Members of Son del Centro (Santa Ana, CA) lead a workshop at the 2005 Encuentro.

Art as Resistance: David Solnit (Art and Revolution) and Carol Richman
Outlets for creativity and expression are essential components to the sustainability of our movements. This interactive workshop combines strategy and creative action as participants learn skills for silk screening as well as poster and puppet making.

Challenging Oppression: Satya, Max Toth (USAS), and Elly Kugler
An introduction to the systems of oppression that occur in our society and how we can challenge those systems in our organizing and in our lives.

CIW: History, Philosophy and Victory: CIW
The grassroots farmworker organization from which the work of the SFA was born speaks on their history, analysis, organizing philosophy, and victory over the largest fast food conglomerate in the world.

Corporate Campaigning: Brand Busting, Muck-Wracking, and Strategic Corporate Campaigning: smartMeme
SmartMeme trainers will walk through the elements of a successful corporate campaign strategy, and facilitate a reflective discussion on what a corporate campaign can look like. We will show some examples of successful corporate campaigns, looking at the common themes and design principles in such a strategy: the goals and logic of a corporate campaign, factors to consider when selecting a corporate target, potential leverage points in a corporate target, elements of campaign design, tried-and-true-tactics, negotiation and escalation, and the dilemmas of a "markets" approach to systemic social change.

Direct Action: Gonzalo Perez and Satya (Ruckus Society)
An introduction to direct action with a discussion on non-violence and de-escalation tactics.

GROW Training: Carl Lipscombe (Student Labor Action Project)
An introduction to nuts-and-bolts grassroots organizing with a focus on strategy and direct action.

Labor Movement 101 - Unions: Rebecca Wasserman (American Rights at Work) and Marc Rodrigues (GEO/UAW and SFA)
The current rift and shake-up at the upper levels of the U.S. trade movement are well-known as are the depressing figures on union decline and worsening wages and conditions for working people. This workshop will offer perspectives from researchers, organizers and other on-the-ground voices on these issues as well as some of the important and inspiring organizing and ideas coming out of the labor movement and why unions are still a relevant and necessary force for social change.

Labor Movement 201 - New Worker Organizing Models: Katie Salas (Young Workers United) and Jose Oliva (Interfaith Worker Justice)
In recent years workers centers and other alternative models have sprung up often as an alternative to a bureaucratic, exclusionary labor movement. Among them are Young Workers United and dozens of immigrant community-workers centers who have fought to build power and gain rights while developing leadership from below.

Mapping the Corporate Food System: Beehive Collective
Exploring the connections between land, workers, consumers, corporations and global economic agreements in the corporate food and agriculture system.

Music as Resistance: Son del Centro & Musicians for Peace
Musicians for Peace and Son del Centro are two groups of youth, musicians, activists, organizers, and community members that use the arts as a tool of resistance against the cultural hegemony that dominates our communities. Musicians for Peace seeks to create a space for a dialogue on peace while allowing musicians to define it for themselves. Son del Centro seeks to create a space for the people's cultural movement through workshops, performances and transnational collaboration. Through our workshop, we hope to discuss the connection between music and peace and contribute to a holistic understanding of issues affecting community development, both historically and culturally. Discussion is encouraged to bring to light the realities we face and our attempts to confront those realities through the arts. Our workshop will also discuss the history of peace music, the connection between music and peace, issues of immigration, and alternatives to assimilation. We invite you to attend and participate in our workshop. Hasta pronto!

Root Cause: Global Justice from the Grassroots: CIW, Miami Workers Center, & Power U
Formed as a grassroots response to the FTAA ministerial meetings in Miami in 2003, the Root Cause coalition speaks on the effects of unsustainable and exploitative free trade agreements on poor communities of color both abroad and in the United States.

War and Empire: SOA Watch, National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, & DC Zapatistas
Making the connections between sustained violence at home and abroad, the exploitation of poor communities of color during wars, and the obsession for wealth and power that fuels war.

