comrades
While Lancaster Stands Up has mostly been playing defense, its leaders aim for something more.
“I feel like everything we have done up until this point is reactive,” says Nick Martin, the 28-year-old former regional field director for the Bernie Sanders campaign here. Together with Becca Rast and a few other friends outraged by last year’s election, he called the first meeting of Lancaster Stands Up. “Now we are actually going on the offensive and building political power.”
The Nation writer Jimmy Tobias caught up with Martin—who, like Becca Rast, he first met in 2010 when they were all were involved in a campaign against mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia—during the organization’s April mass meeting. Wearing a camouflage cap and work boots, he is greeting people, a mostly older white set, as they file into a local bar in downtown Lancaster.
“Our goal,” he explains, “is to use visionary politics to build a long-term mass-scale organization.”
King's radical staff
Becca Rast, Jess King’s campaign manager, organized her high school to march against the Iraq War with help from Jonathan Smucker, who at the time was the national field organizer for the War Resisters League. Rast’s teenage co-organizer, Nick Martin, is now the King campaign’s field director.[5]
Lancaster Stands Up Leadership Team
Lancaster Stands Up: the handful of folks who called for the initial emergency community meeting November 2016 has since then developed into a multiracial and multigenerational 11-person coordinating team, which includes Eliza Booth, Rafael Diaz, Amber Farward, Evan Gentry, Michelle Hines, Daniel Levin, Claudia Paz, Jonathan Smucker, Susan Wenger, Ismail Yoder Salim, and Melanie Yoder Salim (previous members who served: Amanda Kemp, Nick Martin, Becca Rast, Nelly Torres).
- Since May, our Leadership Team has been preparing our next steps—how to move from protest to political power. We have been polling our base and talking with volunteers to figure out how to move this important work forward. We have been developing a clearer and more sustainable structure to allow LSU members to contribute their time, energy, passions, and gifts for the work ahead.[6]
Co-founders
We Will Replace You c0-founders included: