TCG National Conference 2006 - Building Future Audience

Transcripts

National Conference 2006
Saturday, June 10
Transcript: Mini-Plenary: Another World Is Possible

Clyde Valentin

Welcome, everyone. My name is Clyde Valentin, director of the Hop-Hop Theater Festival in New York, and honored to be sitting at this table with such distinguished folks from various walks of life. To my left we have Melanie Joseph, the founding artistic director of the Foundry Theatre, Michael Guerrero, the director of Grassroots Global Justice, Candido Grzybowski, who is the director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses and one of the cofounders of the World Social Forum, so it’s a great honor to have him with us. And Alice Lovelace, the National Lead Staff Organizer of the U.S. Social Forum. That’ll be the order of how we’ll be talking today. We hope to give you an overview of what the World Social Forum is, for those of you who are not familiar with this, Candido will spend some time discussing its principles and its history and its growth, Michael will talk a little about the participants of the World Social Forum and the grassroots organizing that is happening on the local level. Alice will discuss what’s happening here in the United States next June 2007 with the U.S. Social Forum.

My introduction to the WSF was quite random. I was in San Francisco for one of the festivals they had at the time and I walked into a bookstore and found this book called Another World Is Possible. I thought, oh, that’s an interesting title. This was 2003, a couple of years after 9/11. And kind of an academic book, very intellectual, stuff you’ll get in school, but more importantly the principles in that book were very profound for me. Very profound. I said, yeah, this is it, this has to be it. The idea of a global popular movement that represents a cross-section of people, of interests, of struggles, of change—really was it. And that was my introduction. A few years later, Melanie Joseph comes back from Brazil and says, “We’ve got to get a bunch of artists to the WSF. Are you interested, have you heard of it?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of that thing, I have this book.” [laughter] That’s how we started the road to get on this particular project.

With that, I’d like to have Melanie start with a very general “101”: What is the World Social Forum?

Melanie Joseph

Every year for four or five days in January—on dates held simultaneously with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which costs $25,000 to attend, by the way—the World Social Forum provides the world’s largest open stage for social movements, networks, progressive individuals, grassroots organizations and socially engaged citizens from all over the world to come together to exchange, to debate ideas democratically, to pursue innovative strategies for change, present ongoing experiments in economic, social and political processes, and to network widely toward building another world. Indeed, I hate to say the slogan or logo, there isn’t a word, but the subtitle of World Social Forum comes up always, “Another World Is Possible.”

The only common denominator that gathers the people who come to this is an opposition to global market liberalism, or what is increasingly being referred to as neo-liberalism, in other words, an opposition to the corporate and military models in which capital instead of people is the organizing principle of our public and private institutions.

Since the first forum in 2001, the WSF has now taken the form of a permanent world process. In other words, the event happens once a year, but the process continues pre that event, post that event, whatever. What the WSF proposes to do is facilitate, decentralize coordination and networking among people of organizations that are engaged in concrete actions toward building another world. At any level. From local to international. The objective to allow as much as possible for horizontal actions, without struggles for hedge money, and to make room for a global civil society to emerge as a new political actor, autonomous of government or political parties. And so one of the most compelling aspects of the forum is that all of the events in it, workshops, plenaries, panels, etc. are organized, designed and hosted collaboratively by the people who come. In other words, if you’re a participant, it is your forum, you’re the creator of the forum. As an example of what the actual forum might look like: I went in 2005 in Porto Allegre, there were 2,500 events to choose from over 4 days. There were 11 thematic terrains. There was, you know, water, and protecting diversity, and human rights, etc. And there were 155,000 people there from 132 different countries. It was a dream to me.

By the way, 35,000 of those people were young people, who stayed in a youth camp, and those people organized a temporary city government for themselves, to determine how waste was dealt with, water, etc. A city organized for four days.

There have been six World Social Forums so far. Four of them have been in Porto Allegre, Brazil, which is a really interesting city. It’s something you should check out on the Internet—why it would have been born there. Maybe Candido can talk a little more about it. The fourth one was help in Mumbai, India, went back to Porto Allegre in 2005, and this year in 2006 it was held concurrently in three different cities. They called it a polycentric structure this year, because they wanted to get out a little more into different communities—they did it in—Mali, in Caracas, Venezuela and Karachi, Pakistan. In 2007 it will come back together to Nairobi, Kenya.

In addition, it’s interesting to note that there have been 200 smaller forums, at least 200 that I was able to count, that have been held throughout the world. Regional forums, local forums, thematic forums, national events, etc., held in more than 40 countries, but all organized under the principles and methodology of the World Social Forum. The charter of the forum is something we’ve handed out if you want to take a look at it. There’s even one held every year in Paris in the First Arrondissement, they’re actually about to do their fourth Paris First Arrondissement Social Forum. And I’m very very excited, I think most people are, to note that there’s going to be the very first U.S. social forum held here in June 2007. That’s kind of an overview.