Winning the Battle of the Story: Story-based Strategies for Social Change: smartMeme
This multi-media, interactive workshop combines traditional movement building skills with new strategies for re-framing issues, challenging assumptions, and infusing new ideas into popular culture. SmartMeme has developed a range of strategy tools for applying a “narrative power analysis” to social change work, and developing tools to wage story based strategies in grassroots campaigning. The curriculum helps unpack the “control mythology” of the media-saturated culture, and link traditional organizing and movement building efforts with values based messaging, narrative concepts and creative action at the “point of assumption.” The STORY training also explores the relationship between meme theory -- the study of how memes (units of cultural transmission such as ideas, slogans, icons etc.) spread and replicate – and movement building.

Zapatismo: Linking Hemispheric Struggles: Adrian Boutureira (DC Zapatistas)
An exploration of resistencia throughout the Americas, from Chiapas to the Immokalee.

Jordan Buckley is finishing his final semester at the University of Texas, and will receive degrees in sociology and Spanish in December. He worked as an intern with the SFA from February to may of 2005. He co-hosts a radical talk radio show on KVRX 91.7 FM and writes for Indy papers Issue and Proper Gander in Austin.

Lovella Calica does organizing work from a place of love and hope in a more beautiful world. She has lent love and tears (work) in a variety of struggles from the environment and labor to peace and counter recruitment. Her connection with SFA/CIW goes back to the first Taco Bell Truth Tour where she was amazed at the strength and beauty of those around her. She works with the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC), the National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) and the Not Your Soldier Counter Recruitment Training Camps Organizing Committee. Starting out as a rugrat in the forests of Michigan, she believes that we all have more potential and worth that we give ourselves credit for. She challenges everyone to push themselves for what they believe in, including activist work. She is excited to learn, grow, share and laugh with the Encuentro participants and organizers. P. S. Yes, she does love long skirts, poetry, new (and old) friends, the Philippines, leaves and bright colors.

Doyle Canning works with the core collective of the smartMeme Strategy & Training Project. She is a strategist, trainer, and organizer with a big imagination and a deep commitment to social change. She is the co-coordinator of the STORY Program (Strategy, Training, and Organizing Resources for Youth) and she staffs smartMeme's East Coast office in Burlington, Vermont.

Melody Gonzalez is a Chicana from Santa Ana, CA. She is a recent graduate from the University of Notre Dame where she helped organize a campaign to cut an athletic sponsorship contract with a local Taco Bell franchisee. She is currently in Immokalee as a Student/Farmworker Alliance and Interfaith Action staff member.

Elly Kugler has organized and trained with a focus on providing resources and support to grassroots movements led by people most affected by multiple forms of oppression. She co-founded the San Francisco Childcare Collective, a solidarity organization that provides free childcare to groups led by low-income women of color, and worked under the leadership of worker organizers to build a domestic worker's collective at the San Francisco Day Labor Program. She was a participant and facilitator in San Francisco's Challenging White Supremacy workshop and received training in community organizing at the School of Unity and Liberation in Oakland. She currently teaches theater for social change to teenagers in Washington, D.C.

Carl Lipscombe is the National Coordinator of the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a joint project of Jobs with Justice and the United States Student Association. Prior to SLAP Carl worked as a campus organizer with New York City Jobs with Justice, and served as Associate Director of the Accountability Project also based in New York City. Carl graduated from Brooklyn College of the City University on New York where he received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science. While in college he advocated for free speech, recruitment and retention of faculty of color, students' rights, and curriculum reform as President of the Undergraduate Student Government. Carl is also an organizing trainer for USSA's Grassroots Organizing Weekend Project (GROW) a project which trains student activists on the elements of direct action organizing. SLAP was created in 1999 to support student activists fighting for workers rights and economic justice. SLAP's programs include the National Student Labor Week of Action and connecting student activists to one another and to local labor campaigns and JwJ coalitions.

