20250415 STAND Newsletter – Protest Leadership Established
Dear Friends,
On Saturday, we had our third STAND meeting, and we introduced our third action team – Protest. With the formation of that leadership group, we are now organized the way we envisioned when we launched STAND less than 2 months ago. As we’ve organized, we’ve been consistent in our message: our society and its governance should reflect the value that we all share. This isn’t an unreasonable expectation; as a nation, our freedom was declared with the undeniable equality of all people written right up at the top. Our government has repeatedly fallen short of that aspiration, but grassroots movements like the one we are seeking to build have periodically forced its hand and are directly responsible for the abolition of slavery, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and more.
So with our leadership teams now in place, it’s time to get to work. Over the last couple of months, we have discussed extensively where a group of our size can meaningfully push back on policy. Some of the tools we have at our disposal will allow us to make an outsized impact, but it’s important that we develop and maintain focus in our efforts to ensure that the work we do is likely to have a measurable impact. Here are the three areas that STAND will seek to engage as we continue to grow and build our numbers:
Support of federal workers (CDC, DOE, FDA, etc.)
Defence of immigrants and their right to humane treatment and due process
Institution of compassionate policing
Each one of those areas is broad, and requires significant discussion, coordinated strategy, intelligence gathering, and action plan development to make meaningful impact. We have been developing those plans, and it’s time to roll them out, discuss them with you in detail, and get you plugged in. Starting at our next meeting on May 3rd at 3pm, we will begin having breakout groups dedicated to these targeted topics, combining both Communication and Protest to coordinate larger efforts to meaningfully impact policy. We will start on the 3rd with our federal workers effort, and rotate through those topics at future meetings.
A few things to keep in mind. First, targeted efforts and conversations are happening right now across those topics. If you are extremely passionate about one of the topics that won’t get broadly discussed until a future meeting, please reach out. We will get you in contact with the folks getting that work up off the ground and figure out if there is an area to help more immediately. Second, we are well aware that these three topics are not all encompassing, and they do not even reflect all of what we hope to do as an organization. They simply represent the areas that we feel like we can make a short-term meaningful impact. If you see another opportunity to serve our core mission, we’re happy to explore that in discussion with you.
Lastly, we will be continuing to develop specific tools that will allow us, as a group, to have the impact we want to have. We are in the process of developing workshops that will help get us there, and the first dedicated workshop will be held by the Protest team on April 29th from 6-7pm –Technology and Protest: a Beginners Guide. We will talk about the effective use of recording devices (like your phone!) in a protest and law enforcement setting, surveillance and technology disruption tactics commonly used by law enforcement, and commonly used technology to ensure secure communications within a movement. A flyer for that will be coming soon.
I’m looking forward to taking this next step with you together!
STANDing with you,
Matt
