Occupy Oakland Foreclosure Defense Group seeks full recognition as committee.
Submitted to GA Facilitation Committee on March 4, 2012 via email.
Formerly recognized as a working group of Occupy Oakland, we the Foreclosure Defense Group seek full recognition as an Occupy Oakland committee. We are the group that organized the Gayla Newsome re-occupation of December 6th and its subsequent successful defense. We are the group that is helping Mrs. Katie Mitchell of North Oakland successfully fight to keep her home of 35 years. We have come to a point where we are trying to integrate many new members into our process and into the fight, and so wish to make our process transparent, our membership requirements clear, and further extend lines of communication to committees and to OO as a whole.
Our membership structure:
Our work demands solid accountability. We are intimately involved with families and their homes and so demand a high level of commitment and responsibility from our organizers. To serve this end we have adopted a model utilizing different levels of commitment and expectation for our membership. There are three levels of involvement.
Supporter: You receive email updates on all the various fights we are in and emails letting you know how you can plug in (This is the lowest level of commitment.).
Member: You lend regular support, take on tasks, and are a voting member in our meetings. To become a member, you must come to an action or have an organizer vouch for you. Members can bring proposals before the group.
Organizer: You consistently come to weekly meetings, strategize for fights, organize actions, and take on frontline duties. We are still working out whether or not this should be a formal level or a more conceptual distinction.
Our commitments to the GA and to Occupy Oakland as a whole:
There is a persistent visibility and communication problem on the part of committees within Occupy Oakland; the right hand rarely knows what the left hand is doing.
We commit to report back to the GA once a week regardless of the weeks particular activities.
We commit to regularly updating our page on occupyoakland.org with the latest information on our fights and how to get involved.
We WILL publish our general meeting notes.
We WILL NOT publish the notes of our strategy meetings nor publish any notes containing any sensitive or confidential information on our allies or on those seeking our help.
We will maintain our own website where we will publish updates, aggregate news on housing, land reclamation, and foreclosure fights. In addition, we aspire to archive resource material as well as document the particular fights we have taken on.
We hope to participate in the larger movement discussions and strategies such as the weekly interoccupy phone conferences and local occupy coordinating councils.
We hereby submit this proposal to the Occupy Oakland General Assembly Facilitation Committee on March 4,2012.
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