Occupy RoanokeVA

Greetings! Thanks to all who were able to make it to our first meeting. We have a new meeting planned for either Sat./Sunday depending on whether or not The Unitarian Universalist Church of Roanoke can have us on Sunday. We are shooting for Sunday, but may have to settle for Saturday. We will know by tomorrow which day we can meet there. I have just called and left them a message that they will return by tomorrow.  I will also try to find out if we can use their nurseries to make this meeting “kid friendly”. We plan on having a 3 hour meeting to finalize the details for our Occupation of Roanoke.

I now will go through the topics/things we talked about at the meeting in order to allow everyone to see what catch up on all we discussed. Please all who were in attendance feel free to add to anything I may have missed.  Also, please anyone feel free to ask questions about anything we talked about and either I or someone will be able to answer your questions.

• The Occupy Roanoke main event will be held at Elmwood Park (right at the corner of Williamson and Elm. We plan on starting the event either Friday afternoon Oct. 14th or Saturday morning Oct. 15th.  We will work out the exact time at the next meeting so be thinking about what your thoughts are on this.  We had a discussion about whether we were doing a one day occupation or a more long term occupation of Roanoke. We all seem to think the long-term is a better fit for what we are doing and for what we want to accomplish. We wanted to set a goal of occupation for one week.  As we move forward this may change (hopefully to an extended time), but one week is a good starting goal for us. We discussed marching once a day at the same time during our occupation,  We will need to go over the details about this at the next meeting.   We want to be professional and peaceful in our protest (no vulgar signs/profanity and nothing violent).

• Brandon Martin has gotten permits before so he can help guide us in the right direction for this. We want to try our best to cooperate with city code on this, but we realize/understand they my deny our permit.  If so, we can use this as a chance to maybe get the media on our side (“We tried to get a permit and were denied”).  We will need $ to fund the permit and insurance needed to get it.  We encourage all to bring in money that they can spare to our next meeting for this purpose.  Ban Hoback (sp.?) recommended that we contact David Lawrence as our lawyer for this/other legal matters.  His number is 982-2606.  Also, Sara Scheffer offered to call Bruce Vickley (sp.?) for us and get back to us on any info he can offer us. We will talk more about this permit at the next meeting. (Brandon let us know if there is a time-frame for getting the permit done…I don’t have any info written down about that). We want to try to play ball with the city on this matter, but we will see what happens.  We will discuss a backup plan in more detail at the next meeting as well.

• If anyone doesn’t know or hasn’t seen the Declaration of OWS we will be putting up a copy of that on here.  We are here to support OWS and bring attention of their movement to Roanoke.  We stand in solidarity with them on everything they are about.  Please familiarize yourselves with this Declaration as soon as you can. (Brian please post this in a doc if it’s not already up).

• Brian is going to be making us a flyer to help us get the word out to others that may want to help us.  We were thinking that the best way to print the flyers (unless we are able to raise enough money to get them printed) would be to have a document available for folks to print them on their computers at their own expense. The flyers will be black and white.  Kaydee has volunteered to make signs for us and had some great ideas for signs.  She wants to know what your ideas are.  I am asking permission from her to post her email but until I get that ok’d feel free to contact me at jpeoples70@yahoo.com (make sure to put SIGN IDEA or whatever you are writing me about in the subject line so I will know it’s ok to open! THANKS).  We also are asking that everyone try to compile as many facts as they can about what’s going on in our economy, Wall Street, or anything that will coincide with what’s on the Declaration.  Make sure you write down the link where you found it and bring it to the next meeting.  We are going to compile as many facts as possible so that we can be able to give people pertinent information when they ask about it at the Occupation.  We will have an information center at the Occupation and will need volunteers of folks willing to share info as needed/asked for.  We also want someone to record someone reading the Declaration so that we can post this on youtube and show that we are in complete solidarity with the folks in NYC.

• We want to try to set up ways for people to donate money and want your feedback on how to go about this.  We talked about possible donation spots and want to have at least 3-4 that we can tell people to go to for donations.  These spots would ideally be a local small business.  Sara had talked about getting in touch with Burger in the Square and she will let us know about the status of that.  Pops (on Grandin?) was also mentioned by Mary Croft.  If you have an idea for a good spot to set up donation jars please let us know.  We are also looking for a volunteer to be our Treasurer and propose a budget to show why we need money and where the money is being spent.  This is an important job and one we will definitely need.  If anyone has any other suggestions for how to accept donations please let us know.  Paypal was another option that was mentioned…thoughts on that?  We are also looking for volunteers to be our own reporters. This way we can report ourselves and stay away from media. Ustream and simple video recording was discussed as our means to cover ourselves and then we can blast the internet with our footage. Yes we are on the news tonight and I don’t know how they found out about our meeting, but they did.  I spoke with them briefly and they recorded some of what was going on.  I hope that I didn’t fail you all or upset anyone for talking to them as I tried to stick to the script of what we are about.  After this, we discussed having a blanket statement to share with them from now on and we will decide on what that will be at the next meeting.  We also want to take volunteers on calling social groups to help us in our cause. If you want to do this please contact me at my email(jpeoples70@yahoo.com) and I will make sure that I document who you contacted so we are not contacting groups more than once.  Be sure to get back to me as soon as you here anything also.

• We are going to be sending care packages for the folks in NYC after our next meeting. Courtney is in charge of this so if you have questions about this please contact her(email to be listed ASAP at the bottom of this doc).  Please bring any items/money for supplies to the next meeting.  We will pass around a hat/something to take anything we can to send to them.  There should be more info about this on the group page also that she posted up earlier today.  Be sure to let people know about this and grab anything they may want to send if they are unable to make the meeting.
• We established some committees tonight in order to help with the workload and to put people at tasks that are best suited for them.  These committees include 1.press committee(handling press releases etc. as well as knowing everything about what’s going on with our signs and what not) 2.Legal committee(handling all issues that we need to know about what is/isn’t legal, loopholes, civil lawyers etc.) 3.Social committee (handling how everyone is feeling/what they are saying whether it be good/bad…this will be more for when we actually hit the streets) and 4. Networking committee(handling all of our promoting and connecting with others etc.)  If anyone has any suggestions for another committee we may need please contact me @  jpeoples70@yahoo.com and we will figure out who to put in charge and get others assigned to help with that.  Once the committees for people are put up with their email addresses (very soon…awaiting an email from Kaydee to make sure I have all the names correct…once I get that they will be posted up so please bare with us on this matter we will release this ASAP) please contact any committee that you wish to be a part of and they will be able to assign you a task(s) to work on.

We are excited to be off to a great start and better organized after the meeting.  We are sorry if any of you could not make the meeting and we hope that you will be able to participate in our next meeting as well as the actual Occupation to come soon.  Please try to bring at least 5 people with you to the next meeting to help increase our numbers.  The more of us we can unite the bigger impact we can make!  Thanks so much for everyone’s interest in supporting our fellow Americans at OWS. We are all part of the 99% so we all play a part in making a change!  Hope to see you all soon and hit me or any of our committee members for questions(as soon as their emails/names are up…which again will be ASAP. Apologies for not having that all ready to go for you right now).