Note: This post is in support of TheFatLadySings and her plan to bring more of our brothers and sisters of color to Netroots Nation and to reduce the digital divide by providing training in new media and Internet Technology.
Please note that we have a new plan for supporting TFLS and her project. This is different from what has previously been posted.
"The key to winning the Pepsi Refresh grant is accumulating daily voters. Netroots Nation has agreed to help us organize to win this grant. Sign up at this link to receive an email once a day providing you links to vote. Once the contest is over, win or lose, the email list will be deleted and your email won't be shared with anyone. So please help us recruit all the daily voters you can, and we can do this."
Let us thank what gods may be that evolution is an ongoing process. There is hope for us yet.
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin....All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer....
To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.
To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.
To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.
To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.
To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.
To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.
You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.
Thank you for this Life.
Lakota Prayer
It is my belief, based on science, intuition and my own personal sense of life, that we are all one. Descended from a common ancestor, dispersed by geography, distance and time, we are nevertheless a vast extended family that all too often and all too tragically fails to recognize its own. Thus man's inhumanity to man. When we judge someone as less than human or other than us, bad things happen – things like slavery, torture, war, genocide or holocausts. This family dysfunction has dogged us for all of our days, but that doesn't mean we can't change. Because something has always happened is not the same as it being inevitable or immutable. Everything that happens could have happened differently. Our future is not carved in stone. We can change the trajectory of our species. We can change our minds and thus our futures.
We can learn to love and embrace each other and see our differences as delightful and welcome but inconsequential in comparison to our natural kinship and mutual affinity. We can learn to live as the long lost siblings we truly are, brothers and sisters all.
Now comes an opportunity to express solidarity and kinship with our brothers and sisters of color – without whom we would be less than nothing. Their struggle is our struggle. They are us and we are them. This digital divide deprives us all.
This plan from TheFatLadySings comes highly recommended by fellow kossack cacamp, a very highly respected Native American leader who said:
I'll be voting daily (7+ / 0-)
This is one of the best proposals I've seen here on dkos for helping our communities. Thanks a lot you guys.
For me that is the only endorsement this plan needs, nevertheless allow me to add my own. This plan fits beautifully into the overarching effort by all people of conscience to right historical wrongs. We need for our brothers and sisters of color to be talking to us, teaching us, informing and inspiring us. We allow them to be left out and left behind at our grave peril. We need them.
The key to winning the Pepsi Refresh grant is accumulating daily voters. Netroots Nation has agreed to help us organize to win this grant. Sign up at this link to receive an email once a day providing you links to vote. Once the contest is over, win or lose, the email list will be deleted and your email won't be shared with anyone. So please help us recruit all the daily voters you can, and we can do this.
Your VOTE can help us win a grant to send people of color to Providence for Netroots Nation 2012
Rural communities and communities of color live behind the digital divide. They don't have access to the same online organizing tools as white, urban upper- and middle-class neighborhoods. As a result, progressives find it difficult to engage the under-served.
Each year at Netroots Nation it is noted that too few people of color are included or heard.
TheFatLadySings has an idea to increase the numbers of people of color attending the annual conference. She wants to tap the existing organization Communities Joined in Action and send leaders of these community health coalitions to Netroots Nation and introduce them to online organizing tools.
Communities Joined in Action is a national alliance of local coalitions working to end disparities in health care. CJA believes health care is a civil rights issue. It works to create civil rights facts on the ground by teaching coalitions in underserved communities to use the Affordable Care Act and other tools to ensure access to quality health care among the poor, people of color, the homeless and other hard-to-reach populations.
This year, a Marketing and New Media Committee has been created and dedicated to teaching coalitions to build power through community organizing, and to make use of online organizing tools. TheFatLadySings, known to her non-blogging friends as Lauren Reichelt, has been tapped to chair this new CJA Marketing and New Media committee. She has submitted a Pepsi Challenge Grant for $50,000 to help Communities Joined in Action to bring a large CJA delegation to NN12 to caucus with bloggers and to learn on- and offline organizing techniques. She will also help CJA to develop webinars to teach community coalitions across the US to use some of these tools.
David Trujillo and TheFatLadySings
Lucia Sanchez and Raymond Ortiz
at the NN11 American Indian
Caucus last year
Last year, TheFatLadySings brought three colleagues from Rio Arriba County in Northern New Mexico, to NN11 in Minneapolis. They attended the American Indian and Latino Caucuses as well as workshops in community organizing, messaging, online tools, etc. Since then, Rio Arriba County has hired a Public Information Officer, revamped their County and health council websites, including a blog so they can communicate directly with the public.
Mid December, mindoca is traveling to Rio Arriba County to teach them to use and train others to use new media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs. She'll explain their use in advocacy campaigns, marketing websites and blogs, community strengthening activities and legislative action. Mindoca also attended the annual CJA conference in Washington, D.C., where she trained coalitions to use online tools in their organizing efforts and to build community power.
TheFatLadySings and her team want to attend NN12 next year and provide a way for colleagues from Communities Joined in Action to attend as well. This is a solid effort to increase the numbers of people of color at NN12.
We need your help. Specifically, we need you to promote and vote for our grant application. Go to refresheverything and sign up for an account with Pepsi. Then go to Lifting the Digital Curtain and vote for us. You can vote once a day.
Please vote every day in December!
If funded, the grant will also send two members of Native American Netroots who would not otherwise be able to go to Providence. And NAN will help Communities Joined in Action to recruit American Indian coalitions as members.
TheFatLadySings and colleagues hope to see you at NN12 Providence, Rhode Island. They hope to be able to tell you there about the many wonderful facets of the Affordable Care Act that are helping us to eliminate health disparities. And they are eager to learn about the use online tools to register and mobilize our communities to vote.
Please Tweet and share.
We need diarists to help us promote this cause every day in December.
Sign up for a day in the comment thread below.
REMEMBER!
"The key to winning the Pepsi Refresh grant is accumulating daily voters. Netroots Nation has agreed to help us organize to win this grant. Sign up at this link to receive an email once a day providing you links to vote. Once the contest is over, win or lose, the email list will be deleted and your email won't be shared with anyone. So please help us recruit all the daily voters you can, and we can do this."