Join smartMeme and 1,000+ other social justice organizations in Detroit for the US Social Forum June 22-26th…

The biggest, badest, boldest convergence of 2010!

SmartMeme’s Featured USSF Events both are slated for

THURSDAY JUNE 24:

smartMeme Workshop - Thurs. 6/24 10 am - 12 pm

Story-based Strategy: How Grassroots Organizers Can Win the Battle of the Story
Cobo Hall, room DO-03D

Book Release Party - Thurs. 6/24 6-8 pm

Free food & cash bar!

Celebrate smartMeme’s Re:Imagining Change @ the Majestic Cafe

4120 Woodward Ave between Mack & Warren, Detroit 48201

RSVP on Facebook

SmartMeme is also a collaborator on the Echo-Justice Project and the Narrative Peoples Movement Assembly!

** Join us by taking a quick framing strategies survey and participating in the peoples’ movement assembly:

Narrative Peoples Movement Assembly

Friday June 25 1:00pm - 5:00pm

Media Justice Dreamz/Echo Justice: Building Movement through Building Meaning

Cobo Hall: D2-08

With: Center for Media Justice, smartMeme, Praxis Project & Progressive Communicators Network

This PMA is about elevating framing and story-based strategies a key methods to advance media justice and build social justice movements!

More Great USSF Stuff From smartMeme’s Friends and Fam:

WEDNESDAY JUNE 23

Movement Generation - Eco-Justice 101: Ecological Crises, Impacts on Communities of Color, and Strategies for the Future

10 AM - 12 PM
AFL-CIO Canopy
Communities of color stand to be first and worst impacted by the multiple ecological crises that are developing today. These crises: of water scarcity and pollution, climate change, waste and toxic pollution, food and agriculture, and the loss of biological and cultural diversity, are a result of the same systems that have driven exploitation and oppression in our communities. They demand the urgent attention of our leaders and organizers as we build our resistance and fight for a better tomorrow. This workshop, which will feature audiovisual presentation, small group discussion, and interactive exercises, will explore: 1. What are these developing crises? 2. How will they impact low-income communities of color in the US and globally? 3. What are examples of community resistance that we can learn from? and 4. How can understanding these struggles create opportunities to advance our work on other issues like housing, jobs, immigration, community development, education, etc?

Eco-Justicia 101: Crisis Ecologica, Efectos sobre las Comunidades de Color y Estrategias para el Futuro

This workshop is also offered in Spanish 1-3 PM

Cobo Hall: DO-02A
LIMITED TO 50 PEOPLE

DS4Si: Social Interventions: An Approach to Creating Social Change
1 PM - 3 PM
Woodward Academy: 1436
with the Design Studio 4 Social Intervention
Social interventions are creative and often public ways to create social change. In this interactive workshop we will engage participants in designing powerful, fun and creative social interventions through: reviewing five diverse social interventions, looking for themes, addressing the S’s of intervention design (scale, structure, systems, symbols, and sensation), discussing the importance of increasing interventionist approaches to change, and inviting participants to be a part of a larger conversation and practice of designing social interventions.

THURSDAY JUNE 24

Movement Generation - Eco-Justice 101: Ecological Crises, Impacts on Communities of Color, and Strategies for the Future
10 AM - 12 PM
WSU Cohn: 224
Communities of color stand to be first and worst impacted by the multiple ecological crises that are developing today. These crises: of water scarcity and pollution, climate change, waste and toxic pollution, food and agriculture, and the loss of biological and cultural diversity, are a result of the same systems that have driven exploitation and oppression in our communities…

Global Justice Ecology Project - Climate Connections: Building the Movement for Social Change

10 AM -12 PM
Woodward Academy: 1436

Co-hosted with: Movement Generation, Indigenous Environmental Network, Women of Color United and others. Climate Change is at once a social and environmental justice issue, an ecological issue, and an issue of economic and political domination. As such, it must be addressed through broad and visionary alliances. To successfully address the climate crisis, we must also identify and address the deep root causes that link it to the myriad other crises we face…

Ruckus Society & Training 4 Change - No More Rallies, No More Marches: Direct Action Strategies for Climate Justice & Community Resiliency
1 PM - 530 PM
Cobo Hall: DO-03B
Tired of seeing the same old mass demonstrations? So are we! This workshop will explore creative innovative action design, to help push past marches and rallies into direct actions that are strategic, effective, and fun!

FRIDAY JUNE 25

Peoples Movement Assembly - Ecological Justice
Co-Convened by: Movement Generation, Ruckus Society, Southwest Workers Union, EJCC, Just Transition Alliance, and many others…
1:00pm - 5:00pm
Cobo Hall: D3-28
This is a BIG PMA that bringing folks together to advance proposals from the grassroots for shared work on climate and ecological justice rooted in an understanding of the need to transform the global systems that determine the ways each of us gets to live, work, and play.

Art is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation

1 - 3 PM

New World from Below Book Party
7-9pm
Spirit of Hope Church - 1519 Martin Luther King Dr, Detroit 48208

Celebrate recent radical publishing with AK Press, PM Press, Autonomedia, Institute of Anarchist Studies, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Microcosm Publishing, Team Colors Collective, and others!