Charlene Obernauer has been working with the Musicians' Alliance for Peace as a member of the Human Rights Task Force at Ward Melville High School. She will be attending Stony Brook University in the fall, and will be majoring in religious studies and minoring in music. Charlene organized a school field trip with HRTF members for the 2005 Taco Bell Truth Tour, where she also performed with her band, A Mandown.

Jose Oliva was born in Xelaju, Guatemala and was forced to flee the country when several of his family members were tortured and disappeared by that country's military regime for their social justice organizing. After graduating from college, Jose became involved in Casa Guatemala, a solidarity organization where he worked with inner-city Latin@ high school students teaching electronic media as a means of organizing, through a program he created while directing the Guatemala Radio Project. Jose eventually became Executive Director of Casa Guatemala where he began to organize day-laborers in Chicago's street corners and came across the Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues, which was also doing day-labor organizing. Jose saw the value of working with and through communities of faith to organize workers for better wages and conditions in their workplaces. Currently Jose is the Director of the Interfaith Workers' Rights Center, a project of the Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues and Coordinator of the Interfaith Worker Justice National Workers' Centers Network. At the Center Jose has created a program that blends elements of popular education with direct action organizing, with the goal of "allowing workers to shape their own lives".

Gonzalo Perez does anti-oppression organizing in SEAC during his spare time. During the day, Gonzalo is full time visionary in DC! He hails from the depths of the urban Amazon jungle of Lima, Peru, and was usurped to the U.S. at the age of 11. Gonzalo received a Bachelor's of Science in Marketing and Economics from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Some of his experience comes from working with EnviroCitizen, the Rainforest Action Network, SEAC, and many other groups. In 2003, he worked on the Matt Gonzalez for Mayor campaign in San Francisco, CA (which was a huge grassroots movement in the city that received international attention). Most recently he became the Person of Color Caucus coordinator for SEAC and formed The Rogue Collective in Washington, DC (a radical people of color collective). He also enjoys skateboarding, video games and the O.C.

Patrick Reinsborough is a co-founder of the smartMeme Project -- a strategy and training collective that works to combine grassroots movement building with strategies to inject new ideas into the culture. Patrick has been involved in social change work for over 15 years and has worked as a grassroots organizer, campaigner, coalition builder, media activist, direct action coordinator, trainer and strategist in numerous grassroots movements. Through his work with smartMeme’s new STORY training program (Strategy Training and Organizing Resources for Youth) Patrick works to build a culture of strategy and holistic analysis among multi-sector youth movements. In the last year smartMeme has been a featured presenter at a number of national conferences and conducted trainings in nearly twenty states and several native nations. Patrick writes and speaks frequently about grassroots movement, global resistance to war and corporate rule, creative action and the theory and practice of social change. Several of his strategy essays were recently published in the anthology Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World (City Lights Press 2004). When Patrick’s not organizing or dreaming up new geeky social change jargon he spends his time parenting, wandering urban space, learning to play go and playing music for his friends.

Benjamin Robison has performed as soloist, concertmaster and chamber musician in France, Italy, Greece, Canada and the United States. Mr. Robison began studying the violin at age three. While still in high school he was a prizewinner in the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. After a two-year sojourn studying physics, he returned full time to music in 1992 and won the grand prize at the Canadian National Music Festival. Mr. Robison is currently artistic director of Ardesco, a multimedia chamber music ensemble and a collaborator in Spiral Blue, a music, image and technology workshop. Mr. Robison is particularly proud of his ongoing relationship with the Musicians’ Alliance for Peace, which he helped found and The Music for Peace Project— a global call for peace through music. The Musicians' Alliance for Peace (MAP) was formed in October of 2001 by graduate students at Stony Brook University to promote peace with music. Initially MAP performed live multimedia events as well as benefit, political and memorial concerts, and worked with groups such as The Social Justice Alliance, September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Breakthrough and Students for Peace and Humanity. Currently, MAP is planning the 3rd Music for Peace Project 2006, which will take place March 31 - April 2, 2006. MAP is dedicated to the creation of a local and world community where compassion, empathy and diversity are the norm and peace is cultivated both as a means and an end.

