Kitchen Table Activism

Background: Kitchen Table Activism (KTA) is a monthly project of the Rural Organizing Project. Often building on quarterly themes, short actions are described in each KTA. The theory is that basic steps and tasks can lead to powerful collective results as small groups of people gather to complete the same action throughout the state of Oregon.

ROP works to keep the basic tasks easily achievable so that groups with other projects or groups with limited immediate energy can still manage to complete the KTA each month.

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World Conference on Racism
thinking globally and acting locally

KTA for September 2001

Purpose

This activity is designed to raise awareness of the World Conference on Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that begins August 31, 2001. Your group will discuss the purpose of the conference and brainstorm local incidents to help link the local and the global. The goal is to raise the visibility of the conference and how it impacts your local climate in the pursuit of human rights. Your group can also gain some publicity by promoting the connections.

Why do this?

Growing out of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (previous KTA actions have raised the profile of this treatise), the World Conference on Racism seeks to promote the faith in fundamental human rights, in dignity and worth of the human person.

World conferences such as this one usually consist of two portions. One forum is for official governmental exchange and agreement, called the Governmental forum. The second avenue is for non-profit and private organizations to exchange ideas and practices to reduce discrimination, called the Non-Governmental Organizations forum (NGO Forum). Together, both forums seek the common goal of reducing the classification of race to equal treatment under the law and in practice.

As this KTA goes into the mail however, the United States official governmental delegation is threatening to drop out of the conference based on tensions with other nations' focus on the problem of the Israel-Palestine conflict. An estimated 3000 to 5000 NGO participants from the U.S.A. however are pressing forward to attend (and some delegates are from Oregon groups that we can hear back from directly such as CAUSA). The United States is a signatory of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1994) that requires periodic evaluation and reporting to assure people's rights are being upheld. This activity is designed to help bring the impact of this global conference into our own communities.

Steps

  1. Reach consensus on whether your group wants to take on this activity.
  2. Review the enclosed articles ahead of time to share with the group (or distribute for people to read at the group meeting itself) to provide some background on the purpose of the conference.
  3. Use the discussion questions (on the back of this page) to generate ideas about local and global connections if you need some help to start your exchange.
  4. Have someone keep notes about these different examples and review them with the group after several minutes of brainstorming.
  5. Decide if you would like to have the whole group write their own letters to the editor, or to submit an opinion piece in the name of the group, or if there were some other media outlet with which it would be appropriate to share the group's local-global.
  6. Clarify process for getting the piece out; send a copy to ROP (or post to ROPNET).
  7. Congrats! You have literally just been thinking globally and acting locally!
  8. BONUS ACTIVITY: Think back to the ROP's Long Range Plan. One of ROP's goals over the next four years is: The ROP will work to increase local group capacity to combat discrimination and to work effectively individually and with allies to advance racial equality and immigrant rights.

    Do you have feedback about program direction you would like to see to meet your own local needs and ROP's Long Range Plan? Let us know! E-mail or call, thanks!

Questions and Resources

Here are the discussion questions and websites that provided the general articles that went snail mail to each local contact. You can check out many more related sites while you are on-line! This is a case where the web can bring the global home. The two support articles mailed out can be found at the following links. Both are pdf files that require Adobe Acrobat Reader to download.

Discussion Questions
Bringing the global issues home, and issues at home to the global stage.

1. What documents do we use in our own communities to teach about standards of human rights? How do we enforce them? (Explore tradition, moral authority, policy, government, police)

2. What do you see as the most difficult issue in your community about race and racial bias?

3. Do you think the issue you named is similar to one experienced in another part of the state or region? The nation or another country?

4. How do we begin to tackle these sorts of problems in our own communities? Can we learn from other states' and countries' examples?

5. What role can national and international standards play in reducing institutional discrimination?

Based upon your discussion, is there a common action you can take to raise the visibility of this global event in your town?

Resources If you have Internet access, you may be interested in further background material. Go to:

www.un.org/WCAR/ (official conference website) or

or www.ngoworldconference.org (official site for NGO conference).

p.s. As of today 8/27 the Bush Administration has said there will be no official delegation from the United States because of the connections being made between Zionism and Racism. Colin Powell, Secretary of State, issued a release this morning saying that he currently has no plans to attend.

Questions? Please contact us!