Allison Glass and Jacob Flowers will facilitate MSPJC’s flagship skill building organizer training over the weekend of March 1-3. The Core Organizer Training teaches participants the foundational skills you need to be effective organizers and win on issues that are important to you. If you want to be more effective in the work you’re doing in the community, register here today!
Topics covered include:
- campaign planning,
- tactics,
- coalition building,
- working with and creating your own media,
- conflict transformation,
- meeting facilitation
- nonviolent direct action.
These skills will be taught through hands-on application, resulting in participants having direct experience and practice to that these skills can be immediately implemented. And because this training is skill-based, these skills can be used in any community work in which you are engaged. We will learn together as a group, where all experience and expertise will be honored and shared.
This intensive weekend training will convene Friday 6-9pm, Saturday 9am-5pm, and Sunday 1-5pm at MSPJC, 3573 Southern. You must be present for the entire training, and registration here is required. Please contact Gio at 725-4990 or gio@midsouthpeace.org with any additional questions, and we look forward to learning with you!
Our State, Our Stories :: A Better TN is Possible
The grassroots group has been meeting at the Manna House at 1268 Jefferson every Thursday night for almost a year now. On Thursday Nov.15th at 7:15 p.m. as the meeting drew to a close, H.O.P.E., organizer Paul Garner was locking the gate to the Manna House and the group was about to depart, when two MPD squad cars made a U-turn and pulled up on the remaining seven members present.
The Core Organizer Training teaches participants the foundational skills they need to be effective organizers and win on issues that are important to them. We train using popular education and integrating experiential education, allowing people to learn in a hands-on, direct manner, while also drawing out the expertise that the individual already has within. The result is a training that is fully interactive and has direct application in each session.
Once a month the membership of the MSPJC comes together to get updated on the work already happening and set the direction for future work. This month’s meeting is on February 13 from 6-7:30pm at your offices at 3573 Southern Ave. All members and folks interested in joining should attend. It is a potluck if you can event, so please bring a dish if you are able. If not able, please just bring yourself, we always have plenty of food & drink!
H.O.P.E. is the name of a Mid-South Peace and Justice Center sponsored organization whose members are exclusively people who are currently or have formerly experienced homelessness. For over a year now, H.O.P.E. has been organizing and agitating around the issues that are a priority to the homeless community.
Last month we ask for your help with the Point In Time Count, which is conducted once a year by the Community Alliance for The Homeless and is required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to retain federal funding for homeless programs. Now we are reaching out for your assistance with another event that will positively impact the lives of individuals experiencing homelessness.
♥ On Valentines Day, February 14, please join us in showing some love for our brothers and sisters on the street by participating in this third installment of Project Homeless Connect 3; a massive outreach and service event to break down barriers that make it difficult to leave homelessness. We are expecting 1000 peoplewho are in need to attend this event, and we need just as many passionate volunteers to help connect folks with services! Check out the 
Back in October, H.O.P.E. members hit the pavement, volunteering with the 
H.O.P.E. would like to thank everyone who came out to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with us! We had a great time with folks from the community and other organizations like 
We watched coverage of the inauguration, screened the documentary, At The River I Stand, and followed that with a round-the-room discussion of the struggle for civil rights and equality for all people and how we can continue this work today. It was a fun way to network with other organizations and hear about all the awesome work that is going on in our community. We also had special guest, Coby Smith, who is featured in the documentary. He is a founding member of The Invaders, which was a militant black power group that was organizing in Memphis during the 60’s and worked closely with Dr. King during the time he was in Memphis. Thanks to everyone who came out and special thanks to
The community-Police Relations (CPR) project of the MSPJC is a groundbreaking effort that is creating a space for dialogue about the real issues between community members and law enforcement, which will ultimately culminate in a plan for action to improve community-police relations. This action plan will include solutions that address all levels of the issue: political, economic, institutional, and psychological.
In the afternoon, community leaders and members of MPD and the Sheriff’s Department met together. As the next stage of CPR is to move the dialogue circles out into other parts of the city through community forums, we discussed the importance of allowing enough time for thorough planning to ensure that these forums are as inclusive and successful as possible. We agreed that we need to accurately frame the community forums, so that members of law enforcement do not feel they are walking into a hostile environment where they will be ambushed, and so that both community members and police will know that they are all going to heard and respected. We decided to create a working group to undertake the immediate next step: to train facilitators for the community forums, which will begin in May at the earliest.
The second half of the combined meeting addressed concerns around media and messaging that had been brought up repeatedly in earlier meetings. The group recognizes that the mainstream media’s reporting – especially that of local television news – presents a one-dimensional, distorted view of both law enforcement and members of the community. The highly sensationalized coverage never reports on any positive events or people from either side, nor on any positive relations or times when community and police work together. And the media do not provide any context for their stories on these topics; there is no examination of the structural, socioeconomic, institutional, or political dynamics that underlie conflicts and negative incidents, such as shootings of police or community members. A proposal was made that we form a working group to start to map out CPR’s media strategy, both in terms of responding to inaccurate, problematic mainstream media coverage, and in terms of producing our own media (e.g. via Facebook or on the radio).
It was very encouraging when at the end of the meeting, over two dozen people volunteered for the two working groups (facilitation and media/messaging), which will be meeting in the coming weeks. Over the next few months, CPR will be firming up neighborhoods, venues, and dates for the upcoming community forums.