Marc Rodrigues is currently an intern with the Student/Farmworker Alliance and finishing up a Masters Degree in Labor Studies at UMass/Amherst. He’s interested in the history and political theory of the “global justice movement,” particularly zapatismo and its application to community and labor organizing in the U.S. He’s been involved in campus-based organizing at the City University of New York; anti-war, global justice and labor organizing; and with the Left Turn anticapitalist network/magazine and is currently a member of the Graduate Employees Organization/United Auto Workers Local 2322. Marc is turned on by popular education, labor history nerds, and people who speak portuguese; he was born and raised in Yonkers, NY.

Katie Salas has been involved with Young Workers United for three years and is now on the board of directors and an active participant on YWU’s education committee. She has worked in the service sector for the last 9 years and is currently a bartender and pursuing a degree in education and social justice. Young Workers United is the only workers center focused on young people in the US. YWU worked on the successful campaign for a minimum wage of $8.62 in San Francisco, the highest nationally, and are currently focusing on health insurance issues.

Satya has worked on a wide array of environmental, social justice, and human rights issues. He has traveled extensively, doing community organizing, coordinating direct actions, and facilitating trainings. He works and trains regularly for the Ruckus Society. Satya has focused primarily on stressing the connections of power-dynamics throughout movements and incorporating an anti-oppression analysis throughout all of his work.

Sean Sellers is a proud native of the Lone Star State who is still bummed that the Dallas Mavericks didn't resign antiwar point guard Steve Nash in the 2004 off-season. Currently, he lives in Immokalee, Florida and works with Student/Farmworker Alliance. He feels a little weird writing about himself in third person.

David Solnit is a Bay Area-based carpenter, activist, and puppeteer who has been on the frontlines of direct action, protesting the US role in Central America in the 1980s and free trade deals in the 1990s.  David is member (and co-founder) of Art and Revolution, a loose-knit collective combining art and theater with direct action.  For the past four years Solnit has worked with the CIW, helping to conceptualize much of the art used during the 2005 truth tour and victory celebration. David is also editor of Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, and is currently involved in strategy trainings and organizing against the Iraq war.

Son del Centro (Carolina Martinez, Kimberly Mercado, Natasha Noriega-Goodwin, Jorge Facio Rodriguez, Salvador Gregorio Sarmiento, Ana Siria Urzua) is a group of youth that sprouted from the Son Jarocho workshop at El Centro Cultural de México near its inception in 2002. Under the umbrella of the Centro Cultural and mirroring the Son Jarocho musicians from Veracruz, Son del Centro gets out the voice on the resurgent Son Jarocho movement extending out of Veracruz into other states in México and across the border to California. Like the phenomenon of Nueva Canción, Son Jarocho's gathering/celebration of the "fandango" is allowing for people to connect and support each other’s projects--our project at the Centro is composed our many Son Jarocho classes, traveling workshops and our collaboration with friends in LA county, Veracruz, and Immokalee, Florida! As youth of color we have a common spirit of seeking a "reencuentro" with our roots to form the foundation of a sense of community and "convivencia" as part of our effort for social justice.

Kevin Walsh is a popular educator, activist and researcher currently based out of Madison, Wisconsin. He is a member of the Beehive Collective as an organizer of the food system graphics campaign.

Rebecca Wasserman is the Outreach Associate and Campus Coordinator for American Rights at Work. Her work includes designing a campus outreach strategy, building partnerships, and coordinating events. A 2002 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ms. Wasserman was heavily involved in campus activism that focused primarily on racial and economic justice. American Rights at Work is a new non-profit organization dedicated to educating the American public about the barriers workers face when they attempt to exercise their rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Our mission is to fight for a nation where the freedom of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers is restored, guaranteed and promoted.