You told us that you want to know what is happening across the entire network for shared strategy, analysis, statewide work, and to grow your organizing skills. We are committing to experimenting in this space with you from now through the election and assessing in December how well it’s meeting our needs and the goals set out at the Caucus.
How will it work?
Members from groups across the network said they would love to have at least one person from each group join each meeting, and ideally, that it’s the same people each month, so that we can build meaningful relationships and build together. This space will be what we make it. Its success will depend on the amount we are all able to invest in and prioritize this as a core part of our organizing. This space will be virtual, but feel free to grab a few group members, do an actual potluck, and join together!
Call schedule
We will meet on the first Thursday of the month at 6-7:30 pm PST / 7-8:30 pm MST. Save the dates!
- August 6th
- September 3rd
- October 1st
- November 5th
- December 3rd
Can you join us?
If not, who is the right person or duo from your Human Dignity Group to commit to this experiment for the 5 months around the election?
Please note: Rural Power Potlucks are for member organizations (aka Human Dignity Groups) in the Rural Organizing Project network, and individuals directly invited by ROP staff. If you we’re not invited by ROP staff and are not part of a member group (see list here), please email office@rop.org before registering for these zooms.
How it came about:
At this year’s Caucus, we built the agenda together by identifying and prioritizing what people were hungriest to discuss. One of the strategies we collectively identified was an ongoing space for statewide connection and strategy building. In that session, we talked about the necessity of staying connected right now as the ROP network and how challenging that feels in a moment where there are so many notifications coming at us from so many platforms. Our traditional ways of communicating aren’t meeting our needs to feel deeply connected and grounded in shared strategy.
After rounds of workshopping ideas of what could work, we landed on trying a monthly gathering where each group sends at least one delegate (but more are welcome!)
What we’re hoping to do together:
Share important updates across groups and from ROP central: What patterns are we seeing across multiple communities? What can we learn from each other about what is and isn’t working in our local organizing? How do we lift up and highlight successes so we can all learn from them?
Invite statewide and national collaborators to come, share analysis and learn from the ROP network. Recently, the ROP staff team has been in several national strategy spaces around anti-authoritarian organizing and building the kind of democracy we actually need. In many of these spaces, people are sharing things like – “ROP, I’m so happy you’re here…the work you are doing of building organizing infrastructure across the state and bringing people in is exactly what we need to be doing right now to bring down authoritarianism.” It is so powerful to hear people we admire be so hungry to share space with us. We have already invited some of those folks, like Hardy Merriman, Ash-Lee Henderson, and Daniel Hunter, into our virtual gathering space, and they are so excited to come and strategize with us.
Skilling up! We’re imagining calls that include conversations and mini-trainings that help us become stronger organizers. We will work together to identify what skills and tools we need most.
Statewide strategy development: The image that comes to mind here is starlings murmurating! Starlings fly in these remarkably responsive swarms, moving sometimes further apart and sometimes concentrating, but always tracking each other’s movements and flowing in the same direction to help keep each other safe. How does the ROP network move closely together right now while honoring our model of self-directed groups who are the experts in organizing their own communities?
(If you’re not a bird nerd, see the image below if you’re like “what the hell is murmurating.”)
