Some thoughts about the students bill of rights

A renewed call has been issued for a student bill of rights, and here in Baltimore some organizing has begun which is facilitating productive discussions about this opportunity. The organization around these efforts is in the early stages, and not very formalized, but some good folks are on it.

This is not a new call, a google news search for “youth bill of rights” displayed in timeline view illustrates the salience of this call throughout history. The notion of a bill of rights speaks to the disenfranchised because it evokes the most basic rights that are to expected to be guaranteed to all citizens*. Civil rights struggles started in the past and continuing today have worked to transform the interpretation of a citizen so as to make sure that the rights guaranteed in the constitution are extended to all regardless of race, gender, national origin, religion, and increasingly other protected groups.

A movement for a youth bill of rights must be a civil rights movement which aims to humanize under the law, people which are denied the rights afforded to whole civic beings. Extending small rights to young people…the right to drink clean water…the right to choose your school…the right to go where you want when you want etc, are meaningless without constitutional recognition of youth as a protected group. Because if the small rights are not backed up by fundamental civil & economic rights then the small rights only exist to the extent that the state or the larger society decides they should exist.

Without fundamental constitutional rights (including the right to vote) any extension of rights to youth is an act of benevolence by the same system that currently exploits, subjugates, and disenfranchises young people. While acts of benevolence may be a momentary lapse in an otherwise oppressive relationship, they still leave the power structure in place because without full constitutional protection the adults can simply revoke the rights extended to youth through an act of benevolence.

Organizing efforts should focus on envisioning a world in which youth are full beings under the bill of rights, what would the world look like if young people had constitutional protections that overwhelmed school,police, city or any other policy. What if young people could vote when they learn about civics. What if young people could own businesses that didn’t require an adult to sign off on things. Exercises in after school programs and in classrooms and on street corners that help students to envision these worlds will not only build the youth advocacy capacity to make an argument for basic human rights, but will also provide a focus for a movement that could change the world, but only if it aims big.

On the hunt

Sometimes good things end. My time at Youth Organizing Urban Revitalization Systems was amazing, I learned so much, and had a great opportunity to work with an amazing program and a great group of people. But due in large part to the economy this job has ended, and this week, begins a new job hunt.

So I have spent today updating my resume, my LinkdIn Profile and working on figuring out what comes next. As always that is a complex question, because while i search for new jobs, i am also in a sense starting two new businesses. Really its one business with a for profit and a non-profit purpose that will likely merge into one or the other later, but for now its a balancing act.

Two new businesses? What are they?

The unifying theme is social media for youth and community organizations…The for profit business provides , consulting, and coaching to non-profits, schools, and community groups looking to develop social media strategies. The non-profit aspect trains young people (who then train other young people) to start their own social media campaign, strategies, sites, and businesses. In addition it will provide internet content that aims to utilize the power of the existing on the ground social networks and leverages them into an on line social network.

The goal of both is to empower organizations to more effectively use on-line tools for collaboration, resource sharing, organizing, advocacy, and communicating both internally and with the public.

Both the non profit and for profit provide employment opportunities for the youth that go through the training program, and both will use a peer to peer management structure.

Seeking a job..

I will definitely write more about all of this, but this post is about looking for jobs. Ideally I am looking for short term temporary work in the areas of social media, non-profit program development or management, argument and debate coaching, research, or event work. If you know of people who are looking for this kind of work please have them contact me.

I am also interested in permanent part time positions, in that realm i have really good office skills, and would be very interested in something like office manager, development assistant, program associate, etc.

I am in Baltimore, but the work does not have to be, telecommuting is easy as long as both ends have good phone and internet access.

My rates and salary expectations are very reasonable, if you have an idea or a question get in touch with me.

Soon this blog will be my personal blog, bmoreconnected will become the home of my tech and organization focused work and unsolicited advice will become my home for political commentary.

That is it tonight.

Sometimes the impossible is just that

One of the most inspiring things about people committed to a the possibility of a more just world is their inability to see things as impossible. The most amazing and successful things i have been involved in my life have seemed impossible when they started, and its not just me all the radicals revolutionaries and just plain justice seekers i have ever known have taken great pride in proving those that claim something they are dedicated to can’t be done in fact can.