SATURDAY JUNE 26

MASS STREET ACTION for Clean Air, Good Jobs and Justice!

Rally at 9 am in front of Detroit Public Library, 5201 Woodward

Join the People of Detroit on Saturday, June 26 for a Rally, March & Mass Demonstration to End the World’s Biggest Waste Incinerator!

See You In DETROIT!!!!

Two new Podcasts For your Listening Enjoyment…

Click to LISTEN: Part One :

Moderator: Laine Romero-Alston, Solidago Foundation; with Makani Themba-Nixon, Praxis Project; Doyle Canning, smartMeme; and Kathleen Pequeño, McKenzie River Gathering Foundation.

Click to LISTEN: Part Two :

Moderator: Helen Brunner, Quixote Foundation and Media Democracy Fund
 
Panel; with Karlos Guana Schmeider, Center for Media Justice; Patrick Reinsborough, smartMeme; Damekia Morgan, Community Media Organizing Project and Friends and Families of Louisana’s Incarcerated Children.

(Special thanks to Karlos @ the Center for Media Justice for posting this audio!)

This tele-strategy session series was organized by the Progressive Communicators Network, and brings together grassroots communications practitioners with a commitment to justice issues and funders who support justice and social movement efforts for a rare opportunity to think together about opportunities and imperatives to strengthen communications as a tool for change that will substantively impact U.S. culture, consciousness, and political policies.

This is a time of unprecedented change for grassroots communications practitioners. Factors such as the current economic crisis, rampant media consolidation, emerging new media technology and shift in administration bring unique and urgent challenges and opportunities. Faced with this changing communications landscape, grassroots justice organizations must make smart decisions about how to effectively communicate to advance their program and political work, often with fewer resources and confronted with changes in how media is made and news is communicated.
 
These times demand whole new approaches to change making and communication. It’s no longer enough to win individual victories, we must fundamentally shift our social, cultural and political ecology.

The Center for Media Justice, for example, has put out a call for a comprehensive and transformative approach to justice communications: Truly effective and sustainable movements for racial and economic justice must have the capacity, strategy, and leadership to advance a shared worldview and agenda, watchdog power, elevate strategic stories to a wider audience, increase engaged popular governance, and influence policy to change social conditions.They outline a powerful strategy that tackles race head on, brings the voices of the disenfranchised to the center, transforms public narratives, increases media access, and ultimately changes public consciousness and policy.

Join us to hear about these cutting edge strategies and more communications realities from across the country. We invite you to be part of creating the strategy and infrastructure that will boldly work to transform communications, change work, and the political realities of the 21st century.

Join me and smartMeme board member Shana McDavis-Conway on March 27th for a special pre-conference intensive - RE:Framing Feminism: Narrative, Strategy, and Social Change - at the Women, Action & Media (WAM!) conference in Cambridge, Mass.

Welfare Queen. Baby Mama. Red Neck Woman. Soccer Mom. Having It All. This workshop will engage you in a process of “Narrative Power Analysis” to surface and analyze the stories and stereotypes about gender that we confront in our lives and work, and the sexist assumptions that often underpin them. The intersecting narratives of gender, race, and class create a complex mine-field of messages in the dominant culture that all of our work must struggle to re-frame and transform. The session will use images, media, theater techniques, and small group work to envision feminist interventions in the contemporary media environment…

Register now to join us for this Friday Intensive! Stick around and see Jen Angel’s sessions on Covering Climate Change and Publicity on a Shoestring: Promoting Your Own Book or Project on a Tight Budget…

The full list of WAM! 2009 workshops is here. With co-sponsors like Alternet, Bitch Magazine, Femministing, and the Women & Gender Studies Program @ MIT we are bound to be in good company!

See you at WAM!

New from smartMeme: Changing the Story for Media Justice!

smartMeme was invited to collaborate with the SPIN Project on their newly released toolkit Whose Media? Our Media! - Strategic Communications Tools to Reform, Reclaim, and Revolutionize the Media

In communities across the country, inspiring campaigns of resistance and transformation are standing up to powerful corporations and bought-and-paid-for-politicians. The Battle of the Story is being waged daily to determine whether our collective mediascape will be a sterile corporate monoculture or a vibrant ecosystem of diverse voices and perspectives….
~ From Patrick Reinsborough’s contribution, It’s Time to Change the Story!

The Whose Media? Tool Kit is an impressive, comprehensive, change agent How-To Guide. Packed with tips, analyses and best practices, Whose Media? Our Media! walks you through the tools of strategic communications – planning, framing, messaging, creative campaign tactics — and offers special spotlights on digital media/Web 2.0, Ethnic Press and Funding the Work.

Whether you are a seasoned activist, or someone new to the movement trying to get your story out, this tool kit is an invaluable ally in the battle of the story.

smartMeme Says:

Don’t Leave Home / Take on Corporate Media

Without It!

You Can Download the Toolkit Here: [Download PDF (1.8 MB)]

Or order hard copy from SPIN.
*If you are a member of an organization that works for media reform or media justice, you are eligible to receive a free copy of this kit! If you would like a copy of this kit but do not fit the above criteria, you may order the kit for $15.00 (includes shipping and handling).

ENJOY!