Minutes from Last Mtg.

Minutes from the July 10th meeting – The Twin Cities return from the US Social Forum

I started taking minutes after we had already started so forgive me for not listing everyone’s name who attended.

Most important piece – we are planning on gathering on Saturday, July 21st, from 3:30 until 7:00, location to be announced. More information on this later in the minutes.

The conversation began with introductions and check ins on the Forum and our work in the Twin Cities. From there, we moved into a discussion about what the work is we need to do in the Twin Cities to build on the Forum.

In the Twin Cities, people stay in their silos. There is a movement happening, you could feel it and see it at the Forum, it is happening in big ways in the southeast and the southwest and it is led by people of color and organizations of color. It isn’t happening in the Twin Cities. We don’t connect here. We stay in our silos, we stay in our separations and we don’t talk to each other.

There was a lot of talk at the last two Midwest Social Forums about doing movement building in the Twin Cities. We had a few meetings afterwards but they just kind of trailed off.

What we doing movement building towards? Are we only getting together to talk or are we also thinking about action? Each of the plenaries dealt with really political issues that included action and not just meetings. How do we bring that here?

Project South talks about movement building in three different stages: Consciousness, Vision and then Strategy. Building movements and relationships takes time. We don’t know if we have the same visions, we still don’t know each other. We aren’t yet at the point of strategies.

I am not interested in creating a new organization, a new 501-c-3. Instead, I want to find a way to connect what is happening in the Twin Cities already. I know of lots of amazing organizers from the Twin Cities who do their work nationally. Who are known outside the Cities. But they don’t do it here. I want to take the time to really know this community, to have a sense of what is happening here, to see how we are connected and different and to see our movements and work interconnecting. I would assume that some groups and organizations would decide to do actions in the middle – that’s fine. In the meantime, others will keep building like this growing stream, building the connections and the trust and the relationships.

We need to be doing ground level organizing, building our analysis, making more connections. What moved me at the US Social Forum was the amount of analysis and cross-sector work. We don’t do cross-sector work here. This is where we have to build – our analysis and cross-sector work. To do that, we have to know each other. At the Forum, I was struck by how many areas had organizations who saw their role as movement building – this is what they were doing, they maintained the relationships and created opportunities. We don’t have anything like that here.

I want to encourage organizations to get hooked in with the Grassroots Global Justice folks – you can find them on the US Social Forum website. There isn’t anyone from the Twin Cities, any organizations, connected here.

We can spend time training each other, sharing our skills.

We need to find a way to meet regularly, someplace and time that we can count on.

We’re good at logistics here but then we get tired, we rarely seem to get past second meetings.

Well, it seems like there are two things happening right now – report backs to the community on what happened at the Forum which would include dialogue about what we have learned and then also a focus on movement building and what happens next. We have to look for organizations that were at the Forum but are not present at this table.

Charlotte is going to organize a list of report backs – folks can send her their information and she’ll put together a centralized list.

The irony here is that we’re having separate report backs – more of that silo stuff – all of these little communities are doing report backs without connecting at all.

January 26th is set aside as a week of action – this is when the World Social Forum would be taking place but we’re not having one centralized forum in 2008 – instead the idea is to have a world social forum that is literally taking place all over the world.

We’re interested in building towards a Twin Cities Social Forum or a Minnesota Social Forum of some sort for the January 26th period.

We’re going to have a meeting on July 21st from 3:30 until 7:00 to begin building relationships, defining the container that will hold this work as we move into January and beyond, etc.
Susan, Lena, Jen, Andrew and Lisa will work on the agenda (and I assume co-facilitate it although this will be more of a group facilitation). Agenda items suggested include 1) outlining the background of the forums, 2) personal sharing of what we took away from the Forum/what we experienced, 3) time to begin building relationships, 4) get a sense of what was at the Forum so we can also see who wasn’t, 5) build a TC movement map, 6) look at the container/infrastructure for moving forward.