A report on our 2019 national gathering

Last weekend we held our national gathering. Thanks to the secretary of our board, Delia Landers, we have some notes to share with all of you that could not attend.

 

On El Salvador

Felicia Mijango, from CRIPDES regional UCRES, gave an update on El Salvador.

The new directiva has six women and one man. They are from the five regions. They are all new except for two of them who have been on the directiva before. One of the members is a youth. CRIPDES was founded as an organization to defend rights, to organize communities. But previous junta directivas have not upheld this. This new directiva wants to restructure and rebuild with the communities. What really matters is the situation that we are facing now.

In El Salvador there is a struggle to try and organize the communities. The new government that just took power this year has instituted many changes with the economy, social programs, opening for transnationals to come into the country. The government’s propaganda has been to sell this as a way to create jobs but in reality many people working with social programs have been fired. New territorial plan in El Salvador that is attempting to get rid of gangs from the urban areas but that is leading to people in gangs reaching out to the rural areas. This is not being publicized. There are communities in which CRIPDES has done work against violence in the past and now they are having to deal with this new issue with the youth.

The new directiva needs to figure out how to face these new challenges.

Global Warming, communities are not talking about climate change. But people are noticing the changes. People are not able to produce as much. They are working with youth and with women to try and combat climate change but it is difficult because there is so much to do. They are working to get a law to protect water. This has been a long ongoing fight. There are many laws in place that are in danger of being overturned, such as the mining law.

CRIPDES is coming up with their strategic plan this week and are going to be working on how to put these into concrete plans.

 

Q&A

Jennifer: What about the programs for children and communities that came through the FMLN?

Felicia: The program for children’s uniforms and for food programs in school and they were funded until this year but a lot of the social programs have not been included in the new budget, there is a struggle to put them in.

Within the ministry of agriculture they were notified that there was no longer going to be spaces for women.

Shelia: What is happening with the seed program?

Felicia: Before they were buying seeds from smaller farms and now they say that they are not going to, they are considering buying seeds from Monsanto.

Dennis: Is there some consensus on what a water law would specifically say?

Felicia: It would be that communities would be the ones administering water, they are trying to privatize it. There are two bills, one that would privatize from the private sector and then there is a popular movement group that would have it be community based. The private sector named the bill very similarly so to confuse people.

Jerry: When the new government says that their seeds are better do they specify what they mean?

Felicia: No they are just saying that they are.

Marc: Off of the election we had a significant defeat of the popular movement and people looking to elect an alternative party that has turned out to be neo liberal and working with the US. What is the social movement doing to address? What kind of reflection is FMLN doing in this defeat? What is the relationship between the social movement and the party? What is happening in the communities?

Felicia: One of the things that they are trying to do it getting organized again. When the FMLN was in power they detached themselves from the social movement. CRIPDES can say that they are working to improve the organization and find alternatives. The relationship with FMLN is only partial.

Zulma: CRIPDES is part of the national table against Water privatization, about 50 people meet every week. They invited someone from the FMLN to talk about their opinion on the work, after he had been talking for five minutes people started to boo him. The communities see that there are some leaders who are not working for the people.

Felicia: Communities that used to be historically left and have opted for this new party it was because this party was pretending not to be left or right. They were using populism. The majority people who voted for them were young people and then saw that so many social programs were being taken away.

It is very important to make an in depth analysis of the situation in El Salvador.

Libby: I am wondering about the food security, is there more food available, are the crops better?

Felicia: There has been irregular rain and a lack of rain and so people are struggling to have enough to eat. CRIPDES is working on trying to recover the local seed and having farmers use that to grow. Trying to counteract the lack of water and rain.

 

 

Groups

We held a discussion about the diffent groups: popular education, migration, climate change, communications and how to make the best use of them in term of a long-term (and sustained) relationship with our entire network.

For example, one of the commitments was that Jennifer Long (Austin) is going to work on creating the new protocols for delegations in terms of committing to what they are going to do after they leave, especially for the scholarship recipients.

If you have ideas that you want to share, let us know.

 

 

Our plan

After reviewing our operative plan, the following items were discussed:

There are things from last year’s plan that we have accomplished, especially in regards to the migration committee.

Next gathering it would be helpful to use our operative plan as a benchmark to see how we did in the past year

Specificity is important

Define what we are planning on doing and then revise them when we hear about the complete operative plan from CRIPDES.

We need to be very clear about who we are and what we are doing.

Think about how we could expand the role that the board has in the organization, there is definitely a lot of structural possibility there

Important to figure out what these smaller committees and workgroups are going to focus upon and then go from there

We will continue to work on this over the next couple of months

 

 

 

 

If you want to read all the notes from our gathering, let us know. People were more energized after this and we even got new members for our board. Since, this year we are officially letting go of the New Jersey committee, there is no better time to remind you to spread the word, engage more people and help us get more sustainers for the upcoming years. Remember that we are all about people-to-people solidarity.

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