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brokering a conversation....

Anne Dalke's picture
Submitted by Anne Dalke on Mon, 01/27/2014 - 9:51pm

We have since the beginning of our 360-planning been thinking about how we might broker a conversation among-and-between community partners who focus on social justice issues, and those who focus on responding to and minimizing environmental degradation. Dorceta Taylor's visit in early March will direct us to these questions.

In Jody's class today, you began to talk about how we might do this: do we want to bring in people from off-campus land conservation organizations, and similar group of folks from social justice groups (what might motivate them to attend such a session?). Or should the discussion be campus-based? (how might we draw a diverse participation from the affinity groups, and the environmental activists?) "What's that thing that draws different people in?"

Please continue the discussion here....let's try thinking out loud together about how we might do this....


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sara.gladwin's picture

I thought maybe to help us

Submitted by sara.gladwin on Thu, 01/30/2014 - 9:05pm.

I thought maybe to help us get back into that conversation (which seemed to have energy at the time) I’d try and sum up some of the things we talked about in Jody’s class! It feels like maybe people haven't commented on this because of being unsure where we left off/not wanting to repeat anything.

I remember that there seemed to be a lot of support around campus-based discussions, but there was a question of what that would look like and how we would realistically draw people in. I brought up the final event for the Women and Walled Communities 360, which was very well attended, and how many of the people who attended were actually friends and family (and by that I mean my mom) who came to support us. Their initial reason for being there was us; and that what sometimes draws others in is other people, not necessarily pure interest in the event. Someone else brought up the SAW culture show and it is structured to appeal to different types of interests; for example, some people come for the food, some people come for the fashion show, and some people come for dancing/music; so the idea expressed there was that maybe we need something that is structured in a way as to appeal to many different people. There seemed to be uncertainty about how we would have/initial a conversation with outside groups.

 I have a feeling that there is more here that I can’t remember- Maybe, if I’m missing anything, could someone fill in the gaps?

 As for adding something new to the conversation- I have a couple questions that I’ve been wondering that might help us think about what we want to do….

 *Piggy backing off of the uncertainty about outside groups: How would we go about involving the outside community? How are we choosing who we might want to work with? And do we want the BMC community to be working w/ these outside groups to have conversations as well? Also- how do we want to frame these conversations?

*Something else I really liked that I think Anne might have suggested (can’t remember now) was about attending to our community by going to the events of other groups/helping to raise awareness for others events… I was thinking that one way to garner support for our own events would be to start by supporting the events of others, maybe events that we might not normally go to/see ourselves becoming involved in.

*Ava’s talk also made me think that maybe when we begin our art projects we could think about doing our own art show/gallery. Or even some kind of installation on campus; that could be a way of entering into a campus-wide dialogue.