It’s time for our movements to go on the offensive toward the world we want !
We invite each and every individual to attend the 2nd Mass Strategy Meeting on United Progressive Offense this Wednesday, May 30th, 7pm, at Troy Davis (Woodruff) Park, on the side with the chairs and fountains. We had about 120 people at the last meeting on April 25th, and we’re expecting around 200 at this next one.
We hope that these meetings will continue to happen monthly, that people feel a sense of ownership of them and excitement around them, and that they’ll take on a life of their own in the Atlanta community.
We believe the purpose of these meetings to be a space where individuals, groups and organizations can communicate to each other and the larger community about what they’re doing, where folks can organize themselves and coordinate their efforts more explicitly, and where potential new activists can find ways to plug into the existing movement.
We envision these meetings to be an open, horizontal, bottom-up space where people come together as equals in solidarity and unity across different groups, organizations, issues, struggles, strategies, ideologies and communities to decide how we will move forward and create a better world together.
These meetings developed in response to recent attacks on our basic rights by the Georgia Legislature and their corporate sponsors a few months ago, where we achieved inspiring unity through the fight against these legislative attacks.
This unity built great potential for our movements, but what if we go farther? What if we use this unity to collectively assert offensive vision, goals, and demands toward a better future? Although we had some historic victories, we lost ground, too; a purely defensive posture will ensure that we continue to lose ground to regressive policies.
We believe as a goal for these meetings we could agree on a shared vision framework which we could use to unite us across struggles, groups, and communities, to help us develop strategic steps toward achieving this shared vision, and to provide each other mutual support for solving all of our collective problems and improving multiple aspects of all our lives.
At the last Mass Strategy Meeting, we formed break-out groups around visions enumerated in the Declaration of Rights of the People of Georgia such as food is a human right, education is a human right, public space is a human right, employment/a living wage is a human right, and freedom from discrimination/equality is a human right.
We have even tried to survey everyone who attended the last Mass Strategy Meeting to figure out how we can make this one even better than the last, and we have received many very insightful responses. We are planning to have a meeting about facilitation and structure for the Mass Strategy Meeting the Monday beforehand, Memorial Day, at 7pm probably at Peachtree and Pine.
Please come and add your voice to the Movement by plugging into this Mass Strategy Meeting! Also, fliers are available here (in English and Spanish) and the Facebook event can be found here - please spread the word to everyone!
Let us come in a spirit of solidarity, with a focus on going on the offense, because we’re all in this together.
