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This is a listing of some of the key decisions that were
made at the Steering Committee face-to-face meeting January 28-30,
2006 in southwest Florida. We hope these notes will provide some transparency
and accountability within the SFA network. As a grouping of people
acting within an autonomous, fluid network, we hope to provide some
national scope to the organization and support on upcoming campaign
and organizational needs. If you have any questions or comments, please
contact us.
After reviewing the 2005 encuentro, a 2006 encuentro was agreed upon
with the possibility of it being shorter and holding it in the fall.
Lots of work has gone into making our e-communications effective. The
new interactive site will be launch soon and is exciting. We will
need to think about an administrative process for it. The database
needs cleaning up and it’s a good excuse to call all of our
contacts. The whole SC will help with this process.
The Immokalee crew is working with area youth and students, primarily
on anti-war work.
We will continue to support our movement allies whenever possible.
We will also focus our energy on participating in and highlighting
the CIW campaign in key arenas:
- Commitment to be in involved in La Otra Campaña
- Explore involvement in North American Social Forum
- Involvement in the newly-formed Economic Justice
Action Coalition (EJAC)
- Involvement in the National Youth & Student Peace
Coalition (NYSPC)
- Involvement with SLAP Week of Action
- Continued attendance at movement summits
We want to continue relationship with existing foundations and work
to build more with others. However, we recognize the dynamics of grant
giving and commit to work towards organizational sustainability and
autonomy. We discussed various ideas including securing university
honorariums, throwing benefits, developing a fundraising
guide for the network, and fully developing the sustainer
program. Each SC member committed to raise $500.
A web-friendly list of our
brainstorming from the weekend includes: Talking with young fast-food
workers, weekly protests, letter-writing campaigns, writing local statements
of support to give to managers, seeking endorsements and working with
local groups, developing talking points and FAQs, working with children,
building bridges between issues on a local lever, emphasizing connecting
to local issues when going to campuses, radio PSA ’s,
and resource-sharing capabilities on interactive section of website.
To talk in more detail about campaign strategy, contact
us.
A staff member is leaving Immokalee in December 2006. The
hiring process will start immediately with involvement from the SC
and CIW. The application process will be open to
all. The SC is considering term limits and term commitments. The
goal is to have someone to start in the beginning of Fall 2006,
which would leave the fall semester as an overlap period. In our
discussion it was noted that Spring/Alternative Breaks have
been a strong area of leadership recruitment and development.
Our ideas: help provide overall network direction,
support staff, provide staff accountability, outreach & network growth,
organizing/strengthening the campaign, diffusing network workload,
building strength in different geographic areas, self-organizing,
representing SFA at conferences and events, ensure
sustainability, provide institutional memory, and assist in structural
needs.
We discussed two year term limits and staggering the board. However,
we came to no firm conclusion. We made a commitment to publish our
notes. We always need to keep the work we do transparent and readily
available to the larger network through constant communication with
each other and those in SFA on the ground, on the website, network-wide
conference calls, and at movement meet-ups.
There was a general agreement about using a consensus-based model and
having regular communication via conference calls and the listserv.
The caucus expressed its desire to reach out to those who are not chican@/latin@,
encouraged non-POC to help in this process, and possibly host an
Estación Libre delegation in Immokalee. Also, materials will
be translated into both English and Spanish. A commitment and crew
of people will be working on translating and teching the CIW and
SFA websites. The SC also made a commitment to work on developing
materials that make links between struggles in order to make connections.
There needs to be more dedicated space to discuss gender oppression
at meetings, encuentros, and in
the Immokalee office. The QC wants to focus
working with
other LGBTQ group, in particular non-mainstream/radical organizations.
There should be an opening up of the process of meeting facilitation
which could be assisted by having facilitation trainings at future
meetings and encuentros.
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