1/29/09

Hello Friends

This email has announcements of two important events Traprock is co-sponsoring and also to let you know what I think we need to keep Traprock growing and thriving. We had a great MLK event with the Greenfield Middle School students and several community groups are starting to use our space for their meetings - a great community service and also a way for more and more people to know who we are and where we are. We were the recipient of donations made at a wonderful concert sponsored by the Interfaith Council of Franklin County last Sunday. GCC is planning for their film series to start in February and lots of ideas are brewing about the direction we want to go as we move thru this cold winter into the spring.

This is what I think we need - please let me know if there is anywhere you would like to get involved or if there is anything you would like to do that isn't in this list. Many of you indicated interest in some of the following at our Volunteers Meeting several months ago - this is an invitation to see who is willing and able to do what at this point in time...

• a commitment to spend several hours a week on a regular basis at Traprock


• someone to do data entry on a regular basis


• folks to be part of a "political action" committee to define where we want to put our activist efforts


• folks interested in working with Loren Kramer organizing and operationalizing our video library


• folks to help plan a monthly event at Traprock that might include a potluck, time for discussion about what's happening in our community and the world and "Reaching Obama" Sandra Boston's idea to write letters to Obama on a monthly basis (cc'd. to our Congress people?) to let him know what we want, what we don't want  - our first meeting to discuss this is 4:30 on February 5th at Traprock. All are welcome!


• folks to plan an ongoing film series with me - (not to conflict with or compete with the GCC series) I have some ideas that don't overlap with what other groups in the community are doing


• someone to take responsibility for getting information to our website on a regular basis


• someone to take responsibility for publicizing our events through PSAs and newspaper announcements


• someone to make good flyers when we need them


• someone to take charge of flyer posting (organizing volunteers to do this)


• folks to be on our program committee and do out reach to resources we can invite to do programs


• folks to take charge of our printed material - to get flyers from community organizations and to assess and organize our books and periodicals


• Some one to work with Sarah to make a brochure


• folks to work on the Peacemaker Awards to be given to high school students collaborating with the Interfaith Council of Franklin County


• someone to do outreach to community groups to find a co-renter of our space


• folks to be on call for special needs - like getting our thank you's out to donors


• folks who want to plan for the 4th of July and Hiroshima Day

I'm sure there's more but that's a start - let me know if anything calls your name!! Thanks...thanks... thanks!

Upcoming co-sponsored events:

• Thursday, February 12, 7 p.m. in Northampton at Helen Hill Chapel on the Smith campus


• "Closing Guantánamo: Can President Obama Repair Torture's Wreckage?"


• The seventh anniversary of Guantánamo Bay prison on January 11, 2009, came just days before Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. Obama has promised to close Guantánamo, but questions remain as to when, how, and where the remaining detainees will sent and where they will be tried. Some authorities have suggested permanent “preventive detention” for terrorism suspects, without charges or trial, and holding trials in an as-yet untried “national security court” rather than U.S. or international criminal courts.


• On February 12 at 7 p.m., Attorney Sabin Willett will speak about the need to close Guantánamo Bay Prison and the challenges that President Obama must resolve in order to do so. Willett, an attorney with Bingham McCutcheon of Boston, is nationally known as a defense attorney for several Uighur prisoners—Muslims who are refugees from China—at Guantanamo. All of them have been found innocent, yet they remain in prison or in a refugee camp in Albania, even after a federal judge took the unprecedented step in October 2008 of demanding that the Bush administration release them to the United States. However, the Department of Justice has appealed the ruling leaving the innocent men in limbo.


• Sabin Willett has procured the release for three Guantánamo Bay prisoners and is actively litigating for nine others in the D.C. Circuit and D.D.C. Willett’s opinion editorials have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Miami Herald. He is a partner in the law firm of Bingham McCutcheon of Boston.


• On Saturday February 21, 2009 at Smith College Neilson Browsing Room, Jim Shultz and contributor Roberto Fernández Terán of the new book Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press, 2009) will be speaking about the events in Bolivia that have, in the last five years, changed the course of Latin American history and provided inspiration to anti-globalization activists around the world.
  
  The book is the product of the Bolivian-based Democracy Center which “works globally to advance social justice through investigation and reporting, training citizens in public advocacy, and leading international citizen campaign.” For nearly three years, the main focus of work at the Democracy Center has been to research and write a serious, in-depth look at how the forces of globalization shape the lives of people in impoverished countries. The result, Dignity and Defiance, gives a first-hand account of Bolivia's famous Water War against multinational Bechtel. It investigates the human impact of the U.S. war on drugs. It documents the disaster left behind by an Enron/Shell oil spill. Its meticulous research reveals how IMF economic policies led to bloodshed on the steps of the Bolivian Presidential Palace in 2003. The book and the tour are particularly timely given the projected overwhelming passage of a new progressive Constitution this week by the Evo Morales government.
  
  “Dignity and Defiance …tells the story, from the ground up, of how people have fought courageously to keep globalization from swallowing their lives and to make it work to their benefit – as activists, workers, and immigrants. Ultimately the book is a story of inspiration, and it goes to the heart of what has drawn so much global attention to Bolivia.”

Please join us!!