All Island Forum notes, pt. 3

50% community activity

Motivation: I want to be involved in the community in a service that is not paid, professional work

Wants: to work with people with diverse opinions on a given topic, or for people to feel comfortable expressing their opinions on this topic. To work on interfaith efforts, music hospice.

link: with one other person or group

learning edge: I need to learn patience. I want change to happen right away.

-Kathy Ostrom


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Wally

Community act. 3 hrs/day

Where: Sr. Ctr, hospice, past.(?) care, DOVE, politics

Motivates
Value of contribution = compassion for others
More funding for Sr. Ctr, DOVE
Good/exc. leadership

Better experience for me?
Good experience already - comes fromn self

Support from others?
Awareness of DOVE, Sr. Ctr.

Who link?
K.C. Sherrifs (Dove)
Politics- Dem party
Sr. Ctr. - 5,000 islander's 750

Most learn as an activist?
I don't know


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Steven Lipke

To make a conncection that deepens the community through interaction and mixes thoughts abnd emotions to bring new ansewers and open the true character of understanding genuine connection


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Motivation: Want to give back to "pay" for my good fortune

Wants: More communication between orginizations

Link: I'm already linked, possibly overlinked

I need to learn how to be more effective on boards.


Time spent in community engagement: 50%
time not spent in community enagement: 25% family, 25% eating, sleeping, art, veging, visiting

-Barbara


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How much time in activism?

self & household - 35%
family time - 35%
activism - 30%

Where is the effort?
(Still trying to establish that)
 44% mixed short projects
18% neighvborhood/imagination/church

What motivates?
Want to enjoy being part of community
Like to test my limits & push boundaries
Care about social justice

What would make better?
Joining with others to greater degree

With whom would like to link?
Still trying out different directions

What do you most want to learn?
Listening
Clarifying & articulating my own thoughts
Communication on deeper level


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Scott

Community activism: 5%

35% Gardening and living lightyl
20% playing music
15% Letter writing
15% Sharing life philosophy
10% Fruit club
5% the rest


Motivation
I want to live the example of what I see as a good: low comsumption, local buying, simplicity, sharing

Wants
Better infrastructure & federal support (targeted taxes); more sunshine

Help
Fewer pests in garden;
better public transportation;
re-focused federal tax policies

Links
Musicians, gardeners, ride-share people, expert gardeners

Learn
How to better grow food
How to change federal tax policy
How to be more effective at creating large change

All Island Forum notes pt. 2

1. How much of my time to I invest in community activism?

            ¾ Community “Activism” of one kind or another

2. Where do I invest my energy/allocate my commitmments?
   ¼ Vashon Central
   1/8^th shoulder to shoulder cooperative form
   1/10^th helping friends
   1/16^th Hestio Women's Retreat/grad night 2012/VAA Island Arts distribution/Red Lodge (spiritual)/AIF
   1/20^th Welcomem Vashon booth

Q's:

1. What drives you?
   - Passion for interconnected community living. I feel driven to participate in activities that work towards finding commonalities and building cooperation and understanding among people in my local, regional and global communities. This feeds me: heart & soul
   - Environment: Activities that address caring for & connecting to the natural environment – all of it!
2. What do I most need/want to make my involvement a better experience for me?
   - More people participating to lighten some loads.
   - More hours in the day :)
3. What kinds of support do you want from fellow citizens?
   “Sweat equity”, appreciation, encouragement, FUN! (participation)
   With whom would you most like to meet?
   - Anyone interested in the human connection aspect of community activism.
   - Open minded folks
   - Intergenerational, i.e. range of ages & experiences
4. What do you most want to learn as an activist?
   To be more personally organized to better show up and offer my best to any community activity I am involved in.
   I want to overcome my fear/delusion of not being good, smart, experienced etc... ENOUGH to have valuable impact in my community.

What is your learning edge?
Stepping into places that require more responsibility.

-Amy Wolf

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Kyle

division of time in community:

¼ attention to Island

• wildlife
• land use
• gardening/fruit club

1/5^th psychology + health & welfare

1/6^th art

1/6^th personal

1/16^th stretching, yoga, dance, message therapy

challenges – EFFECTIVE dialogue

motive – attentive access to work with local materials

• shared resources
• assist with sustainable dreams

notes from All Island Forum, pt. 1

How to keep going in the face of obstacles when things become frustrating:

1) step back, breath and get broad planetary perspective - "Deep Time"

2) keep looking for opportunities to express needs, feelings + hopes.