Valentin

Thank you, Melanie. And I want to remind folks, if you have questions, please write them down because we do want to allow time for conversation around this work with the folks we have here. Candido, now that we’ve heard the “101,” I’d love to hear why you got started, what was the vision, how you see this growing. What are the challenges, also?

Candido Grzybowski

Many thanks to TCG for inviting me to be here. It is my great pleasure to be here with you and to discuss these ideas. To think of the next U.S. Social Forum next year will be really great for all of us. For my broken English you must make an effort to understand me. You are artists—you have the ability, I think, to feel and understand together. [Laughter]

The forum is also a great experience for us that started it. We’ve seen some activists in this country fighting against globalization, the context was that in the ‘90s our region, the South American part of the world, was strongly pressed by the new liberal policies, disengaging the state’s social policies, which didn’t developing there but is a problem always. There was a lot of action against this, but internationally a lot of new activists were trying to fight this globalization model. This is an economic model, but also a domination model. We must be clear about that. An economic model is like putting the economy against the society, because it’s producing a lot against people. We are producing too much, but not for all. The production is not to meet the needs of the people, but mainly for profit. Big corporations, and so on. Eighty-six percent of GNP in the world is consumed by 20 percent of the population, the others lack food and essentials, which destroys life, destroying the base of life. Nature today is in crisis, and also the research that has been done around controlling life, is like, we are breaking the possibility for future generations to live on this planet.

You artists, you know that when we start dreaming again, we dream big. This is important for society to say another world is possible, but which kind of world? During the 90’s fighting against this – a lot of world networks were established, like the network against the all of the trade legalization and trade negotiation – NAFTA and the World Trade Organizations – that until now were a part of this process as a power institution to control the global practices of these big corporations. Also a lot of networks formed around UN Conferences, starting with the environmental conference, human rights, social development, women’s conference, human settlements, population in Cairo also – all of these conferences are a kind of learning process for different society organizations and movements how to work at a global level. Normally, we do work at a local level, but we must have this interdependence between nations, have a link between what we are doing locally with the global. And these were the learning process during the 90’s.

And we’d been together in Seattle, here in the United States in ’99, when the World Trade Organization met but could not finish because for the first time the movements worked together to say “No, we need another thing.” We created a condition to start the forum. In February, 2000 after the World Economic Forum, we decided to start an organization in the World Social Forum. The World Economic Forum has a long history – maybe our history also will be long like that, but I don’t know. They started – the main people were the losers of the second World War. The Nazis, Fascist people against the wealth of states in the West, against Europe, the United States and its policies, and against the UN charter of human rights. They created in ’53 or ’54 a society with this idea of non-liberal thinking, and in the ‘70’s they created the World Economic Forum in Davo and they meet every year in the last week of January. Saying the world is not only corporations, the world is also people. They deal with big social issues, bringing a social perspective to our community, our corporations, our states, our power – to all institutions. In the center they deal with citizenship. This is the main idea of the forum.

We started in 2001 in Brazil, in Porto Alegre. You might ask, why Porto Alegre, why Brazil – Brazil has suffered much more than other parts of the world from this kind of globalization of trade, this policy of development that destroys life, and at the same time is the part of the world where alternatives are starting to happen. We are part of this social mobilization that creates a lot of movements – this process creates a society with a social niche that can support the kind of movement like the World Social Forum. We also needed a state where the government would not be against us. At this time, Porto Alegre was converted to a liberal policy, and not against us. And Porto Alegre is a city where all of the citizens participate to help define priorities. This is a kind of map of budgeting that has developed. And let me just say that we are against government, but not all government, some governments are good governments. And this shows that Porto Alegre is good government. And it was why we went to Porto Alegre.

