[Cprb] Contacting Urbana City Council members

[Ricky Baldwin]

This discussion is very encouraging, in my opinion.  I
meant to say so sooner.  And, sure, I'd be willing to
meet with whoever wants to sit and talk about this
face-to-face.  I meant to say that sooner, too.  

But I think John's point is pretty much on the mark. 
The best part, again in my opinion, about 'grassroots'
initiatives is not that a bunch of us activists can
push something through a city council, but that it's
an opportunity for a community to work together in a
more concretely democratic way, building the broadest
possible coalitions along the way.

There seems to be a lot of good energy here, so I can
see no reason this can't happen.  Thanks again, folks,
for doing this.

Ricky

--- John Wason <jwason at prairienet.org> wrote:
> At 08:52 AM 10/10/03 -0500, Walling, Jennifer wrote:
> 
> >Hi everyone,  
> >
> >A couple of things.  Last night I spoke with Laura
> Huth about the CPRB and
> she gave me some tips to how we should proceed.  She
> said that first, we
> should talk with Ruth Wyman.  I live in Ruth's ward,
> so I figure I could
> contact her and set up a meeting?  If I tried to set
> it up for October 20
> or 21 (the day we don't meet), who else would be
> able to go?  I'll try to
> figure out her availability in the next couple of
> weeks.  And then she said
> to use the following order - Danielle, Esther,
> Laura, Milton Otto, Joe
> Whelan.  And she thought that we should contact Ken
> Pirok in Champaign
> right away to set up a meeting.  Does anyone live in
> his district?  and
> John Paul, Elaine will answer your concern about the
> NAACP soon.  
> >
> >-jen 
> 
> I have very mixed feelings about this.  I'm
> delighted with Jen's energy and
> enthusiasm (and some of the rest of you, too), and I
> don't want to throw
> cold water on it for anything in the world. 
> But....we've already met with
> all of these city council persons, except for Joe
> Whelan (who refused to
> meet with us) and Ken Pirok.  What would be the
> purpose of meeting with
> them again at this juncture?  Danielle made it
> crystal clear to us that
> what she needs in order to sponsor a CPRB ordinance
> is BROAD COMMUNITY
> SUPPORT.  So in my opinion that's where we need to
> be focusing our
> energies.  I don't know precisely how to go about
> garnering that support -
> that's not my strong suit, but appears to be the
> strong suit of people like
> Jen and Ken Urban - but I do know that we don't want
> to go running into a
> city council meeting half-cocked without the
> foundation properly laid.  
> 
> This ties in with Ricky Baldwin's comments, too,
> about having
> support/collaboration from the various minority
> communities.  I agree with
> Elaine that we can probably count on some sort of
> support from the NAACP,
> but I don't want it to be PASSIVE or TACIT support,
> because that won't be
> obvious to anyone but us.  The support needs to be
> overt and active.  I'm
> also interested in not just the CPRB per se, but in
> building a more durable
> broad-based grassroots communication and coalition
> between the minority
> communities and us.
> 
> Well, these are some of the things we need to talk
> about.  There's a
> balance to be struck between moving too fast and
> moving too slowly, and I
> fervently hope that we in our collective wisdom can
> find that balance.
> Meanwhile, a sincere thanks to all of you for your
> comments and your
> activities on behalf of the CPRB.
> 
> John
> 
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> 


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