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GA Meeting Minutes • GA Minutes From 6-19-15 GA
In Solidarity with #Occupywallstreet Minutes Of Occupy Eugene GA 6-19-15
Facilitator – Jan
Note taker John Thielking
12 people initially present
A quorum of 15 was achieved briefly
Agenda:
Committee Reports
Declaration Of Human Rights
Emergency Gathering Spots
GA Meeting Time Change
Grower’s Office
Ward 9
Actions
Fundraising
Announcements
Anti-discrimination Affirmation Proposal
Quorum Requirement Proposal
Editor’s note: The exact order of the agenda was not followed during the meeting. Some committee reports and other items were reported on later in the meeting than the first parts of some of these items, making it hard to keep track in the notes of what exactly occurred. I have given this my best effort to record what happened in the order in which it occurred.
Committee Reports:
Newsletter
Jack – We may be able to recruit some additional underwriters.
Meeting Time Change
Cindy — First week of the month is often taken up by other stuff, but not the first Monday.
City Council meets on the 2nd and 4th Mondays. If we met at 6, then if there is a City Council meeting at 7:30 that sometimes happens on a first Monday due to rescheduling then it would still work to have the GA followed by people going to the City Council meeting.
Introductions
12 people introduced themselves briefly.
Meeting Time Change (cont’d)
2nd Monday of the month would conflict with City Council.
Mondays have the fewest conflicts.
1st Mondays has the best chance of working out.
Temperature Check — Most of us can make it on Mondays
Consensus decision on meeting time was delayed for a bit since we didn’t have quorum yet.
Emergency Gathering Spots Proposal
John Thielking read the verbatim proposal from his notes from the last two GA meetings:
Proposal: Occupy Medical, OE Office or meeting space at Growers and 12:45-2PM in front of library on Saturdays be informal contact points for OE for people who don’t have online access among other things and emergency contact points in case of loss of communications or other emergency. Also, 12:45PM-2PM Saturday is designated emergency protest time in case of emergency developments such as Mumia’s health, etc.
This proposal was agreed to by all 12 people present. Since the exact same proposal was agreed to at the previous two GA’s this proposal officially goes into effect as soon as the minutes of the 6-19-15 GA are published on the OE web site.
Universal Declaration Of Human Rights Endorsement Proposal.
The UDHR was endorsed by OE by consensus with one stand aside with a quorum of 15 people present. This exact same proposal was also agreed to at the previous two sub-quorum GA’s.
The meeting time change to the first Monday of the month was formally re-introduced and consensus on the proposal was reached among all 15 people present at that exact minute. The next GA will be at 6PM at Growers on Monday, July 6, 2015.
Three people left right after the meeting time change was passed. There were now 12 people present.
Statement On Racism by Mariah L.
Discussion: It could be an anti-discrimination statement.
Do we want to spend out time wordsmithing it?
Dave — disability, illness, ethnicity could be included.
Jan – send it back to committee if we need to if we don’t get consensus in 5 min
10 minutes of discussion?
Temp Check — 10 minutes right now fails.
Jan — Move the discussion on the anti-discrimination statement to the end of the meeting.
Mariah — We could get discussion on OE contacts list.
Connor — approve it as a draft?
I don’t understand why we need to rush through this, should we put times on the agenda? Might want to include the visual list of ‘isms. We don’t want to leave out any one group.
Connor — draft?
I don’t see it as being time important.
Temp Check: Move proposal discussion to the end of the meeting. Consensus achieved on that.
Grower’s Office (5 min) OE’s share of the office is secure for at least the next 6 months. Vickie’s garage sale and $33 from another source is in a separate account. About $350.
Anonymous and Jessica and David Z from Peace Works are all working together to secure tenants
Anonymous – only working with Bank Busters.
We have 6 sustainers contributing $10 per month of money that has unrestricted use in the general fund.
John T — one person inquired about renting office space from Growers and/or us but she didn’t show up at this meeting.
Jessica — didn’t volunteer to work on getting people to share office. May want her own non-profit to share the office.
Anonymous — cautions us against doing any more office swaps. We need Edward (bldg mgr), Growers’ Board and all building tenants to all agree before signing up a new tenant for the OE office. We are currently operating outside this process.
Jan — Bank Busters was the original lease holder. Peaceworks will be the new lease holder on the entire office.
