January 30th Relocalization Meeting Notes

In attendance were Ravi, Doug, Joshua, Jan, Alex, and Guy

For an agenda, we spoke briefly about the organization of the 2nd day, but this still needs to be resolved in greater detail because when we first started out the meeting on this, there were only four of us and we felt we needed more of a quorum. We will continue with this next week. We also discussed about contacting potential keynote speaker and workshop leaders to schedule them since time is short, but again, we lacked a quorum. This, too, will be finalized next week.

Joshua announced that he is leaving the group for work commitments elsewhere and both Ravi and Guy sounded the alarm that our group is getting small, especially since Ravi also says he is on the edge of further participation because of ongoing events at Dharmalaya. Doug also suggested that we need some more women participating in the planning of this event! Therefore,

>>>we must decide next week if we have enough members to continue or perhaps postpone the event until a later date when people have more free time to commit.<<<

Ravi introduced that Don Schneider may be a possible keynote speaker since Don is active in giving workshops on sustainability. Don also wants to create dialogue between different sectors of the community and strengthen the weak connections between them. This sounded positive and Doug added that we need more of a psychological feel to the presentations.

Alex stated that he would contact the Native American longhouse on the UO campus to see if it is available for our event (and we therefore don’t have to worry about insurance) and Doug said he has also reserved a room at EWEB for the event in late April.

Ravi next introduced an excellent table on how we can organize the workshops and he discussed the excellent work of Tom Atlee. Appropriate speakers would be assigned to these particular topics.

FOOD

ENERGY

CONSTRUCTION

TRANSPORTATION

CULTURE CHANGE

ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING

POLICY CHANGE

TECHNOLOGY

RESOURCE BASE

Alex also suggested that Tom Atlee should too be added to our potential keynote speaker list. Tom apparently just received a grant from the Kellogg foundation to hold a similar symposium in Santa Rosa, California.

Discussions then proceeded to formalizing the main goals and objectives of our workshops and then Jan suggested that to lessen planning time, we would first have education in the morning followed by having discussion oriented rounds (based around Ravi’s table above) in the early afternoon. In the late afternoon, the various workshop groups would get back together into the main plenary session where they would offer solutions to all of the speakers gathered together for questions, answers, and discussions. This format, of course, would require strong moderators/facilitators and Alex said he would bring a list of people that may help out with this event. This change of format created a positive response from everybody.

Guy suggested that we should get Native American input as well, particularly from tribal elders who could educate the audience on how they achieved sustainability for thousands of years! We could ask several different tribes such as the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Coos/Coquille, the Grande Ronde at Sieltz, and the Kalapuya. One such person may be Ester Stuzman who is a Kalapuyan elder who lives in Yoncalla. Guy has worked with her before.

Ravi ended the meeting by wanting to give a short presentation next week on his previous work in Russia with the People’s Academy of Sciences. His salon will focus on a theory driven development plan based on PROUT (Progressive Utilization Theory).