The Brazilian organization that started the organizing committee with the idea of sharing experience, accepting diversity and trying to build a new political culture. We started in 2001 with 20,000, in 2002 with 50,000, 2003 with 100,000 people, in Mumbai we had 115,000 people and in 2005 we had 153,000 people. Also this year, in Caracas we had nearly 80,000 and in Burma, 20-25,000 and in Krachi 20-25,000. And this is important to hold it in different regions. The first one was new – we couldn’t discuss a lot because of all of the languages, but we were glad to be together – an exciting event. The second one was a divided event, mainly because the all the networks tried to organize within the overall forum, and we couldn’t talk together, and we realized that this was not the way to organize a forum. And in 2003 was together, using Open Space. We improved the organization of activities, with some planned, and some self-organized activities in 2003. In 2005, all activities were self-organized. And all the money we spent in the first few years to invite well-known people – like Chomsky, for example – to be with us, we decided to put this money towards bringing people who wanted to come to the forum but didn’t have the money. Now in Nairobi, which will be the next forum, nearly $1.5 million will be used to bring people from Africa, Asia, South America, North America. Also at first we only had the forum in Porto Alegre, but we have this obligation to the world, and the world is bigger than the home. The idea to move the forum is that of helping people to get to the forum. There are a lot of national and regional forums, like in Paris. But we tried to look for some part of the world that we need to strengthen and the local organization decided where to have it. This is why we need to have a strong forum here in this country. Here in this country you are in the center of this globalization, but you are feeling like you’re screwed here, and this we must show to the world strongly because it will strengthen all of the movements. It’s important to all the citizens of the world to have a strong event here.

With the Open Space we organize the forum with only some principles – we don’t accept violence – we accept silent actions, but not violence against people. To look for another world is not a problem of what kind of world you are seeking, the only condition is to be part of a more genuine globalization. For me, the most important is to accept all kinds of diversity – life is diverse, nature is diverse. But globalization is trying to destroy this diversity. And if we build another world, it will be one of diversity, it will be a different kind of world – there is not one model. Every society must define it, every people must define it. This dialogue will be people-to-people based on the respect of human rights, respecting diversity, not imposing views is the base. And also respecting the earth – biodiversity, nature – it’s part of life and part of the future of life on our planet. These are some of the momentous aspects of our process. It is exciting. I don’t know if we are friendly enough – maybe you artists can help us to frame this in a shape that we can understand. Because we have a problem – it is hard to create a dialogue between different cultures respecting diversity – cultural and diversion – we are not looking for consensus in the forum. We don’t want to impose some kind of thinking. The forum is not imposing solutions. And this is the main message I can leave for you – you will shape the forum you want – it is not some model imposed on you. And your forum, I know will be great.

Valentin

Thank you, Candido. Colin Greer in the plenary this morning talked about political class and the control of messaging, right, the control of messages and definitions. And here we have a very clear example of globalization as its been sold to us – whether or not we’ve chosen to balance. And here we have globalization as ideally we’d like to see it happen, which is not privatized resources, but a celebration of our diversity of our diversity on the planet, and that’s profound and fundamental. There’s a parallel I think with what Colin was talking about, the politics of belonging, the myth of the mainstream, and the messaging that happens from the top down, you know, to control perception, whereas, there’s something happening globally in every single country from the bottom up. And Michael, who’s the director of grassroots global justice, will talk about some of the participants of some of the movements on a local level, bottom up.

Michael Guerrero

First I want to thank TCG and Clyde and also Melanie for inviting me to be part of this great conference. I always want to acknowledge some of the folks here in the Atlanta area, Alice, who’s now the lead staff organizer for the U.S. Social Forum, groups that are based here like Project South, Atlanta Jobs without Justice, you know, Atlanta’s kind of becoming a big national, international center—not that it wasn’t before—but the fact that this conference is here, other important conferences are taking place, and next year, June 27, will be the first United States Social Forum, and that was a very deliberate decision in terms of why it should be held in the South, and why particularly here in Atlanta as well. So I’m very glad to be here, again, and I look forward to seeing you all in another year. You know, it was difficult for me trying to figure out how to do this presentation, because in some ways it’s like a reconnection for me, because a lot of my background is in the arts. I was going to study music, going into college I’d actually gotten a scholarship and gotten into this big debate with my parents, who came from a humble background, saying, “You’re never going to make a living at music!” So I went to U.C. Berkeley and left with an art degree. And of course, you know, I never made a living doing art, either.

You know, that period was very important in terms of my political development too, and part of that was the time I spend during that time, this was a few decades ago, there was a lot of work going on around the Central America interventions, Ronald Reagan was just elected, I spent a couple of years in Mexico City studying art there. And what was significant about that experience—some of you here may have the experience of the separation of the art from politics. That there’s a resistance, in a lot of places, to combine those things. And I found that experience here to be true, when I was doing painting back then. In Mexico it was very different. The art was very much integral to the movement-building. The mural tradition they have there, the music, all of it was a very integral part, and the analysis and the lens the artists used to understand the world and politics was very integral. You couldn’t separate the two.

