20250701 STAND Newsletter – Rally with Clairemont Oaks
What’s new with STAND
Our members at Clairemont Oaks will be holding sidewalk rallies on the second Saturdays (12-12:20pm) over the summer to bring attention to the potential impact of cuts to medicare, medicaid, social security, and HUD. Email us for more details and support your community!
Our FOIA team is ramping back up to access government policy around ICE detentions – reach out if you want to join in the fun!
Dear Friends,
In the past 72 hours, our FOIA team has sent more than 40 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests to all 15 government departments – 16 if you count DOGE. They were coordinated to be sent simultaneously by 8 STAND members so that we could carefully document the responsiveness of the executive branch to legitimate requests for public information. Responses have already started to trickle in, and I’m proud to say that so far, the experiment we have launched is going according to plan. After gathering responses, and pushing back on non-responsive units, we will use the data we collect to give our elected officials perspective and ammunition to address a profoundly broken but critical democratic system of accountability. Reach out if you want to learn more and join the team! I believe after tinkering a bit that we have found a way to use this tool to make a real impact on our society.
At the same time, we have learned this afternoon that the US Senate has chosen to pass a bill that will undoubtedly cost millions of Americans their healthcare coverage, and profoundly damage our nation’s support infrastructure making us less able to care for the most vulnerable among us. It is deeply disappointing, although perhaps not unexpected, and will result in preventable lives lost. I am personally deeply saddened by it for the impact it will have on my own work, but more importantly, on the impact that it will have on my friends and neighbors who will undoubtedly be affected.
Sometimes as I explain to people what STAND is, and how we have built it together over the past 4 months, they will respond by saying “I’m sorry that you’ve had to spend your time doing that”. I’m not. I’m sad that people’s lives have been impacted by bad policy, and that families are being harmed, and that we are having to relearn lessons that I’d been convinced we learned long ago. But I’m not sad to be spending time building community with you all. In fact, I’m sad that we weren’t doing it earlier.
There will be challenging days to come, but the meaningful path forward will always be together. As we sit down over beers at a pub, or sing together in the streets, or make phone calls together at a meeting, the most important work is the work we are doing to know each other better and relearn how to show up for each other. This moment we are experiencing together is giving you license to break down the walls you’ve built over many years and really see your neighbors, perhaps for the first time. When I talk to you all, I can see what’s possible. Help me find ways to bridge our communities so that when we STAND, we stand together.
STANDing with you,
Matt