David Z said that he could not commit to anything more for his share of the rent. This may be a total of ½ of the total rent (eventually?)
Jessica — will volunteer to coordinate office lease in the future.
Mariah — What do we use the office for?
Jan – Desk, file cabinet, physical address. We are allowed to use the meeting space even if we don’t rent an office.
Ward 9 and Jack:
There was a writeup in the Register Guard saying that there was a new homeless camp established. An eviction notice was served already. Porta Potty became a hot potato.
What kind of support do you need?
Talk to us and brainstorm things to do. We need a hoe and a weed whacker. The group of homeless campers we have now is a solid group of people now.
Jack — Talked to Joe Tindal. OE and the police are the only people dealing with the homeless problem. Suggestion is that OE could attend police commission meetings to pressure them to do something.
Jessica — Hasn’t heard anything about Kerns and the police commission being tasked with this. It would be great to have more OE people there. Homelessness may not be on their agenda for the next two years since even a modest proposal to include homeless issues as part of the next two years of agendas was tabled.
Ward 9 Mission Statement (summary): People at the camp should be treated with respect and dignity like adults who are not causing trouble. It is going to make the city look bad if they don’t work with us.
Connor – Prison-Industrial-Complex comes to mind when talking about ‘services’ for the homeless.
Do you have any contact with the people in the Rose Garden?
We have no connection to the Rose Garden people.
Mariah — What is needed is for people to change their attitude. There is a carpool to an event in Portland. It is only a matter of time before Eugene passes an anti-panhandling ordinance. We need to plan ahead to head that off.
Jack – Orgs that don’t need money as bad as the homeless such as NCI are raising money by panhandling on the street.
Actions
Is the Action Committee reforming?
Actions meetings were a better place to go to discuss issues. What issues to talk about?
OE should always be about action. Every single week something is happening. Skits are fun. In 6 years there will be a giant track and field in Eugene, more gentrification, etc.
Jan – Is anyone proposing any actions? If Beatrice held a meeting would anyone come? Four people indicated that they would come.
There is no consensus needed to to form an Action Committee since it was never dissolved. Started silk screening Black Lives Matter T-Shirts.
John T — Beware that Black Lives Matter is now trademarked by two separate corporations. One has the claim on stationery and the other has the claim on clothing such as hoodies and sweatshirts. Do a basic word search here: http://www.uspto.gov/trademark
to see the two claims.
Fundraising Committee? Any interest?
Jan – Thanks for the 3 people raising money recently.
Who is to say when a committee has disbanded or just stopped meeting?
Jan — To form a committee all you need is that you announce that you are forming a committee at a GA and post the minutes of any meetings on the OE web site.
John T — That is an interesting position. I recall that two of us were essentially shouted down on the OE FB group page after trying to form a working group concerning Foreign Affairs when we attempted to call it an official ‘OE committee’ (after someone announced it as a committee at the previous GA).
Jan– Repeated what he just said. There is no need for GA consensus to form an OE Committee. You can call it whatever you like: a committee, a working group or an affinity group, it doesn’t matter.
Finance Committee Report:
OE has plenty of money to use for various projects for the next few months, including $ for porta potties.
Discussion then ensued concerning the lack of organization apparent at tonight’s GA. Does anyone want to be the regular facilitator? Jan has done this for the last few meetings in a row. See if anyone has something that they want to put on the agenda. Show up 5 min before the meeting and put it on the board.
Jan — There used to be a formal process to submit agenda items.
There needs to be a variety of ways to add agenda items. Jan usually facilitates.
Connor — It is better if there are only a few places online to post agenda items.
John T and Mariah — Mariah complained that her item (anti-discrimination proposal) wasn’t put on the agenda at the beginning of the meeting even though notification of her interest in the item was posted at various places online. John T responded as part of a longer stack that we all are human and don’t always remember what others want to put on the agenda. Don’t expect others to carry your water for you. If the item is important to you, please come early to the GA and put it on the agenda.
Quorum Requirement Discussion:
People walking out because we don’t have quorum shows a lack of commitment.
Should we change the quorum requirement to 10?
Beatrice — Anything less than 15 is not a real organization.
Ralph — If you start downsizing the quorum requirement, then soon you may end up with only two people required for a quorum.
Jan — 15 people for a quorum is the minimum that he would support.
Art — An alternative night to hold the GA is a better solution.