That turned out for me, for me as I went on, in terms of becoming a community organizer, and the work we’re doing in New Mexico, I found out that connection is essential in terms of movement building. Whether you’re looking at the Civil Rights movement and musical traditions, in New Mexico where I was an organizer for 17years, theatre and community theatre was actually a very essential part of bringing the community together to talk about politics. Because, you know, half the difficulty some of the time is to get people in a meeting, but they’ll come together for cultural activities, come together for community building, and it’s within that space you can have some discussions you might not be able to have otherwise.
So I went from there, coming out of that experience in Mexico City, and started doing work in community in New Mexico and Albuquerque with an organization called the Southwest Organizing Project. And those of you who were at Colin’s plenary this morning, a beautiful plenary presentation—he talked about the whole question of the progressive movement and it’s the political class now basically putting a cap on what we can say, and how we build movements, and what the limitations should be in terms of reaching a broader audience of people. And he also referred to kind of a set of organizations or movement-building that’s going on at the local level in different communities in the United States, including here in Atlanta. I was part of one of these organizations called the Southwest Organizing Project, which was working to build community power primary amongst Chicano populations, people of color, and indigenous populations in New Mexico. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country—I think actually it’s been in competition for the last twenty years with Mississippi and Alabama in terms of the bottom economic indicators in the country. It’s a military colony of the United States, most of the economy is driven by research and development for nuclear weapons, two out of the three national laboratories for nuclear weapons development are in New Mexico. Very poor state.

In recent years, they’ve tried to transfer their economy, transition into a manufacturing economy, bringing the high-tech electronics industry in, and a lot of those plants in the Silicon Valley that have created a lot of environmental destruction and devastation, that have had a huge impact on water usage and taken water rights from agricultural communities, so there’s a lot of the social fabric and history of New Mexico, which is very rich in terms of traditional Chicano culture and indigenous culture, is being affected and torn by a lot of these issues of globalization that Candido is referring to. And particularly the role of multinational corporations, the role that they play in development in communities not just in the global South but also internally within the United States.

So, we did a lot of organizing around a lot of these issues. And during the late 1980s and early 1990s, our organization was very involved in environmental justice issues, in environmental justice organizing. A lot of the consequences of industrialization in the last 40 or 50 years really started to hit home in terms of cancer clusters, in terms of the different ailments we started to see in these communities where a lot of these industries are based, where a lot of the workforces, primarily poor and people of color, were being used basically as expendable workforces in a lot of these industries. We started seeing a lot of very serious ailments in the community. Started doing a lot of organizing work to make corporations accountable, the military—which is the largest polluter in the world, by the way—the United States military with hundreds of bases around the world, and also in communities in the United States, both radioactive and toxic emanation has been just devastating to our communities.

So, I’m not going to go into a lot of details about the organizing work we did, but for us the key was not just about how you have these fights and challenge corporations, but how do you build community power so you can not only challenge these corporations and make them accountable, but how do we change the economy, where we’re at? How do we change this model of globalization where these corporations come in, we give them huge tax breaks, we give them huge subsidies, we give them water, we give them natural resources, and those resources leave the community and go to other places.

And so a lot of our work was about day-to-day base building, organizing work in the community, education, sharing information, and different models of how we can develop the economy differently in New Mexico.
So this led us in this evolution, this chain of events, going from the local to the global, and understanding as we went along more and more of these connections about the role of these international corporations and the role they were playing in our communities and how these decisions were being made. Totally separated and in isolation from the grassroots, from the community itself. And you know, understanding these different models they were using with the World Bank and the INF, and during the ’90s the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which allows for the freedom and liberalization of capital to move throughout the world, and these corporations to move, but not people. And the devastating impact that it had on the economy of New Mexico and the world.

A lot of the issues we deal with today have their roots in this global model. Even immigration, which is one of the huge debates right now in the United States, in the Congress, the fundamental issue is often missing from the debate. And this political class, as Colin was explaining to you, they’re not even discussing this issue, which is—why do people come here in the first place? The displacement of people that was caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement over the last 10 years, when 2 million farmers were displaced as a result of NAFTA in Mexico alone. And that was by design—what happened was they became a low-wage workforce to work in the manufacturing plants along the border—those plants picked up and moved at the beginning of this decade to China, leaving about 250,000 people in Mexico in the border region unemployed. Where are they supposed to go? They can’t go back home, now we’re building walls and militarizing the border, so they can’t come here.

But the fact that those questions are missing from the debate means that people who should be allies, the people who are concerned about immigration, the question of immigration and jobs in the United States, should be our allies with the global movements and migrants throughout the world, because it’s not just happening in the United States, it’s happening in other countries as well.

So, anyway—I’m kind of jumping around—a friend of mine called the World Social Forum a beautiful but messy experiment—that’s kind of what this presentation is.

