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Breakout report backs
1. Carol-Reaching out to the rest of the 99%, occupy the hood. teach-ins, picnics, collecting for food banks(comunity outreach/good samaritan acts), Occupy foreclose and evictions,
2. JJ-Reaching out to the rest of the 99%, babbling
3. Iwanka- Fundraisings, trying to fact check that we were spending the money appropriately and legally, bake sales, pay more attention to how we are using money in the movement,
4. Mesha- Taking GA’s out into the neighborhoods, salsa tools, smaller neighborhoods events to begin to introduce the ideas to people, finding tools on how to meet your neighboors and build solidarity with them
5. Aubery- how to occupy other then the occupy movement, talke about how Indianapolis was going o arrest many homeless just for the event, informational walks where they go and hand out information at targeted locations, chilli ook off on the doorstep of Syracuse’s local energy provider
6. Inga- Doing something other then revolution/occupy, trying to find ways to do things that are more inviting to people who are not as revolutionary minded,
7. laura-things other then protest, lectures, database of all of the occupy movements, rallies for citizens united, tents that fit into your hand, floating tents attatched to helium ballons where we occupy tents that are not on the ground
General Announcements
1. Lauren- gunning down protestors in Tahrir Square,
2. Walt/Joan- occupy call planning got together, trying to plan more interesting and regional calls, they met to work together and are planning events to get people more involved in interoccupy!
3. Nancy_ on the 15 of every month one occupation is getting together to do a “fun” event in order to continue solidarity despite being evicted
4. Lorenzo- Ndaa letter writing campaign to Obama in dispute of him signing the NDAA, Group starting in Sacremento, for enviornmental issues
5. Mark- Foreclosure, coalition o non profits, to ask that all foreclosed homes are halted under imminent domain
6. Julia- working on research projects and surveys, asking people to help with said research projects
7. Cameron(portland) push for Occupythe Ballot, trying to get people more involved with candidates who are more friendly to the 99% within the electoral College
8. Aubrey- the power company in syracuse, direct action find your local power company and go to their front door on fridays(payday) and hand out soup and chilli (idea being that people are being forced to choose energy over food)
9. Cameron(buffalo) discussing the individual accoutntability where we formally accuse certain people instead of a broad sprectrum of the “1%”
10. Nate- asking people to email to occupycontactlist@gmailcom, trying to organize lists of people so that we can discuss among each other on a national level.
11. JJ- a rally for immigrants rights/ march for solidarity with the unions and NAACP
12. Patrick- “I love all of you”
Interoccupy having a list of alternative news sources
Taking GAs to Neighborhoods
Nancy: Charlottesville
Michael: Portland
Mischa: Toronto
Charlottesville is connecting to community organizations
Portland is divided into 5 quadrants and within each quadrant setting up a web portal using wordpress and each quadrant will have its own web page and it will be possible using Salsa tools (used by moveon.org) which allows people to find house meetings or start house meetings in their neighbourhoods allowing people to go on and find neighbourhood group to plug into, and each neighbourhood group can plug into one quadrant’s GA which would then plug into the Portland GA.
Occupy Portland got donated Salsa tools account donated for one year, if things work out, it will continue, got $1000 dollars worth of stuff from the start, recommend approaching Salsa
As an action group we can do what we want to in addition to GA we have a Spokes Council and this was cleared through the spokes council, tools are up to us. Looked at Salsa, what if they decide we can’t use them any more, can we live with that? By then we will be able to handle it another way, Salsa includes maps to find the house meetings
Charlottesville neighbourhoods are close to GA, but 7 days a week has been a real problem in getting consistance, want to go out and have mini GA’s with the neighbourhoods we do have, less technology, more about people going out and holding meetings and talking about the occupy movement and drawing in the other 99%
Portland is starting canvassing teams to do a survey so that it can be known what issues within a given location are most interesting to the people there and using a web tool show as a percentage who is interested in what, and with the canvassing it is hoped that generous donations will result, the people to people contact is critcally important, also have Yard signs that were produced by a local union that says I am the 99%, the whole idea is to make occupy visible everywhere
Portland people are very committed and working very well together, crop of folks who have never done community organizing or anything of that sort, it is amazing that there are so many people who are committeed to doing this, at least 200-300 working on this full time, this is almost unbelievable
In Toronto we are prototyping events to roll out in January and Februrary
Center for Policy Alternatives, Local.circles.org for helping neighbourhoods to form small groups, a 5 week training program taking people through process whereby they become mutual support for each other and at the end of the five weeks decide what they would like to do next, the idea is to get neighbourhoods organized to survive what’s coming
Small group 20 to 30 committed struggling to reach out to everybody, disconnect between college and city, reaching out to diverse groups including immigrants and are really just in infancy, some gruops seem a little further along
Occupy Toronto is reaching out to educational institutions including Occupy University of Toronto
What To Do Other Than Demonstrate
Inga took notes:
Adopting an appealing tactic which invites people
Move your money campaign is effective on many levels.
Looking for a common unifying issue the movement could be: green jobs, alternative energy these things must be grown. Leveraging the procurement piece of the puzzle can start moving control by utilizing progressive, local level strategies.
Occupy Farms in New York is providing food for the movement. Five farms in NY state are doing this.
Reese from Palo Alto: keeping jobs local is a common theme of unification but has not been a long term solution so far as there are many books on the subject.
International Global Action day May 12 looking for ways to get 50 millions participants.
Crutial any effort is the ability of movements to easily find and communicate with each other
Risk is a key consideration in alternative strategies so it’s important to guage what the effect is before doing something drastic.
Many people in the movement do not have resources but they have time and ambition.
Other Direct Action Ideas
Ideas of direct actions – break-off room about actions other than protesting
occupy superbowl – homeless people will be arrested prior to superbowl and moved to undisclosed location. – occupy the superbowl contact.
indianapolis has high % of homes in foreclosure – less than $5,000 behind for most homes in foreclosure. the money spent on commercials alone would pay off all homes in foreclosure in the city. Someone suggested that occupy the superbowl is laid out like a tailgate party and the general concenous was to keep direct actions positive, since most of the people attending the game are “99%” folks like us. If we tick off the fans attending the game, we will make the whole movement look bad.
Occupy Richmond is doing ‘informational walks’ to bring information to the masses- they have hit wal-mart distribution centers, ferderal buildings, Dominion Power, etc and held events there. (Poor guy didn’t get to talk much- #Occupy_Superbowl was our main focus.)
I brought forth the idea we have for Syracuse to have a chili/soup handout at Niagara Mohawk. Niagara Mohawk was bought out by National Grid (UK based company) and currently, Central NY as a whole has the highest energy rates for the entire country- yet upstate NY, if NYC was not considered, would be in the top 10 poorest states in the nation. (Quote from Hillary Clinton from when she was running for state senate.) We plan on having a chili / soup hand out because in our area people have to choose to pay for electric or for groceries- so we’re going to give free food and info to people who had to choose the power bill over the food bill that week. we on the #Occupy_Syracuse are now talking about possibly starting a national ‘food or power’ day.