Meet + greet with a smile.

Talk more/be less busy to stop and discard other's ideas

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brian hildebrand


what I want to learn as an activist is how to better seek funding and support, as well as how to better organize physical gatherings.


time spent engaged in community related affairs - 50%


where I invest my effort: 50% physical commons, 50% virtual commons

(wherever i can afford to be part of community activity)


what motivates me most:

seeing a more effective stewardship of the commons, and seeing that common space expand in both geography and vision

to make my involvement better, I would like to see a cooperative organization with a consistent and constant venue of operation

I would most like to link with media creation and promotion groups, i.e. Voice of Vashon, VAA etc.


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John Runyan

Activism - 40%

division: All Island Forum 40%
political groups, Backbone etc. 20%
Schools, Homestead, Parkmont 20%
Mentees 10%
prof community 10%

Motivations:
I am curious about people
I want to learn and grow
I want my communications to be better in talking, deliberating and deciding


Wants:
More opportunities to listen and learn together, especially about tough, complex issues


What would help:
Willingness to allow for facilitation and higher quality exchanges

Link:
I'd like to link with other leaders, especially elders in this commmunity


My learning edge:
I want to learn how to collaboratively craft decisions that meet more people's needs



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John Dancey

times spent in activism - 15%

division of time - 55% religious group, 15% Occupy/AIF/Community Dinner


Motivation:
Awareness of suffering and injustice. Sense of compassion, equanimity, lovingkindness and joy. Sense of interdependence and of how wer are all in this together.


Participation in groups that are inclusive and open in planning and active


Experience in listening and being heard


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I want to facilitate community interactions which elicit deep truths about how to move forward in ways that honor and affirm true needs and desires.

I want to enjoy our togetherness; our differences and common themes

-Tim B

speak for yourself and see if anyone listens

Something we can all agree on? I don't think so.

Top Ten Ways to Tell Kony is Phony.

The Hidden Agenda is to Invade Africa

excerpted from an easily googleable article

by Bruce A. Dixon

Reason #10: Invisible Children is funded by a core of notorious right wing donors including the Discovery Institute, the leading funder of efforts to promote the replacement of biological sciences in schools with “intelligent design,” along with the Caster Foundation and the National Christian Foundation, all prominent backers of anti-gay referenda, politicians and initiatives in the United States and around the world. The Ugandan regime of Yoweri Museveni is a favorite of theirs for having passed legislation making it a criminal offense to be gay, punishable by a life sentence.
Credible African journalists like Keith Harmon Snow have also alleged that Invisible Children’s white and male leaders have direct personal connections to US intelligence agencies.

Reason #9: Invisible Children and Kony 2012 don't tell us that the Ugandan government of Yoweri Museveni, one of the “good guys” in the Kony 2012 universe, is also accused by the same International Criminal Court before which it wants to bring Joseph Kony, of using tens of thousands of child soldiers in its genocidal depredations in neighboring Congo, where Uganda and six other African nations invaded and killed an estimated 5 to 6 million Congolese in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a larger death toll than anyplace on planet Earth since the second world war. Bruce Wilson’s excellent March 8 Talk 2 Action article "Invisible Children" Co-founder (KONY 2012) Hints It's About Jesus, and Evangelizing links to numerous sources for this and much else.

Reason #8: Invisible Children and the Kony 2012 video also don't tell us that Uganda's Museveni replaced a president and rival general from the Acholi region of northern Uganda, the same ethnic group as Kony's LRA. The Ugandan government has evicted hundreds of thousands of Acholi from their lands and confined them to desperate and squalid refugee camps for more than XYZ years. 

Kony and his LRA did commit monstrous crimes in previous decades, but by now are said to number only a few hundred combatants. Kony may not even have set foot in Uganda in years, but he and the LRA are useful as convenient bogeymen to justify the continued dispossession of Uganda's Acholi, whose chief misfortunes besides the LRA itself, are having produced rivals to Museveni and living at the edge of a resource-rich region that stretches across Uganda's borders for hundreds of miles into Congo and Sudan.

Reason #7: Invisible Children and Kony 2012 are lying when they attribute the disappearance of all 30,000 missing northern Ugandan children to the LRA.

The truth is that some of the child soldiers the Ugandan government used in neighboring Congo were abducted in northern Uganda, nobody knows how many, and a large but unknown portion of that region's civilian dead, many of them Acholi, perished at the hands of Uganda's government, which always had far more firepower and resources than the LRA, and just as little regard for the property and lives of innocent civilians and their children.

