SONG VA Job Announcement-2
SONG NC Job Announcement

Much gratitude to all who participated! (PLEASE help us spread the word!)

“In Your Face and In The Trenches: Southern Trans People Speak Out!”

SONG Trans Report FINAL (WORD version)

SONG-Trans-Report-FINAL PDF 2010 (PDF version)

*if you would like SONG to mail you a paper copy of this report, please contact us and we will be happy to send it your way!

When: November 12-14, 2010

Who: being put together by our fierce bad-ass members in New Orleans, LA! with
support from the SONG staff.

Where: along the Gulf Coast or in the Bayou in Northern Louisiana (exact
camp-site To Be Announced)

How to Register: Registration starts at $25.00 on a sliding scale (both ways, if
you can’t afford $25 put down what you can if anything, and if you can throw
down more than $25, than help us cover the costs for other people and the site,
and give what you can

Email paulina at paulina@southernersonnewground.org
with the info below and pay for your registration online here

OR mail the check (please make sure you say it’s for the camp-out registration)
to SONG / 250 GEORGIA AVE. SUITE 201, ATLANTA, GA 30312.

CONTACT INFO

FORM OF REGISTRATION PAYMENT (so we look out for it)

Do you have any accessibility needs? Mobility needs?

Anything else we should know?

Are you planning on bringing any children?

Can you bring all the gear you will need? Sometimes folks can bring extras, if they know other folk are short on stuff.

How do you plan to travel to the Camp-Out?? [if you need to fly, please let us know and we'll direct you to the closest airport and help coordinate pick-ups // if you are interested in CARPOOLING, then note that's what you'd like and we'll connect you with other folks coming from your sub-region, etc.]

NOTE:

Your registration fee goes to help off-set the cost of the camp-site itself, so thank u!

Generally there are also Cabins nearby for people to rent in addition to Camp Sites for tents. If you’re interested in renting one, we can also connect you to them, as well as with folks who may be able to go in on shared cabins, so let us know if you would prefer that!

CLICK HERE TO OPEN: ActionPlanSummary-FINAL

SONGsters, the time has come!!! Please find attached the summary report and compilation of statements made at the National Peoples Movement Assembly on June 26, 2010.

Send out to colleagues and members, post on websites, and let folks know about this major accomplishment at the second US Social Forum in Detroit.

Thanks to our own SONG member & communications extraordinaire Katina Parker for the beautiful photos: “Photos taken by katinaparker.com.”

All Resolutions for Action are posted on www.pma2010.org

Amazing and inspiring work from all –

Steph Guilloud (also our own SONG board member!) & Ruben Solis
PMA Working Group Co-chairs
Project South & Southwest Workers Union

if you were at the US Social Forum and / or took part of one or more of the People’s Movement Assemblies at the US Social Forum in Detroit this summer or any of them leading up to the USSF, please share your reflections / thoughts / etc. here!! We want to hear from u!

However, at the US Social Forum in Detroit, MI this year, we brought together 18,000 people. Not just any people. Poor people. Indigenous People. LGBTQ people. Workers. Parents. Culture Makers. Tradition Keepers. Bikers. Elders. Youth. Most of who, in a big picture of economics, have a lion’s share less of the pie of US American wealth than the ruling elite. Which means what? It means that many people struggled in buses, without pay, with few resources, across state lines dangerous to gender non-conforming people, to immigrant people, to formerly incarcerated people, in order to be in Detroit. People struggled to get themselves to a space that was entirely self-organized by our movements.

At the Forum, every day I saw thousands of people organizing spaces, handing out supplies, creating safety to our folks, and providing healing work to each other. If we consider this in contrast to massive conferences with massive resources that run only moderately better and safer than the Forum, we must conclude that despite the logistical problems of the Forum, there was real organization and leadership present. I think our hands and bodies get it. I want our minds and spirits to collectively catch up and decolonize us. Too often, in these spaces, we still act as though the Forum is a service that is put on for us. This is evident in the way many of us (often myself included!) have criticized the process. We talk about what was missing, what drama occurred, and what could have been done better. We frame these sentences with a period on the end. How could the Forum be transformed if our criticisms went more like this: “There was not enough political education and accountability around how male-identified folks can intervene respectfully on sexual harassment. I want to make that aspect of the Forum stronger next time. Do you agree? Will you help me help us?”

Of course, the Forum process has problems; however, at some point we have to realize that every process, encounter, and space will have problems. We are at a moment in movement building where self-governance of our leadership, and deeper understanding of representation (who and how we represent our communities) are key steps we have to understand in order to move forward. The PMA (People’s Movement Assembly) process is a move in the right direction. For those who don’t know, a PMA as defined on the PMA website is: A gathering of people to discuss and analyze our conditions, to come up with demands, commitments, and visions for how things could be different. A PMA is a facilitated space to decide and coordinate actions that will bring us closer to those visions. In my humble opinion, the PMA process is what creates the possibility for the US Social Forum to be more than a collection of workshops; it creates the possibility of a true process of representatives speaking for communities, coming to common understandings of conditions and strategies; and setting overall general direction for the Left. It is going to take a massive amount of leadership to make this process what it could be. Even with success, the process creates mandates for areas of struggles; we have to decide how we take that lifeblood into our organizations and work. SONG looks forward to continuing to build leadership and movement within the forum process, and is grateful for all the leadership of SONG membership at the US Social Forum.

