Activist Training Camp - Materials
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
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"Onondaga Land Rights Action: An Introduction"
By members of the Onondaga Nation
Members of the Onondaga Nation will be presenting a brief history and culture of their people and will explain the purposes of their recently filed Land Rights Action. The Onondagas' homelands make up a large area in the Central New York region, making up the central nation in the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Currently, the Nation's state-recognized territory is just south of the city of Syracuse. In 2005 the Onondagan people filed a Land Rights Actio in court asking for legal recognition of their special relationship to this land. Such a recognition would give the Onondagas due authority in decisions regarding environmental cleanup in the area, and would allow a healing to take places from the losses that have been felt, among other things.
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"The Politics of Food, Reclaiming Our Health"
By Leilani Fletcher of The Food Trust, Philadelphia
A workshop focusing on how access to healthy food is a political and social justice issue for all: how in America, people of color, youth, and low-income people are especially targeted with cheap, unhealthy (high in sugar, fat, salt) foods and obesity related disease is increasing at an alarming rate. By discussing the obstacles of race, age, culture, apathy, and class when uniting around a food revolution, the workshop's goal is to brainstorm together how we young activists could help bridge these areas and create a new vocabulary and paradigm for our collective work toward sustainable, healthy and healing food consumption.
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"Spiritual Active-ism: Building Supportive Community, Working Without Stress."
By Jen Edwards of JEN/ed productions: an alternative to gen(eral) ed(ucation), NYC
The workshop will address the following themes: How can we create real space and support within our own movements for collective self-development that is open and free from the dogma of any one method or path? How can development of ‘SELF’ fuel the individual and preserve the longevity and commitment to social service and change? The politicization of religion and how it differs from spirituality. Working, communally, through ‘burn out’. Creativity in activism: opening to all potentials within action, within ourselves, within ‘the movement(s)’. ‘Speaking TRUTH to Power’- how to FIND your TRUTH, and live it.
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"The Racial Wealth Divide"
By Adrian Boutureira of United for a Fair Economy, Boston
The racial wealth divide is an integral analysis in understanding the most recent misconceptions that cloud our understanding of immigration processes, both regional and international. The workshop will examine economic disparities, with a focus on a historic hemispheric paradigm, through which young activists can interpret the phenomena of immigration. A closer look at wealth distribution in the U.S., particularly along racial lines will explore the history of asset accumulation in the 19th and 20th centuries through participants' collective family histories, and review the role of government in this process.
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"Radical Art Workshop"
By Graham Boyle of Shepherdstown Progressive Action Committee, WV
As editor and art layout manager of a local indie progressive magazine, Graham will explore the methods and programs used to publish a magazine. From developing relationships with local printers to acknowledging art as activism, the workshop will be both informative and inclusive.
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"Facilitation Processes"
By Lydia Johnson and Danny Chiotos of Shepherdstown Progressive Action Committee, WV
This workshop will incorporate the traditional skills associated with facilitation, including listening to all voices, choice creating, non-linear discussion oriented consensus processes, as well as an anti-oppression analysis of facilitation processes. How to acknowledge how multiple forms of oppression express themselves in group discussions and processes – stepping up/back, understanding group dynamics.
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"Lessons Learned from Women of Color Activism"
By Kandace Vallejo of DC and Maren Cummings of NJ
A work in progress, this workshop will examine the notion of intersectionality of multiple oppressions that has for centuries been represented in the activism of women of color, whether their work was recognized as "activism" or not. From community child care to local work with international effects, various women of color communities will be discussed, including Chicana activism (Mestiza) and Black Lesbian activism.
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"Who's Dime is it Anyway?: The Price that Students and Workers are Paying"
By Brandon King of UNITE HERE, NY
Much of the repression and abuse that students face on campus, workers face on the job, daily. Many students fight along-side workers and are constantly involved in a struggle for a better life. We will continue to pay a huge price if we fail to recognize the paralells between the student movement and the labor movement and actively organize around it.
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"Bhopal Disaster: Lessons Learned"
By Namarata Bhasin of Boston Coalition for Justice in Bhopal
This presentation will explain what happenned in Bhopal in 1984 and the subsequent aftermath of corporate irresponsibility that was countered by international protest.
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Anti-Oppression Training - "Building Community Across Human Differences"
By Deborah Wilcox of Confluenct Consultants & Associates, OH
This workshop offers participants an opportunity to learn how to build community across human differences. And to explore how issues related to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religious diversity and other human differences function in their personal and institutional lives.
This workshop will also engage participants in dialogue about: What is oppression? How it is taught and how oppression operates in their lives on a personal and institutional level. Oppression is a human condition that is pervasive. It is prejudice plus the irresponsible use of power and it hurts everyone both the victim as well as the perpetrator.
Oppressive institutional arrangements are used to benefit one group at the expense of others, through the use of language, media, education, economics, religion and more.
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"Rural Organizing in Appalachia: Mingo County, WV"
By Brent Rowley & others
Organizers working in Mingo County, WV, will share what they've learned and the rural organizing methods they use.
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"Living Wage Action Coalition"
The Living Wage Action Coalition is a collective of students and recent grads from campuses across the country that share experiences from their living wage and student-worker solidarity campaigns with new and existing campus campaigns.
LWAC has structured students’ experiences into a series of workshops. LWAC collective members have been doing these workshops around the country on the LWAC campus tour since August 2005.
We do not seek to form chapters on campuses -- we leave this to the amazing national networks that already exist: the Student Labor Action Project and United Students Against Sweatshops. Instead, we seek to support student-worker solidarity organizing and deepen this movement's radical analysis through our long term project.
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"Carbondale Bikes"
Description coming!
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"Gender & Positive Masculinity"
Description coming!
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"Coalition of Immokalee Workers/Student Farmworker Alliance"
Description coming!
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"Breaking Down The Lockdown"
With the recent FBI crackdowns on the environmental movement, eco
activists are finding themselves dealing with prison issues more and more
frequently. This workshop will provide background about the Green Scare
by looking at past waves of government repression (ex. Red Scare,
COINTELPRO), but will focus on the role that prisons play in society at
large. We'll unpack loaded words like "crime" "safety" and "security" and
map out how the prison-industrial complex connects to other societal
issues. In doing this we will create a space to ask ourselve tough
questions about whiteness in the environmental movement, how to connect
the dots, and where lines of real solidarity can built.
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"Social Detox - Deconstructing Sexism as ENV Restoration"
This workshop is part of a media campaign called Social Detox. This project
is in collaboration with Skunkrising A. Midnight from PMS MEDIA (
www.pmsmedia.org) and is accountable to various anti-oppression collectives.
This workshop will focus on deconstructing, destroying, detoxing SEXISM. It
is a group process critique of the social environment and the relationship
patterns that facilitate our behaviors and health. Social Detox is a
movement to begin restoration, towards gender self-determination and
balance.
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"Non-profit Solidarity Panel"
This discussion will be a peek into the world of non-profits, and
solidarity work between them at multiple levels. We intend to examine the
ways in which non-profits are structured, and not only how they work
together, but the different levels at which non-profits can do work,
attacking systems of oppression from the top down and the bottom up
simultaneously to create sustainble change. In having this discussion, we
will highlight not only how different organizations can work together and
show support & solidairity for the work that other organizations are
doing, but as well how different types of organizations are structured,
and how they work with students, community members, and governmental
officials to get work done. In doing so, we hope to give participants a
broader understanding of what solidaity is & means, and how it is applied
practically in different situations. In addition, we hope participants
will gain better understanding of the possible job opportunities for
activists who may unexpectedly wind up this line of work immediately
following college.
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