In 2002, I was part of a delegation that went to the World Social Forum, similar organizations to our, grassroots base building organizations throughout the United States, a delegation of about 40 organizations that went to the World Social Forum. It had a really profound impact on all of us that were part of it. One was just the scale. I mean, when you—for those of you who have been to a forum—it’s a very inspirational event, I mean, what Candido started to describe, when you have all these people from throughout the world who share common values, you know, it felt like a very safe space. And in you’re in this city, Porto Alegre, which has the politics and participatory budgeting. There was a sense of possibility. There was a sense of hope. And there was a sense of strength that, yes, we could build a movement that challenged this model of globalization. And it led us to question our own work within the United States.

What we also saw in Porto Alegre was the strength of movements, national and international movements that were growing around the world. There was this diversity, and this divergence from all these different opinions, but people would live with these different opinions, understanding that they shared common values and that we had to develop common strategies to challenge this agenda; people were willing to live with those distances and figure out what’s the common ground that brings us together, and how do we work together. In the United States, I’m sure a lot of you are aware that it’s a very different situation. It’s a very fractured movement right now. We have this political class – the Democrats - that basically are in the way in terms of really addressing and developing a progressive national agenda. We don’t have the mechanisms for doing that. We don’t have the same level of dialogue within the movement. And a lot of it has to do with the way our movements are funded, because we are so dependent on philanthropy that it restricts us in terms of the kind of discussion we can have even with each other, and we end up more in competition with each other than working together.

So for us we saw in the model of the forum that there are great possibilities here for the United States as well. For grassroots organizations that we felt it was important for us to come together, but we needed an open space where we could talk about these different things, we could come together with different sectors, like the culture and arts sectors, like TCG, you know, the anti-war movement, the immigrants’ rights movement. Rather than working on parallel tracks in our different styles on our different issues, how could we start to come together and define a common language? How do we start to come together to define messages that don’t come from consultants in Washington, D.C., but come from the people themselves? And design a real progressive vision, not something that’s packaged and sold to us.

That’s what we saw as the power of the forum. And initially we were resistant, the first couple of years, to having a forum in the United States, because we didn’t feel that enough people knew about the process. And race and class are important issues in the U.S., and we thought that if we made a call for a forum back in 2002, that it wouldn’t be as diverse and as broad as it should be. So we’ve been very deliberate over the last couple of years in reaching out into communities of color, reaching out to indigenous communities, and trying to get their ownership of the process first, and from there build to bring in other groups and constituencies as well. So we see a lot of promise in it. Especially at this time, which is a very critical time globally, and also within the United States and the role the United States plays in global politics, and the fact that the empire is in decline and there’s a changing global landscape—we need to be a part of this global dialogue that’s taking place throughout the world because if we’re not, communities in the United States become the most dangerous communities in the world. Right? Our communities are servicing military that is basically defending this model of global capitalism. And so we need to be working with our brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the world to define what the alternative vision will be.

So it will be difficult—as Candido says, come on, building a global movement is not an easy thing! But we have to do it. Everybody recognizes, even everyone fighting at the local level, fighting in the trenches, recognizes we have to be engaged at the global level. We have to be in the arena where these corporations are. So I hope that you all are here June 2007 and we can start to define this vision for the United States. [applause]

Valentin

Michael spoke with respect to his experiences as an artist traveling to Mexico and the engaging of art and politics, or I would say the engaging of art and policy. And Melanie’s going to talk bit a little about why us, and why now, in terms of artists’ increasing participation in the visioning of the World Social Forum.

Joseph

I wrote you a letter. I’m going to read a letter I wrote to all of you.

First off, everybody, I think it’s important to say to you that I love what I do. I love making and supporting the making of art, and I’m always up for celebrating the potency of our poetics and tumbling into ecstasy over a great piece of theatre, music, poetry etc. I can’t believe how lucky we are to be doing what we’re doing. But I don’t believe art alone changes the world. And I do think that the world has to be changed. I don’t think it’s a stretch to want a world that takes better care of the humans who live on it and the planet that’s underneath them. But I believe it’s people, lots of people, that do lots of different things that actually change the world. I am interested in being a participant in the consideration of what changing the world means and how that might happen.

And still I think there is something immanent in a citizenry of artists and cultural workers, something that lies outside of the actual art we make, that lies in the ways we think and in the particular skills we draw on to do what we do every day that unifies us and that might make us a valuable partner—that makes us a valuable partner in imagining and creating the future. So why not us?

First off, there is a global conversation growing that everyone should be a part of it. So of course us. And what’s become unambiguously clear to me is that the future of change has something to do with the ongoing development of some kind of an international vision, with the continuing expansion of our relationships internationally, across languages, across communities and across cultures. Over the past 25 years I’ve seen this happening more and more in little pockets all over the world. And it seems to be reaching critical mass even as I read this to you.