Of course there is a flip side to that. When we fail to acheive the impossible we are often left feeling wounded, hopeless, and at times like giving up the struggle. Most anybody who has talked to me in the last few weeks has seen strains of that, but i know its not unique. Whether i have been in the struggle with you for years and years or just started speaking with you recently, i have seen the moments of pain and dismay that come from the difficulty to make the world around us operate in the way we know it should. When hard work and the right argument simply are not enough, when organizing, planning, protesting, and standing against injustice is simply not enough. It can become easy to take the inducements to stop fighting,,”after years of this… its not selling out its buying in”" It can also become easy to convince your selves with your well honed and developed argument and advocacy skills that those that you are fighting for are at least getting the struggle on on their own and you are not needed for the fight and at worst don’t want you fighting with them…so why dont you just give up the fight…not take a side and just live the most comfortable life you can…we will get to the comfort of not choosing a side more in a second. But you get what im expressing and all but the most militant of you(even them) sometimes think of giving it up.

But because you come back. I come back. A movement is built by people who keep going when that which seems impossible proves to truly be impossible.

What is possible of course is a political question and it is determined and policied by the same people that determine and police the lives of Baltimore youth. Doing the work is always part of a process of making the impossible possible… that is the role of the changemaker, the advocate, the revolutionary, the visionary.

Stepping back…seeing why i failed to make the impossible possible is instructive(at least to me), for example i am thinking alot about the projection of the future in a time sensitive make or break moment…As the time has approached where i know i will have to make the step back i talked about earlier today i have increasingly talked about an increasingly impossible future…This has been hard to avoid, and i have thought alot about it…i have recognized it in other political and organizational things and i still don’t have a good answer…at the time when a vision is often most developed, when the plan is as close to fulfillment as ever it must represent a tricky balance of strength and vulnerability…im thinking alot about this.

Why all the grandiose movement talk andy, i know it sucks, but its not like you are Anne Braden. I believe YOURS is part of a movement that empowers (urban) youth around Baltimore (and the world) to self determine their own economic and social and civic existence. Pardon the nod to simple Marx but until youth have access to the tools of economic production they will be exploited by the economy.In Schools, in communities,in families, in prison, in the workforce, and in Iraq this exploitation will continue until young people build the power to make it stop.

The point of all this really is, i leave today with my held high, i think the work we have done has been great, i will do whatever i can to help support it, even if its not my job…so i will move on to do something else(or maybe something similar) who knows, but i will either in my free time or as my job work and work and work for the youth civil rights movement.

And im ok with that.

Television released it’s grip on poor people

So today television ended for people who can’t afford cable or a digital converter box. That is kind of a strange thing. Television exerts tremendous influence on the lives of most Americans, until today the poor have not been excluded from this. But people who can’t afford to pay for television will not get to watch the rest of the nba finals, nor the world series, the midterm elections, or god forbid another 9-11. Now you have to pay to watch even that.

But it also means the poorest Americans also won’t be able to watch sitcoms, serials, scandal, and the cop dramas that make of the majority of network television. As much as it is entertaining, television is also a tremendously power control mechanism. It teaches us what to strive for, what is beautiful, and perhaps most importantly what is possible. And perhaps the discomfort of missing dr phil in the middle of the night will be overcome by the potential moment of liberation that this end of tv poses.

The poorest of people, those that can’t afford to pay for tv, have a bit of an opportunity. Because they will have to make their own entertainment, their own culture, and their own news and politics. While the new forms of living that emerge in a post television world will be diverse their participants will have the opportunity to shape their own ideas of politics and aesthetics and culture free of the influence that tv trys to exert on them.

This could be beautiful…of course the notion of poor people creating their own culture is not new, nor is it caused by the end of analog broadcast signals, but the willingness of the content providers to relase their grip on the poorest Americans in a short-sighted fit of capitalist power grabbing, may just provide a unique opportunity for the do it your self life forms of the poorest Americans.

Embrace the digital conversion to create beautiful art and poetry, plans for empowerment and liberation, to live and love, and to let the people around you be your American idols.

Bmore Connected

I speant a lot of time on the bmoreconnected blog tonight. I am very excited about it. I think it can become a really good resource for (bmore) grassroots organizations, the general idea is to provide technology tips, reviews and discussions related to the work we all do. The thought is that we all have our favorites but it becomes difficult to keep track if we don’t have trusted reviewers…so the blog is an open portal to using tech for your social justice work. Hopefully we can attract a lot of outside talent to solving baltimore most pressing problems.

