I suppose the first thing is our name got changed to Occupy Minneapolis. There are Occupations in several other Minnesota cities now so it's logical to get more specific.
Most of today I spent on chores, including shopping and cooking so I could take some food to the people occupying the foreclosure in North Minneapolis. I call this Occupation Hot Dish :-) because I first came up with it by throwing together what I had around to make something for the vegan gluten free eaters
more of this evening below the squiggle
Monique's house is barely 2 miles from mine , while I am not even close to foreclosure, I have been through some of the same nonsense with my lender, delays, lost paperwork, anything they can do to get out of using HAMP funds properly.
Her yard accommodates quite a few tents and a nice fire for working groups to gather around. They canvassed the whole neighborhood today and got more signatures for the petition to US Bank and invited neighbors to a big BBQ tomorrow.
However, we still have a contingent at the People's Plaza too, and that's where the General Assembly was tonight, so I raced home to do my dishes and then headed downtown.
We hit 63 degrees today, so the General Assembly stayed outdoors, just up and a bit out of the wind on the Government Center steps
It took a while to get the agenda set as people wanted to add quite a few individual proposals, but after that everything seemed to click right along. We passed SEVEN proposals!! We've had many nights where we managed to pass only one or even none;consensus can be messy and time consuming. But it is a beautiful thing when it's working. And by working I don't mean all the proposals were simple no-brainers and we all sang kum-ba-ya right away. We had blocks tonight, and on one internal matter, I got to see how a block should ideally be resolved. We got the blocker to thoroughly explain the concerns, and then others in the group made suggestions on how to change the original proposal to deal with those issues. After a bit of discussion we had a modified proposal that was able to gain consensus.
Other internal nitty gritty things were dealt with, we also voted to support another woman facing foreclosure, and the one that made me happiest was the Strategic Non-violent Direct Action proposal. It is too long to include here, and got amended from the printed copy I have on hand anyway, but it is based on the open letter to Occupiers from the Alliance of Community Trainers.
http://trainersalliance.org/...
One of the signers is Starhawk who was with us at the RNC 2008, in the thick of it all, authorities impounded their permaculture bus, so she is one who walks the walk. And since the St Paul Principles had also been suggested as a way to resolve some our issues, I really sat up and took notice when she suggested a different way for this movement, And I think that's the key, if we want to be a movement instead of a finite protest, we need to work together in a more cohesive way. I think this is really going to help us avoid some of the difficulties I reported on last Sunday.
And if you wanted to see me actually doing a happy consensus dance, you would have had to be watching our Livestream :-) though I don't know if it caught me doing that!