Nowhere is the development of an international vision more deeply active than in the global public space that is the World Social Forum. And I have to say over and over, this is not a political movement. This is a public space that is attempting to build a way of thinking as global citizens.

I went in 2005 and it was actually the most profound experience I’ve had in my life. It continues to be an indescribable one—like seeing an amazing work of art by yourself and having to come home and tell someone what your experience was. Once you’ve gone, you want everyone you’ve ever know or will know to go to the World Social Forum—that is certainly my experience. Ultimately, it comes to this: Nowhere does civil society have an opportunity of this kind out of which to develop its interrelations autonomously, with no governments, or battling political agendas. It’s a horizontal process where people can come together in the deepest and most profound spirit of collaboration.

So of course artists should be there—especially theatre artists, who traffic on a daily basis in collaborations and who live comfortably with imagining what isn’t there until something is there. And the WSF process is expanding rapidly—inviting more and more people to bring their ideas, practices and simply themselves to the process. So now’s the time.

And more to the point of why I write to you, is that if a future is being imagined and plans are being made, I think artists must be there to carve out some public space in order to find new modes of partnership for arts and culture in this new future. Not only do we care deeply that people are fed, that human rights are elaborated and protected, that peace prevails where brutality rules, that the earth itself is protected, that there may someday be an end to this endless list—but what kind of future would it be if we have to keep looking for reasons that arts and culture have a place in it.

For me, I’d like to imagine a future where we finally don’t have to argue for the value of what we do, where the “deliverables” of cultural and artistic expression might be articulated less materialistically or, imagine—where the notion of “deliverables” isn’t relevant at all to cultural and artistic experiences. What would such a future be like? Where a ministry or a department of culture took an intrinsic place beside a ministry or department of agriculture or labor.

But we have to make this happen, because even among those whose politics and progressive sensibilities we share, in fact especially among them, this is often a novel concept. As many of us know well, we are always invited to events like the WSF to perform or exhibit our work or bring the people in, which I think is also a vital service and something I’m usually really proud to do, we are seldom invited to the table to participate in any other way. It’s hard to know if we aren’t invited because we don’t show up or if we don’t show up because we’re not invited. But in the case of the WSF, there is no host to invite us, we are ourselves the hosts and the guests and the ones who determine the menu.

So it seems to me now is the time to bring an artists’ sector to bear on this creation of this new future in this global discussion. And the WSF provides the kind of public space for the entire ecology of who we are to participate in this discussion—from those who mount musical revivals to those making political work, from artists at large institutions that seem to be out there and separate from the people, and are they are not, to artists organizations with a budget of zero. There is room for all of us in the World Social Forum. And there’s room for imagining in the World Social Forum, which means there’s room for all of us. Now we have to show up.

So—since plans, as you’ve heard, for the first U.S. Social Forum are underway, and the whole world is going to be watching what we do, especially because this is one of the last Western countries to host a World Social Forum within its boundaries, one of the best ways we can do this is maybe to get involves with the USSF. And so I want to yield the table quickly to Alice Lovelace, because we’re running out of time.

Lovelace

I think that you are here because you understand there is a critical role for arts and culture in any movement that involves the people. So I know I don’t have to explain that to you. But I’m going to tell you how to get involved.

The U.S. Social Forum has divided the country, and that also includes Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, the Marshall Islands, into 10 regions. Each of those regions has a regional representative and regional committees. There has been a request from the coordinating committee, which Michael is a part of, and all of the regional coordinators and the workgroup heads, for each region of the country to have its own smaller social forum to help mobilize the base. So June 16–18, the Southeast Social Forum will happen in Durham, N.C. July 6–9 the Midwest Social Forum will happen in Milwaukee. In October there will be a border Social Forum at the border of Texas and Mexico, a cross-border social forum. And other social forums are evolving. So one way you can get involved is to find out what’s happening in the region that you live in, and join that regional committee to make something happen.

The work groups are youth, communication, logistics, programs, fundraising—needs a lot of help—culture. You can join a workgroup. You don’t have to belong to an organization to join a workgroup. One of the things that may be of particular interest to you all, I want to talk about the youth workgroup and culture workgroup. Because those two things are very close to my heart. Culture workgroup, we are working very hard to bring in cultural artists from all disciplines into this process and our goal is that there will be no session that happens at the United States Social Forum where an artist is not a part. So we are asking the program committee to request there be an artist or a cultural worker sitting at every session, whether the discussion is around water, nuclear disarmament, toxic waste, labor and wages, health and well being, poverty—that artists should be a part of that conversation.

