Organizing: To Do

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Alright folks, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to it. The protest last night was fantastic. It was a spontaneous, grassroots and netroots uprising that resulted in thousand of people peacefully marching through the streets for the cause of equality and GLBTQI rights! And the best thing is, it’s just the beginning. We, the GLBTQI and allied denizens of SF, need to raise our voices and bring our cause to national attention and make sure that everyone knows that marriage equality is about civil rights and full equality under the law!

To that end, here’s a short list of things to organize for the Nov. 15, 10:30 A.M. rally at City Hall:

1. Get permits: Edited: We are getting a permit, thank you for all your help!

2. Speakers: Edited: Thank you all for your suggestions and emails, we have a full list of people to contact for speaking and have leads on getting ASL interpreters for the event.

3. PA System: Edited: We have leads on sound systems, thank you.

4. Publicity: There are a few ways to get the word out, and to be effective we need to use all of them:

• Community Outreach: The need for publicity coincides with the outreach to all our communities. We need to contact GLBTQI organizations, political organizations, religious organizations, minority organizations, schools, etc. (any suggestions for the list? Please comment.) and ask them to contact their members. These requests for publicity and attendance are the most effective when they come from community members, so if you belong to a religious group, an activist group, a political group, etc., please talk to folks in your community about coming to the protest.

• Schools: college and high school students, particularly members of GLBTQI organizations, that are interested in volunteering with publicity or organizing – contact your organizations for publicity, put up fliers around campus, etc. If you’re interested in organizing your school’s club for publicity or have familiarity with organizing events, please check out the fliers page and spread the word with your organization!

• Fliers: We need to get fliers up and out, which is where everyone with access to a printer and a stapler or tape come in: print the fliers and put them up at your community centers, dorms, apartment buildings, coffee shops, stores, libraries, and any place where you see a bulletin board. Please be respectful of private property.  Print some fliers, put them in your bag in the morning, and stick them up as you go about your day. This is a (non-comprehensive) list of the areas that need to be fliered.

• Internet: Go viral. We need as much publicity across the internet as possible. The Facebook event is Join the Impact – San Francisco. Link to this post and cross-post it to your blogs, your Facebooks and MySpaces and Orkuts and any other social network, add it to Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine, share it on Google Reader, and get the word out! If you are familiar with MySpace and want to create a page, email me.

5. Signs/Fliers: If you’ve designed fliers and signs for any anti-Prop. 8 protests and would like to share them, please send links or emails of the designs and I’ll link/post them here.  If you would like to make signs for people to print out and bring to the protest on Saturday, please send me links or emails.

Whew! Looking back at this list, it’s not all that long or hard. If everyone does something, we can easily take care of it all. However, that’s the key thing: everyone has to do something, whether it’s tell a colleague about the protest or stick up ten fliers or ask a leader to show their commitment to civil rights and speak at our protest. This protest is for our rights, it’s for our community, and it’s about our equality and dignity as human beings, which means that we need to step up and organize!

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Filed under JoinTheImpact, National Day of Protest 11/15, Prop. 8, Prop. 8 Protest, San Francisco