OccupyMpls scheduled a full day of teach-ins Sunday, blessedly indoors at the American Indian Center, once again our gracious hosts. The warm colors at the entrance were especially welcoming on this cold grey day
Part of the reason I write these is to give people who have even more and more legit obstacles to participating than I do, a look at what we're doing and what we're about. This weekend I was a semi-slacker; I only went to one of the workshops because I had a full schedule of holiday baking. So the few details I have are below the squiggle.
At least I took some of the cookies to the People's Plaza later.
You may have heard we got evicted from the plaza, but no. They did try, but enough showed up and stood up at those times to prevent it.
Back to the teach-ins at the AIC. Here's what I had to choose from, plus more activities were planned for the evening:
11am - 2pm:
- Non-Violent Direct Action
2pm - 3pm:
- Protest Equipment Use & Creation
- Consensus & Facilitation
3pm - 4pm:
- Creative Messaging & Banner Making
- Media & Outreach
4pm - 5pm:
- Know Your Rights & Legal Info
- Affinity Groups
I decided Consensus & Facilitation suited my time frames and interests best. I was glad to see Jaime, a skilled facilitator I've seen in action, was teaching. We did a variety of exercises that helped us see the underlying issues of what makes a meeting go smoothly or not. Acting out "The Worst Meeting Ever" was great fun, I got to be a self-righteous asshole trying to drag a proposal discussion off topic :-D
I knew we would not be fully trained to be facilitators in one short hour, and it really flew by! but hopefully we did start to think about what happens at meetings in a different way, like instead of just saying my character in the skit was a jerk, looking at whether she felt like a minority group who was not being heard. Another thing we learned is that minority or marginalized group is contextual, as one of the other skits illustrated, a meat eater can be a minority voice if most in the group are vegans.
We then used some of that framework to look at this chart:
the green marker is not showing up well, so the headings of the "pie slices" from left to right are : active opposition, passive opposition, neutral, passive support, and active support. We spent our last few minutes talking about how we could shift people 'one slice over", for instance , those of us who have neutral family members may have been too shy to talk to them about Occupy yet. Some of us resolved to speak up more :-)
I also heard that an earlier meeting on our next foreclosure occupation went very well. Kind of off my topic, but here's the video about this homeowner:
and there is more training coming on Tuesday
Empowerment Training with Starhawk and OccupyMpls
I so wish I could go to all of this but I can't get out of work tomorrow; I hope to catch some of the evening part