More on this to come

Lots of new connectivity

It has been a busy time at work and i have been diligently setting up the new information Structure for YOURS and have not had a time to write about my own things, in many ways the work i have been doing to get YOURS all .org 2.0 has been great for me it has let me see how i can put information i really like to work for Youth/Social Enterprise ventures.

When i started this blog i also created several others which i could not figure out how to use while walking the thin and often invisable line between work and personal, and have decidied that this is my space(no not like that) and those spaces are their own…But this post may blur those lines, because im gonna highlight some of the new things i have been working on so i can connect my readers (hello hong mei) to the work i do.

I would imagine that very few of you are sitting around everyday saying, hmm what is YOURS up to today…or better yet before we get there what do they do down there in Hampden…but just in case…YOURS is a non profit organization that teaches urban youth to start their own socially responsible businesses…in the past we have done urban gardening, T-Shirt design, and a variety of other cool things, in june we opened up a store to serve as a hands on Business Incubation Learning Lab–but we have had a terrible time keeping up with the production side of things, we have a million good designs but lack the capacity to produce it…I have personally been very interested in Web 2.0 technology since that term has come into being but was having a hard time figuring out how to mix my work and my passion…

But recently all that has changed…we realized that with great and inspirational ideas coming out of our young people and our educators every day we needed to learn how to be more nimble in a digital age…we have the concept…youth enterprise…we have the people…but we have had a hard time with the product.

But maybe, we have found the soloution.(to which i owe a great debt of gratitude to Wikinomics, a book i will reveiw soon which is much more helpful than i might have thought)

We are letting our ideas run wild and shifting much of our production from arts and crafts to  knowledge…so we have been rolling alot of new things out…with the goal of not only training urban youth how the “new economy” works but also creating a pretty cool and unique web presence.

Zazzle…years ago i had speant alot of time playing with Cafepress and was unimpressed with how it worked…just somethings that i thought might be intuitive that it would not do…and i was not that excited about the production…but a few years have gone by and those intuitive features have been added. So we have created the YOURS Zazzle store . This will allow us to make products with all the designs we have and to bring the students we work with into the design process, with the bottleneck that has been plauging our production process.

Facebook Page…Take a generation of youth who live on Facebook add them to a constant stream of products, services, and content then teach them to teach others what they have learned, and you have the idea for the YOURS Facebook Page. If you are a facebook user, become a fan of our page and join our cause. Not only will we use the space to update the world about YOURS, but as we learn how to make our facebook presence useful for the organization we will share resources with other organizations and with our fans.

Twitter…Poor Twitter, those who know about it mock it because it is popular (though many of the mockers have accounts), those who do not know about it think the idea is silly…Yet millions of users subscribe to the service and the vast majority use it all the time…We are excited about the millions of users, but we promise we will not send out messages like “The Dog looks sad, thinking about walking him” and then ten minutes later “Walked him”. YOURS Twitter presence will provide followers updates about what we do, when new content is available, and when new services are launched…Follow us on Twitter and help us decide how to use this service.

Youtube…We have launched the YOURS Youtube Channel. We are just starting to get content up there, but we have a student and a volunteer that are working exclusivly on finding and creating content that advertise, promote, and advocate for issues related to community led revitalization. Go to the channel and become a friend, subscribe, and start sharing your favorites with us and watching our content.

As YOURS launches each of these services we not only create accounts for the organization but we also help the young people we work with set up their own accounts, and then use the networks they create to drive users to YOURS.

YOURS is by no means an internet company, and I am by no means a coder or a designer, but by utilizing existing free services we will be able to vastly increase our ability to project the knowledge we create while working to revitalize Baltimore. For me this is an incredibly exciting time because it means that i can combine my love with decentralized pedagogy, urban youth, and technology, and it has made it so that all of the people i like to work with can work collaborativly… I love it and can not wait to see where it goes…

Stay tuned for more updates on blogs, wikis, and other cool social networks we are developing.