Reason #6: Threats of massive foreign intervention into civil conflict do not bring adversaries to the table. Instead they make it unnecessary for those on whose side the foreigners intervene to negotiate at all, and leave nothing for the other side to negotiate over. Uganda needs an end to violence, and resources devoted to building its civil society, not more military aid.

Reason #5: The United States, the other “good guy” in Kony 2012's imaginary world basically invented the modern African child soldier in the late 1970s and early 80s, so their commitment to “ending child soldiers” is a bit suspect.

Apartheid South Africa was bordered Portuguese ruled Angola and Mozambique, with their own vicious versions of apartheid until 1974. In that year, despite massive US and NATO aid, the Portuguese army rebelled, refused to continue fighting against African independence and overthrew its own government at home. White South Africa was deeply threatened by having independent black regimes now at its borders. So, with US funding it helped create and arm “contra” guerilla forces, UNITA in Angolan and RENAMO in Mozambique to burn schools and clinics, to mine orchards and roads, commit mass rapes, mutilations and murders, terrorizing citizens in their own country.

Lacking foreign troops or popular support , but with US aid and plenty of firepower, UNITA and RENAMO hit upon the innovation of kidnapping and enslaving child soldiers to carry out their despicable mission. Both were effusively praised and lavishly funded by Barack Obama's favorite president Ronald Reagan, and their leaders welcomed at the White House.

The chaos and social demoralization spread by Western financed armies of nihilistic child soldiers made them an ideal tool for use in whatever African setting the West wished to delay or prevent the emergence of African civil societies and central governments which might succumb to popular demands to develop a country's resources for its people rather than to benefit foreign interests. Employed in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and elsewhere, “failed states” infested by murderous child soldiers in the 80s and 90s proved to be incredibly good business environments for (mostly) Western extraction of hundreds of billions worth of timber, gold, diamonds, coltan and other vital African resources.

Reason #4: Depending on movie stars and celebrities is the precise opposite of building the backbone and habits of a vibrant and self-aware civic movement.

This kind of so-called activism reinforcing a slavish worship of celebrity culture, acceptance of corporate marketers who tell us what to eat, wear, covet, consume or shun and convince us it was our idea, not theirs. The real deal is that FaceBook, Twitter and much of crowd-sourced culture are fundamentally the master's tools, clicktivism, not activism.

It's never easy, and may not even be possible for slaves to free themselves with the master's tools. That ain't what they were designed for. Most of those forwarding and FaceBooking the Kony 2012 video, including some of the celebrities, as Keith Harmon Snow points out, probably can't find Uganda on a map.

Reason #3: When both corporate parties, the entire corporate media universe, a constellation of celebrities and movie stars, all the right wing and much of the establishment liberal church along with the whole bag of bipartisan foreign policy experts agree on the need for decisive military action, you can bet the course of wisdom and truth is just about always in the opposite direction. Republicans and Democrats voted to send troops to Vietnam, and only a single congresswoman voted against war in Afghanistan.

Reason #2: Kony 2012 and the campaign to keep US boots on the ground in Central Africa are all about the oil.

And the diamonds.

And the gold. 

And the coltan, and the water. 

Uganda's northern region contains vast oil reserves, and neighboring Congo is the source of most of the planet's coltan, a highly conductive compound used in every cell phone, computer, aircraft, automobile, missile, GPS or other electronic device on earth.

Reason #1: It's all about white people, the white West and their First Black President doing their imperial and colonial thing, running the planet for their benefit at everybody else's expense and feeling good about it, saving hapless & hopeless black Africans from themselves. Such a deal. If they wanted to take Kony down, they could have done it last week, last year, five or ten years ago. If they do take him down it'll be cause their Kony tool has outlived its usefulness, and maybe they need to plant a big wet sloppy kiss on Museveni and his gang, a bigger and more important bag of fools and tools.

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. BEGIN THE DIALOGUE.

We are interested in seeing what kind of a potential movement there is on the island, exploring ways we can stand in solidarity with the May 1st general strike and with the revolutionary "Occuppy" movement going forward.

We hope to hear from those who have been involved in this movement, as well as those who are working to strengthen our resiliency on the island so we can be ready to step up to meet the needs of our community when the centralized corporate state can no longer provide the services that people depend on.

There is much to discuss and much to learn. We hope that we can make connections with a wide variety of passionate people in the community and find ways to inform, inspire and assist the great transition from power over people to the true power of and through the people and the community.