I hope people will keep track of how many people attend GA’s. Occupy Online has a quorum requirement of only 10.
Beatrice — We can always use 3 meetings to get stuff passed. We need to have more interesting stuff to talk about. Occupy is about using our bodies to occupy space.
Mariah — If we can call in to make quorum, that could be better.
John T – Does that mean we want to allow voting by proxy?
Jan — But people can’t be allowed to vote by proxy.
Announcements:
No Shell Oil Event: The oil rig shipped out of Seattle.
— Social Forum in San Jose, CA: Daniel Hong from Portland is driving down. He will give rides in his vehicle for $10-$20 in gas money. He also has lodging available in San Jose.
John T —
There will be (was) an informal, public memorial for Noah DeWitt on Saturday, June 20, 2015. There (was) a bike ride starting at New Frontier Market at W 8th and Van Buren at 3PM. There also (was) a gathering of folks in Monroe Park at Monroe and W 10th Ave at 4:20PM.
[Follow up note: The gathering in Monroe Park had about 15-20 people, many of whom knew Noah personally or had run into him at his job at the New Frontier Market. There was a one page write up in the Eugene Weekly also.]
Continuing the Anti-Discrimination Proposal Discussion:
Someone proposed some changes.
Jessica — It needs more work and needs to be more inclusive.
Art — Doesn’t UDHR already cover all of these points?
Mariah — No the UDHR doesn’t cover all of that. But there are community leaders who are thinking of drafting of a similar statement.
We should not list every group on one sheet of paper. We could say ‘for example’ and then list a few examples.
Jack — Statements like this should have educational value. Defacto racism (people in prison), foreign and domestic racism, all foreign wars are justified by racism.
Be sure to check out Jack’s cable TV show ‘Racism, Empire and Survival’.
Anonymous — Could consense on it as is, but it could be even better. It could include sexual orientation, sex, religion, ability, national origin and class.
Beatrice — Doesn’t understand the purpose of the statement(s), but who is the audience? Say something very simple such as OE is against discrimination in any form, without listing specific groups.
Art — This has always been implicit values of OE.
Connor — Try using Google Docs to collectively author the document.
Jack – The purpose is educational. Most Americans are completely unaware of the racism in all of our wars and how we are bombing races into oblivion.
Is something like this not in our OE vision statement ?
Anon — It is not in the OE vision statement explicitly. Have it on the OE web site.
Mariah — Has a bi-racial child. Sees things through this prism. We have lost a lot of our diversity in OE. It is a personal commitment.
John T — Just because we adopt a statement such as this does not mean that our work is over. Lately, I’ve been confronting what I consider to be (hard wired?) racist tendencies or master/slave mentality within my own consciousness and in the way I have been dealing with the Black Lives Matter movement. Just appropriating the statement ‘Black Lives Matter Too’ on bumper stickers that I sell without for instance consulting and getting a response from Alicia Garza et al, the original creators of the BLM slogan is problematic. Plus BLM is now trademarked by a couple of corporations with unknown pedigree. So I have stopped selling those stickers for now. There are other examples such as various draft stickers that hit the cutting room floor because they were in essence telling Black people how they are or what to do. Various Black activists have specifically asked White allies to avoid doing these very things that I’m trying to avoid, that don’t really help Black people in the end. I have settled on peddling the one sticker that I came up with that I haven’t yet found fault with: ‘USA Police Depts Evolved From Slave Patrols’ and I will leave it at that for now.
Jack — We should broaden the statement to include statements about wars and the prison industrial complex.
Connor and Mariah — The document will be on Google Docs. [Follow up note: The Google Doc has not yet been created or assigned a location as of this writing. The proposal presented at the 6-19-15 GA reads as follows:
Occupy Eugene is opposed to all forms of bigotry and racism, both explicit and implied through discriminatory beliefs and actions that categorically dehumanize others, including Blacks, Latinos, Palestinians, and other Arabs, Muslims, Jews, gender minorities, the socioeconomically disadvantaged including our homeless, women, and indigenous peoples worldwide. This statement represents a commitment to confront all forms of racism and the political and economic structures that normalize it.]
Meeting adjourned.
Statistics: Posted by pagesincolor — Thu Jul 02, 2015 7:12 am — Replies 0 — Views 48
Source: https://occupyeugenemedia.org/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=1560&p=3335#p3335