Blogs, cool social network tools, a life stream, and

Ex-officer charged with murder in BART shooting – CNN.com

This story on CNN pretty much shocked me. Since i have started noticing i have seen stories about cops killing people so many times i can’t even remember the names of the people killed. I mean i could literally spend the next several hours listing people killed, brutalized, raped, falsely imprisoned, and subjected to every other form of degredation possible and i would still miss people that everybody knows.  Every now and then the police responsible are suspended, disciplined, and occasionaly even charged with manslaughter. Even other instances caught on video tape or photographs have sparked debate…This one seems different though. I really have not seen any body excusing, defending, or even explaining this one away.

Ex-officer charged with murder in BART shooting – CNN.com.

CNN) – A former transit police officer accused of shooting an unarmed man at a Northern California commuter train station has been arrested and charged with murder, an Alameda County district attorney said Wednesday.

Former transit officer Johannes Mehserle is charged with homicide in connection with the death of Oscar Grant.
“What I feel the evidence indicates is an unlawful killing done by an intentional act,” district attorney Tom Orloff told reporters at a news conference.

“From the evidence we have there’s nothing that would mitigate that to something lower than a murder,” he added. “The murder charge was the appropriate charge given the state of the evidence.”

The old “well he was reaching for his tazer ” excuse has fallen away. Orloff’s quote above might indicate that he knows this as well. But the question remains…Will this cop be convicted? I guess we will see…

Claiming my blog with technocrati

Technorati Profile

That little blob of blue should allow me to claim my blog on technocrati…I’m not sure yet what the full features of that service are but you can bet that i will be finding out tonight!

2009

This is a late start on a resolution, but hopefully one i will stick with, with 352 days left it means im only about 4 per cent in violation. Now that the compliance mumbo jumbo is out of the way let me get to the list.

Things to do in 2009

1)Blog my ideas…i don’t mean the ones that are for work or the ones that suck, i mean my ideas. I come up with a million of them and at best i share them with one maybe three people. Usually the people i share them with really like them, but thats not per se a good sampling, nor does it give me the feedback or the criticism that i need to see which are good and which are eh. I’ve been meaning to blog regularly for a while now and this year i am gonna do it.

2) Monetize and socialize my tech habits… i am not a tech guy, i don’t know how to program, and i can’t develop new solutions(but then again that is not as hard as it used to be)…but i am pretty good at using the cool tools that others have made available. Instead of just aimlessly testing in the ether and forgetting about it two weeks later i am going to catalog, promote, write about and keep track of the stuff i find. Ok thats part a. Part B is to do more than browse to the site and play around with the free trial. I know the difference between wordpress and blogger, between wikispaces and google sites,  between SaaS and cloud computing but other than in occasional outbursts i never use it. So instead of spending all night playing with cool new SaaS apps I’m going to use these skills to help create social change and perhaps more importantly to make money. Plenty of people are doing this i  know, but i know my fields well enough that i can help hardworking people find the tools that are useful to them and to the broader course of social enterprisese. I am not trying to get bill gates rich, but it would be nice if i got something out of it…more to come.

3) Get in touch with old friends, new friends, and friends i never knew i could have. This year brought a major change in my life, for the first time in more than a decade and a half i have gotten away from debate, i miss it terribly, but i like what the world has to give and i want to see what my old friends are up to. For too long i sacrificed those relationships as well as the ones with my family to what at the time was a greater good. 6 months on the outside of a world where i didn’t need to have friends because i saw people i had known for decades every weekend has left me realizing how much of a void that can create in your life. I want to know what my friends do on a tuesday night, what they love,  what they think about, and what troubles them, not just how their teams are doing or what they do on sunday morning. It is really a process of learning how to socialize again, and i must say it has been painful, but i think its a process worth engaging.

4) Be Healthy… Plain and simple eat right, sleep right, stop smoking and go to the gym…there are for sure somethings i am forgetting but the point is i need and want to be healthy.

5)Commit to education…I need to get back in school, i have done quite a bit without a degree but that is not a reason to not get one, nor is it not a reason to go to grad school. For the longest time i have celebrated the success i have achieved despite having a degree but i am ready to see what can happen when i erase that obstacle. All of that aside i like learning, years on the margins of academic labor have left me bitter about the academy, but its not really the academy i have been bitter about its my lack of inclusion. In other words its not the academic labor i dont like its the marginal aspect of that. This leads me to two distinct choices 1)change the academy so that i can have a viable career in it or 2) Finish my BA. I have been remarkably successful at option number 1 but i think i am going to go with number 2.