We’re also inviting artists to come to talk about creative ways of facilitation. Because we do not want to see a social forum—that is like this. My apologies! We do not want a session of talking heads. We know that there are processes and ways of facilitation that artists and cultural workers use that make for a holistic process where everyone is engaged and everybody finds their voice. That is why we need you at that table. There’s so much you have to teach about how to gather people, about how to make this movement not only meaningful to those in the room, but to give people true processes of facilitation and inclusion that they can take home with them. So that there is this residual effect, this ripple effect that will happen.

We also know that within cultural organizations and organizations that work on the ground in communities, you have a real interest in engaging the youth. You work in schools, you work in after-school programs, you work in community centers. We need those youth at the table. We made a commitment of 35 percent representation of youth throughout this entire process. It’s a commitment we have yet to live up to. It’s a commitment you can assist us with living up to. So that the artists and the youth are elements that are critical to the success, particularly here in the United States.

I have here on the edge of the stage a wonderful newsletter from Project South, which is the host organization here in Atlanta, that is housing me and that is the cornerstone organization for organizing the social forum. There’s also a sheet of paper which gives you the name and contact for regional representatives, for all of the working group chairs so that you can get in touch with them, and there’s my card. I invite you to get involved in this process. I invite you to bring your voice to the table and bring your constituents and bring your peers. You can find out more about the United States Social Forum by going to the website—it’s ussocialforum.org. And plug into the process. [applause]

Valentin

We’ve left some room for questions, so please jump in.

Question

I just want to quickly ask Melanie, is it possible to get a copy of that letter?

Joseph

Of my letter? Oh, yeah. Just send me an email, and I’ll email it back.

Question

Those regional social forums will happen this year?

Lovelace

Yes. The regional social forums will happen in 2006, the U.S. Social Forum June 27–July 1, 2007, here in Atlanta, Georgia.

Question

Can you tell me about the forum in Paris?

Joseph

I can give you one of the organizers’ emails if you like. People are organizing—there are so many different ways to organize forums, and this is one that happens in a neighborhood. And there are certain people, in other words, they’re looking at the issues that affect the First Arrondissement, and they’re inviting people from neighborhoods in other cities, other countries , other parts of the world, to these forums. They did their fourth one this year.

Question

What date is that?

Joseph

I don’t know. I’ll give you the email though.

Question

I would like to know how the U.S. Social Forum information will be measured, and the end results. Do you have any ideas?

Joseph

Deliverables? [laughter]

Guerrero

I think that, you know, if you look at the World Social Forum process an organization has taken on the role of doing an evaluation of the World Social Forum process and researching that. As of yet, we don’t have that for the U.S. Social Forum. We don’t have a mechanism or an organization that is taking on the responsibly for doing the evaluation. There will be some reporting and some results that will be done by the staff, but I think it would be great if an organization, if you know of any, or even a university, would be willing to take on the responsibility to do more in-depth research about some of the results of the forum. Because it’s a big task for the groups that are already involved in the organizing of the event itself. I think that’s an important Question, and how we can get that done would be a good Question to address.

Lovelace

I think another way would be that it’s a visible process. There will be a website that we’re still working to get up, but the website will document the entire process. All the working groups, all the reports, all of the meetings and everything that come out of it. And this will be a living website, an archived website, so it will itself become a resource. And also hopefully there will be publications coming out. I’d like to take one moment to do something please. Would all the members of the Atlanta local host committee please stand? Thank you, these are people here in Atlanta who are working to make this thing happen. [applause]

Joseph

Can I just make one other response? Simultaneously to thinking about these ways of delivering, this is also, another frame of this, an equally valid frame of this, is that there’s a paradigm shift going on in this process. And so determining now deliverables is almost scary—because we don’t know yet what this is, and what this new mode of citizenship might yield. I mean, it’s a baby ecology, and assessment sometimes has big feet on baby plans. And so I think that another way to think about deliverables of this is lots and lots of people go to pay attention to what happened, to hear lots and lots of different responses to the successes and failures. I think that would be more true to what it actually hopes to present itself as.

Question

Is there any inclusion of response to the WTOs around the world?

Guerrero

You mean the groups that are organizing against the WTO? A lot of the World Social Forum was actually born from that movement, of groups that were involved in the battle in Seattle, for instance, that came out of that experience and that led to a series of discussions that led to the World Social Forum. Candido could probably tell you more about that. But yeah, a lot of those groups have been involved in the process at the world level.

Question

Michael, you were talking about getting funding and gathering resources and you often feel like all these wonderful organizations are pitted against each other? How do you guys talk or think about money and/or resources, and coming together? I assume you’re not underwritten by Citigroup. [laughter] How did you get the resources to make the newsletter? And how does what do I do with my resources if… ?

