Break The Grip! Hosts a "Democracy School"
A new organizing strategy for communities
Date: Thursday, October 11, 2007
Time: 9 am - 5 pm
Location: Ghost Ranch Retreat Center in Santa Fe (Corner of Old Taos Highway and Paseo de Peralta)
School Fee: $75 (pays for plane tickets and lodging for the instructors);
Lunch: $8 for lunch at the Conference Center (required)
To Register: Call Ben Luce at 660-4041 and/or send email to benluce@breakthegrip.org. There are some pre-reading materials for this class,
so please register asap.
Note: We have only about 12 seats still open (total class is only 20 people)
About the School:
This training is based on the belief that corporations have inappropriately strong "personhood" rights and that the regulatory systems currently in place
is mainly a mechanism for regulating resistance from local communities that are impacted by corporations, not really for regulating the corporations themselves. Until these
fundamental flaws are fixed through new community charters, state laws, and eventually a constitutional amendment, it will be difficult to make truly significant
and lasting progress against undue corporate influence.
The school will be taught by Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, http://www.celdf.org/ , who have already led hundreds of communities to revise their charters, and who are now teaching democracy schools in communities across the United States about how to do this. See the bios for Thomas and Mari below. You may have seen Thomas in his appearance recently in Leonardo DiCaprio's global warming film "The 11th Hour".
Class Schedule:
9:00- 10:00 am: Introductions and Overview of the Day
10:00-10:30 Do Regulations Actually Regulate Us?
10:30-11:30 The Rise of Corporate Rights
11:30-12:00 Peoples' Struggle for Rights
12:30-1:30 Working Lunch: Confronting Agribusiness and Sludge Corporations in PA: Communities Define Sustainable Agriculture
1:30-2:30: Film - A community takes on a Quarry Corporation - PBS "NOW" program covers friends & residents on St. Thomas Township
2:30-5:00 The Beginning of the Beginning in Your Community - Reframing the Issues. Challenging the usurpation of people's legitimate governing
authority by passing local law.
Bios of the Instructors:
Thomas Linzey is a cum laude graduate of Widener University School of Law in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and is a three time recipient of the Schools' Public Interest Law Award, a 2003 recipient of the Law School's Young Alumni Award, a 2003 finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and a 2004 recipient of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union’s Golden Triangle Legislative Award. He has served as an independent candidate for Attorney General, receiving over 65,000 votes statewide, and is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit law firm that provides free and affordable legal services to community groups and over three hundred local governments.
Tom is admitted to practice in federal and state courts, including the Third Circuit, Fourth Circuit, Eighth Circuit, and Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals; and the U.S. Supreme Court. He serves as coordinator of the Franklin County Coalition - a county-based association of twenty-one community groups and over thirty locally owned businesses; and for a Caucus of local governmental officials in Pennsylvania. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of several nonprofit organizations in Virginia and Pennsylvania, is a frequent lecturer to groups and municipal governments across the United States, and recently delivered speeches to the Bioneers Conference in California and the National Network of Grantmakers conference in Miami. He is a co-founder, with Richard Grossman, of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School <http://www.celdf.org/DemocracySchool/tabid/60/Default.aspx> <http://www.celdf.org/DemocracySchool/tabid/60/Default.aspx> - now taught at fifteen locations across the United States - which assists groups and communities to reframe seemingly “single” environmental issues into ones focused on eliminating the ability of corporate “rights” to trump the rights of communities.
Thomas is the Executive Director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).
Mari Margil is the CELDF Associate Director. She is opening our West Coast office in Portland, Oregon. The office will support and expand the Legal Defense Fund’s work in the West, as we are now beginning to work in California, Washington State, New Mexico, and Alaska. She most recently worked with Corporate Ethics International conducting corporate accountability campaigns. Prior to that she headed up the Oregon office of the Sierra Club, conducted internal labor organizing for the Oregon Nurses Association, and worked on candidate electoral campaigns. She holds a Masters degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