6)Do something with politics… I read political blogs, i follow the news, i talk about my ideas but i dont really feel like i do something. I used to go protests, and meetings and stuff and i am not sure i like that. It seems like these days my 1) 2) 3) and 5) means i need to write what i think down, engage in debates, think about what i have to say and start saying it. Yes. I am going to become a political blogger. At least edebate will be happy i am leaving them alone. I’m not gonna do it every day, not that promise yet…but for someone who comments on as much stuff as i do to not have a political blog makes me so like 2001…but this is not as trite as it sounds. The response of the doctrinaire would be…ok but get out from behind the computer and into the streets….first of all this is kind of insulting to the street, but aside from that bloggers (as this election proved)have been given societal permission to speak not just from behind the computer screen but on the public screen and in the public square and in the bars and coffeehouses all around the world. Now that of course means that millions of people around the world are doing it and its tougher to do than ever, but i think i can do it and its as good a job as anything else right now.

7) Connect with the family.. I am now friends with my mom on facebook…and my little brother and i talk on aim…and facebook…but that’s not all i mean, as i have gotten older i have come to recognize the people my family is (as opposed to the role they play) and i love it. Its pretty much the best aspect of my life over the last two years, and i wish i hadn’t ignored it so long. Though i think that it wouldn’t have been the same if that engagement had begun when i was much younger, i just don’t think i was honest enough with my self to be able to be me in front of my family. I know who i am more now and i know who they are better, its nice how that works.

8)Finish Things or don’t start them if you cant… If there was an Olympics for people who start things they dont or cant finish then i would be Michael Phelps. I don’t think i am going to correct this all this year, but i need to make a start at it. The ideas i have and start are good enough that they get people who have faith in them interested and then committed, and then i lose interest, and am hugely stressed when my friends are let down by my overstrecthedness(the direct effect of starting too many things). There are a lot of things i dont like about myself, but this may be the number 1 thing to figure out for me to be successful. Maybe its time for Ritalin, but that alone is not the answer, the answer is learning how to see things through to the end.

9) Strangely is don’t be so hard on me… I am the most self critical person i know, i over-think just about everything and i am not willing to see the good things i do, when the bad ones get in my head…then i become paralyzed by my own thoughts. I need to be nicer to myself, love who i am and work to get better at the parts that i need to work on. Knowing ones self should be to love ones self.

10)Don’t make lists that are all inclusive…I couldn’t resist a self referential joke…Lists can be the friends of organization or they can be the mechanism for diverting from getting organized. If your list has 200 things on it and you add 20 a day while getting rid of 10 you are only going to convince yourself that you are far more stressed than you are. Some days i will spend so long making lists that i forget where half of the info is by the end of the session…no doubt it is a good way to think through everything….but stuff you don’t need a list to remind you of…cash paycheck…for example shouldn’t be on a list. For people who like lists and like cool web aps could literally drive themselves crazy with to-do lists…i love my 30 box list, but when what i do with my free time is create new lists of stuff i have to do either i am overstretching or i am not describing tasks very efficiently or i am way to busy and need to start delegating some. Lists are good, but they should be the things you want to remind your self of not every verb related to your work and your life i can think of.

So to not make this list disappear into the graveyard of my ideas i will need people to remind me…i am sure i can find something that will send me an rss and sms feed every day to remind but what i would prefer is if those of you who know and like me would remind me from time to  time of the things i say. If you see me being to hard on myself let me know, if i am starting ideas that i cant finish send me the link to this post. if you never read another blog post on this page.tell me…see how this works…and if i see yours here or on facebook or elsewhere i’ll let you know….i wont be a nag about it but ill remind you, if you have moved past that resolution then so be it, but if we know what each others wants and needs are we are all more likely to be happy.

Check out my article about social venture volunteering at shared sacrifice

http://www.sharedsacrifice.us/Jan8Ellis_Volunteering.html

I discuss a more movement building approach to volunteering than the typical, do grunt labor model that most corporate charities use. Shared Sacrifice is a new progressive web journal that i think you should all check out, user submitted content, and an editorial staff experienced in communicating progressive politics makes for a good combination.