Guerrero

Funny you should ask that. What we’re doing, see, is we’re going around to these different conferences, and giving talks, and then we pass the hat.

Joseph

In fact, which this is going on, I would like to pass the hat, and any kind of thing that you can throw in it...

Guerrero

If you’re going to write a check, it’s to Project South, the fiscal sponsor for the U.S. Social Forum. But to answer your Question really, I think that’s one of the important discussions that needs to happen within the movement. I think one of the things that doesn’t happen enough is that we don’t discuss resourcing as a movement enough. It happens with each organization basically, you know, in competition left on their own, to figure out how to approach foundations and all that. We don’t have a collective approach to how to address philanthropy, we don’t have a collective approach for how do we transition out of that. I think those are discussions that we really need to start taking on. I think it’s going to become more critical to get into these issues, especially if globalization—in reality, we are underwritten by a lot of these very same corporations, through their foundations.

Question

So if I go to the World Social Forum I can start a meeting to talk about money?

Guerrero

Exactly.

Question

Maybe we might have comments about how resources were managed in the past. Porto Alegre, the World Social Forum... How did you handle contributions coming in? Was there a funding source or was it largely unfunded?

Candido

We start the process looking to the funders of my institution, because I’m also looking for funds. The same international foundations and agencies supported the process. The first one was Oxfam from UK and the Netherlands. And the Ford Foundation from the United States was the other. Half of the money, more than half were from local governments in Porto Alegre. That second forum was from the same, but the third one some money from federal government in 2005, a lot of money from the government, because it was a forum with, it cost only the infrastructure various translators, facilitators - eight million dollars. Half of this was from Brazilian different kinds of levels of governments. And the other part was from these kind of foundations. But Ford Foundation has had problems in 2004 and is no more supporting directly the process. It wants to be engaged, but I don’t know what has happened here, because of Bush Administration. We have a research commission because we have an international consul. Mainly networks - that more important network is engaging the forum. And we meet two or three times a year, inside this international consul with our commission. One is research commission and in this moment we’ve been discussing yesterday about the possibilities coming now to discuss funding the process.

The main idea, how to develop the idea of ownership of the forum. One discussion is a one-day salary campaign in the world. We have 300,000 people in Sao Paolo participating, and we want to ask from them a base one-day salary to support the forum. Also we are increasing a little bit description in a different way because we are different in the world. Some can pay $1, others can pay $100. And increase this. And this kind of initiative you have more autonomy because this is the main problem for us. In Nairobi, we are discussing the budget until now, but they will need something around $5.5 million. They are asking more, but it’s impossible to find. And those millions we need from outside the camp, because it’s a poor camp. In fact yesterday, our friends here to be with us from the Netherlands, with the funders, to discuss, and maybe we will fix the need. It’s possible. In October, the idea is coming from a meeting in San Francisco with funders in the United States. And they’re not trying to fund globally, but they’re doing not good work here. And I said, the U.S. Social Forum needs funds, let’s discuss this. We meet together, the global and the U.S. Social Forum, in October in New York I think, to discuss how to support practically here and internationally.

Question

An integral part of the local host committee fundraising is a bumper sticker. For you bumper sticker bearers, for the U.S. Social Forum here in Atlanta, $1, I’d be glad to see you.

Lovelace

I want to say too that this is something you need to understand about what we’re trying to undertake. We are committed that this will be a representation not only of those who lead organizations and lead campaigns, but of grassroots people, of everyday citizens. Everyday citizens must be able to attend the United States Social Forum. Because in this country, change happens when the people demand change. So we must be able to talk with welfare mothers, with unemployed workers, with those people who are without health care, in order to raise their consciousness to understand what is necessary to make this change. And that is one of the reasons it’s so critical—what you have just done, you have just demonstrated how powerful the individual is, how any movement is possible when people are willing to make it happen. And that is what we’re relying on. Individual contributors like you, we pass the hat every time we talk, it’s people who will make this change. Organizations like BBJ and Jobs without Justice, Project South, they’re putting in their organizational money, taking from their own budget, to make this happen. Because we have talked to foundations and while they are willing to fund a social forum in Brazil or India, they are not willing to let you come together to talk about your own destiny. And that is the truth of where we sit in this country! And that’s why it’s critical that we must all become agents for this important activity. We have to go back to our communities, talk about it, raise consciousness, and we as individuals have to make this happen.

Valentin

Thank you, everyone. [applause]

Contact conference@tcg.org or Jenni Werner, National Conference Director at 212-609-5900 x233.