Occupy Asheville General Assembly
October 6, 2012
Proposal regarding legal fund: Meggen brought
forward a proposal to give $350 out of the OA legal fund to Ben Scales who did
a lot of pro-bono work for OA arrestees.
Background: For a long time we’ve
been talking about giving B Scales some money as a gesture of appreciation for
his representation of more than 40 OA arrestees. There was another a request for funds for a
federal civil rights suit from GloLady - For $450 for a transcript. WGs said the support her effort in spirit but
would like her to look at her other options for funding. Recently AHN had asked B. Scales for some pro
bono help and he said he couldn’t because he needed to focus on law work to
earn money. The request from GloLady and
the news from AHN prompted a discussion at the CC about giving B Scales some
money, this proposal come out of that conversation. Included in the proposal was our intention to
work on a fundraiser to raise an additional $150 for B Scales.
Lindsey and TJ are working on picking up the ball for this
fundraiser. The proposed $350 comes to
about half of the current balance in the OA legal fund.
Jonathan had one concern about the use of the word “crimes”
in the proposal, Meggen will look at this language. The
proposal passed with full consensus of the GA. (No ‘stand asides’ or ‘blocks.’)
Move Your Money Day: Move Your Money Day (MYMD) is Saturday
November 3rd. It was
noted that last year OA did not officially endorse Move Your Money Day and it
was not an OA project per se, but that lot of folks very involved in OA were
also involved with MYMD, it was talked about at most GA’s, and it was a
successful project that it was not bad for OA to be associated with. We discussed wanting to actively promote MYMD
this year. We discussed and agreed upon
the following. MYMD falls on the same
Saturday as our next GA; we will make MYMD the focus of that GA. We will contact local credit unions and find
out if they have plans for MYMD and if not invite them to come be part of a
MYMD event at Pritchard park on the 3rd. We agreed that we would promote MYMD and also
develop materials that explained how to move your money from a large bank to a
credit union and some of the reasons to divest from large banks. In
addition we agreed to leaflet at downtown banks on Monday October 29th. We will gather at Pritchard Park around 3:15
and then move to one or more downtown banks to leaflet. Meggen will work on written materials and
will start an email list to folks who were at this GA. Jonathan, Lindsey, and Kathryn will work on
contacting area credit unions. (We noted
that at the September GA we initiated the idea of doing something for S17,
which was successful, and now we are planning an Oct action, maybe one action
and one GA a month is sustainable?!)
Working Group Reports:
Outreach meets on the first Saturday of the month at Wall St
Café at 2:30.
Social Justice Caucus meets every other Wednesday at Wall St
Café at 7:30. (10-10-12 is next meeting
date.)
Susan asked people to put meetings on the facebook page as
well as on the occupyasheville.org calendar.
Visioning: Kathryn
reported about visioning. She noted some
parts of the visioning that we are already working on informally and others
that seem to be less of an emphasis right now.
For example – on piece of the vision was to use mediation to deal with
internal interpersonal conflicts, this seems to not be as prominent because
there are less interpersonal conflicts, it feels like we are treating each
other well right now. Promoting
effective actions, was another piece of the visioning; as noted above we planned the S17 demo in
September and now we are working on something for MYMD (whether or not these
are “effective” would still need to be determined, but they are actions. Kathryn’s conclusion was that we are moving
forward with many of the ideas in the visioning just not in a formal way. Daniel suggested that there may be more
opportunities to move forward with the visioning after the election. Meggen proposed that we look at the visioning
at the December GA, that this will be an opportunity not only to review the
visioning document but also to use the visioning document as a means to reflect on the past
6-9 months, and use it as a Spring board to think about activity in the first
part of 2013. Kathryn suggested that we
do this inside. We agreed to hold the December GA inside and that we would take a look
at the visioning document at that GA.
Announcements:
Daniel reported that folks at Liberty Corner are speaking
out about cuts to mental health and human
services.
Meggen noted that PrideFest continues till 7pm on 10/6/12.
RK announced that he is finishing his book about
emancipation of astronomy.
No comments:
Post a Comment