Activist Training for
Community Empowerment to
Challenge Corporate Rule
Hosted by We the People-Eugene
Training by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)
We the People – Eugene hosted two Democracy Schools in Eugene during 2012. We held one school on September 28 & 29 with 25 participants, and another on November 16 & 17 with 21 participants.
We were able to provide Democracy School nearly for free to a limited number of community activists, from Occupy Eugene, Occupy Interfaith Eugene, No Coal Eugene, GMO-free Eugene, University of Oregon, and WAND, thanks to support from the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics,
Schedule:
Friday: 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Saturday: 9:00 am to 5:00 pm
Sunday: 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (local strategy session)
The September 28 & 29 school was at:
Knight Law Center, room 241
1515 Agate St., Eugene, OR
The November 16 & 17 was at:
Church of the Resurrection Episcopal
3925 Hilyard St., Eugene, OR 97405
The November 18 strategy session was at:
Oregon Education Association
Costs:
The fee for either Democracy School is $125
The fee for the Sunday local strategy session is $50
Presenters from CELDF for the November session:
Kai Huschke, NW Community Organizer, Board member of Envision Spokane
Ben Price, Projects Director from Pennsylvania
Click here for the Eugene Democracy School flyer,which also includes a registration form that can be mailed in.
Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Educating Eugene area activists about the CELDF approach to confronting corporate abuses that overrule local concerns will provide a powerful base of educated voters and activists. This base will improve the near and long-term future of preserving people’s Constitutional rights and will strengthen our democracy. We hope to get hands-on experience in the approach with a local strategy session that will lead to a local ordinance asserting the right of our community to protect itself from corporate abuse.
Democracy Schools were created by CELDF and Richard Grossman, cofounder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), and were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003.
CELDF has successfully helped stop fracking in Pittsburgh with a local ordinance and has also helped communities throughout Pennsylvania and other eastern states prevent other corporate environmental assaults.
Democracy School lectures and activities explore the history of people’s movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing inPennsylvaniaby communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material.
HERE IS WHAT OTHER PARTICIPANTS HAVE TO SAY:
- …taught me a new, empowering way to protect the environment, reclaiming local control… Mary Ann Kae
- …will never read a newspaper through my old lens again; enlightened on how process works… Maria Ross
- …awed by small, conservative communities that stood up to government-sanctioned corporate abuse … Judy Hopkinson
- …not realize how little legal power communities have when corporations want their way … Cynthia Sheldon
- …first-hand knowledge of ways to bring power back to the people real examples of success… Marian Beddill