Retake Takes on the New Poor People’s Campaign

By paulgibson51 on August 22, 2017 • ( 0 )

A call to action for all Retake supporters. The new Poor People’s Campaign revives the vision and strategies of MLK, Jr. and links them to 21st century challenges and opportunities. And there are roles for you. Read on. Join us.

This post includes specific details about the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) and how you can get involved locally. We are just getting started in linking our current work to this inspiring national movement. You can be part of the design of our strategies. So please read on. We feel strongly that this post needs to be shared. We need to regenerate the sense of urgency we felt on Nov 8th. We need to regenerate the urgent need for action that was manifest at our Nov 20 Town Hall with 450 people packing 1420 Cerrillos. So please share this post with friends and make plans together to attend the Sept 16 Town Hall together. Things are coming together, my friends, but we need many, many more of you. So share on.

Community Conversations Canvassing with Your Neighbors. Retake is continuing its twice weekly community conversations launches, Wednesdays and Sundays at 4pm at 1420 Cerrillos. We are slowly building a cadre of folks who are conducing this crucial work as it is through one-on-one conversations that we build trust, relationships and a movement. We simply can’t do that through posts, websites and social media. If you don’t think you would like canvassing, you might want to reconsider. After a 30 minute training you can be out meeting neighbors, talking informally and identifying folks like you who want to create the city, state and nation of our long-held dreams. Join us this Wednesday and Sunday.

Thursday, Aug 24, 6pm-8pm, 1418 Cerrillos (next to the Center for Progress & Justice). Roundhouse Advocacy. We continue our work developing a set of legislative priorities, identifying districts and elected officials who persistent in blocking progressive legislation, and formulate plans for working with the DPNM and Roundhouse leadership to make those priorities driving forces in party and legislative agendas. To RSVP via Facebook, click here. Or simply write to volunteer4retake@gmail.com.

The Poor People’s Campaign Comes to Santa Fe

ABQ, Tuesday Aug 14. The PPC comes to NM.

It has not been a week since half of the Retake leadership team attended the Albuquerque kickoff to the Poor People’s Campaign. Much needs to be done to transform our community into a focused, trained and organized community of advocates. But a conceptual framework is emerging around which the national aspirations expressed in the Poor People’s Campaign can have tangible articulation in our local and state advocacy. By aligning local and state policy goals with the more conceptual and aspirational goals of the PPC, we will achieve the grounding of a movement in practical policy goals, something stressed repeatedly by Reverend Barber last Tuesday.

The four pillars to the PPC are: poverty, racism, environmental degradation and militarism. On a local level, it is easy to see how Retake’s recent work in support of Somos Un Pueblo Unido and the Dreamer’s Project around sanctuary policy, Chainbreaker’s Equity Summer, our ongoing support for New Energy Economy in its battle with PNM, and our future advocacy on behalf of a Santa Fe Public Bank, together address the pillars related to poverty, racism, and the environment.

Emerging work conducted by our Roundhouse Advocacy Team is focused upon developing a set of statewide legislative priorities that will also align strongly with those same three pillars. More discussion is needed to develop tangible local and state policies relating to militarism. But from the start, it is clear that supporting the PPC is not launching Retake in a different direction but simply organizing our current efforts under a unifying national movement.

Interestingly, yesterday’s post on happiness in the US and Denmark reinforced themes emphasized in recent posts about the degree to which our elected officials have failed to implement policies approved by the vast majority of Americans. The post also pointed to how in Denmark, a prominent component of the movement to usurp the oligarchy that held Denmark in its grip in 1945 was to deploy non-violent direct action, the central strategy to the PPC, which calls for 6 weeks of constant civil disobedience, well coordinated in 25 states throughout the country, beginning in May 2018. This flurry of civil disobedience will mirror the political activism of the 60’s, then focused on civil rights, poverty and war resistance. As then, the new PPC is designed to completely change the public narrative with acts of civil disobedience casting a laser beam on how far we have strayed from our aspirations for justice and freedom.

Sat. Sept 16, 3-5pm at the Center for Progress & Justice. A Town Hall to Kick Off the Poor People’s Campaign in Santa Fe

The details of the six week campaign in 2018 are still be developed. But on September 16, from 3pm-5pm, Retake Our Democracy is hosting a Town Hall where we will discuss how we can implement the PPC locally. We will present plans for training in civil disobedience and together we will sketch out what resources and capacities we will need in place to implement sustained non-violent direct action and civil disobedience.

Retake will sustain its focus on advocacy for local and state policy as this is central to the PPC strategy, but we now will introduce more dramatic public actions to draw attention to the justice of those policies. For more on the PPC, click here. To RSVP on Facebook for the Town Hall click here (preferred) or simply write to volunteer4retake@gmail.com.

Below is a short, two-minute video describing the PPC. Very worth watching.

In solidarity,

Roxanne and Paul