Friday, January 23, 2009

Get Out! The Black & White Reunion and More...

First of all, I'd like to once again plug the 11th Annual Black and White Reunion, tomorrow from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM at the East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

Right, maybe this is reminder is arriving too late to be of any use -- but based on past experience I give this event my highest recommendation.

Try to make it for the early shift for food, opening lectures, and old-timers sharing their stories on the microphone. If you arrive later you can still attend your pick of any number of themed workshops, or just schmooze through the hallways and try to hit up random organizational leaders or elected officials and candidates. I'm pretty sure there's a significant closing lecture as well.

Remember, these folks have been doing this for ten years already, so they have it down to a science -- it won't be time wasted. And if nothing else, you may get an idea how to put things together in support of your own causes -- got to figure the Queer and Straight Reunion can only be about 13 months away, for example.

Now, on a related note: it's time to start attending stuff like this and a variety of other large and small events. The Comet hopes to keep a respectable calendar together and maybe start doing "The Week Ahead" posts on Mondays.

It's also time to start reaching out to those candidate's committees which may intrigue you, and seeing what's up. They say the pen is mightier than the sword but take it from me, the shoe-leather kicks the ass of both. You're going to see a lot of great blogging from all comers in the coming months, but that's only one tiny ingredient. Now if you'll only make some calls for me, if you'll knock on doors for me, if you'll get in your friends faces and blahbity blah blah, you know the drill. You know it works, too!

Multiply yourselves. Change never occurred because somebody thought it seemed inevitable.

3 comments:

  1. Missed the B&W meeting and went to RootsCamp at United Steelworkers HQ. Nice.

    Sorry I didn't see many of ya there.

    Calendar -- well -- I'd love to have some additional hands on an OPEN Google Calendar. I've been running one or more for years. It is nice to embed. It is easy to pick events from your calendar and re-sling them to others.

    We need viable calendars of real-world events.

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  2. The Black and White Reunion Summit Against Racism was fabulous this year. I missed you. There were more than the 150 people that the PG cited....250. Yep, it is a " this is how you do it" group. Calendar idea is being discussed a lot so I would recommend Progress Pittsburgh. Peace and justice too!

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  3. Anon 9:52 - I'm happy to yield leadership on the calendar to Progress Pittsburgh and the rest of the justice posse, and I'll volunteer my copy-writing services if it's ever needed. (P2 is holding its 2nd wave of fund-raising so it's a good time to surf over anyway.) Sorry I forgot it was a "summit" -- I always liked that part.

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