Organizing Based on Longing and Desire

by Sue Frankel-Streit

Maybe it’s a conspiracy. Though Southerners on New Ground (SONG) has been around over 15 years, and I have been in the South all my life, I’d never heard of SONG until I decided to participate in an organizing workshop organized by some friends in Richmond. I’ve been a bit disillusioned with organizing lately, and a bit burnt out on resistance, not to mention a bit traumatized in my personal life. I think that’s why I felt the spirit tugging at me to spend three days learning about an organizing method created and used by some members the long-oppressed and incredibly resilient Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (GLBTQ) community. The goal of the weekend: To provide local activists the tools for intersectional analysis political education, and broad-based organizing based on longing and desire.

Based on longing and desire? I’ve participated in and facilitated a lot of organizing workshops over the last 20 years, and I’ve never heard of basing ourselves in longing and desire though that is, of course, what we do.

Right off, the SONG school set itself up in a way that resonated with my battered, scattered spirit. First of all, the facilitators were three women, black, white and Latina, members of the GLBTQ community. Not who I usually see in the front of the room. They began by setting up an altar carving out a space in the room, they said, to hold our longing, fear and grief. All were invited to place something there; invited, but not mandated (nothing in the whole workshop was forced, and we were repeatedly invited to trust our bodies and our feelings in deciding to participate in any given part).

After introductions (name, why here and gender pronoun you use in reference to yourself), we spent time mapping the current landscape of our personal and communal land, work, body and spirit. Throughout the weekend, we referred to this map, and to these four planes, in analyzing our organizing and relationship building tools.

We worked by telling each other stories – about what our ancestors did in hard times, about power, about organizing, about community. We analyzed power – what is it, who has it in which settings, how to reshape it. We talked about leadership – what it is (and who decides what it is), who has it, how to share it. We worked by acting together and by sitting by ourselves drawing pictures. We made space for full translation between Spanish and English, so each person could speak and understand in their most comfortable language. We took deep breaths together and we held each other’s pain.

We broke open the whole package of conflict and “conflict resolution” for individuals and communities. We went to places I’ve never heard these discussions go: How does conflict feel in your body? How do power dynamics play into conflict and its resolution? What about transforming
conflict instead of “mediating” or “resolving” it?

We acted out personal and communal conflicts and tried to help each other become better listeners, more sensitive speakers, more critical thinkers.

I hardly knew any of the participants in the Richmond SONG School, and I was so wiped out by the end that I didn’t even get anyone’s e-mail address. But I know that I have shared deeply and learned profoundly from an incredible group of often marginalized organizers and courageous human beings. I’m humbled and inspired by people who can bring their whole selves to a circle of strangers and be honest and vulnerable. As far as I’m concerned, that’s leadership and that’s power. And SONG’s facilitators were adamant that every aspect of our time together was geared towards communal organizing for liberational social change.

As the school ended, I thought back on a story one of the facilitators shared when we first gathered. After Katrina struck, she said, “If you didn’t have someone’s cell number in your personal phone, or know where their mama lived, you couldn’t find them”. Offices were underwater. Rolodexes were underwater. If you didn’t have a personal connection to another organizer, you couldn’t find them. What they learned from Katrina, and from listening to the hearts of 100 organizers in the wake of Katrina, was that Southern organizers longed for a movement replenished with healers, for lasting relationships in the work, for critical thinking, and for collective structures. SONG’s school is a response to those longings.

My response to SONG is to accept the challenges they put out: that taking care of yourself and your relationships is taking care of the movement; that I am needed and opting out is not an option. And that real, effective, long-lasting organizing means making yourself vulnerable to your companeras and staying in touch – breathing together. Breathing together is, after all, what conspiracy is all about.

Miss Major and Melanie of TGIJP

One of the highlights of yesterday was the session hosted by TGIJP (Transgender Gender non-conforming & Intersex Justice Project) & the ASTRAEA Lesbian Foundation for Justice’s session titled Human Rights = Transgender Justice: the Yogyakarta Principles and other Potential Tools. In this session, the amazing trans women warriors of TGIJP broke down the political ideology underpinning the Yogykarta Principles and strategies for how to center the experiences and conditions of Trans people towards the shifting of conditions for ALL LGBTQ people, and bring visibility of the global struggles towards self-determination beyond just critique of lack of infrastructure, and towards the re- imagining of Principles that articulate the longings, desires, autonomy and sovereignty for gender non-conforming, trans, and all LGBTQ people. It was brilliant & centering.

1 of 29 human rights that transgender people are regularly denied

Big ups to Miss. Major and the rest of the Trans women warriors of TGIJP & the lovely Namita Chad of ASTRAEA for holding it down.

Another exciting happening was taking part of the Inter-generational Dialogue held down by the Youth Organizing Contingency of the USSF. SONGsters Paulina Hernandez & Suzanne Pharr took part and joined other organizers, youth, elders and power-house youth organizers like Najma Nazy’at from the Boston Youth Organizing Project in the Youth Space of the USSF to reflect on the state of inter generation organizing and work that’s centered the best of our movements and liberation work across generations. Big love for wonderful SONG member and fierce youth oganizer and queer extraordinaire Jardyn Lake, key organizer for the youth forum.