People weren’t listening to me. For one thing, I did not have good access to the brain trust, the organizers and committee officers who actually make things happen.
Most of the work and decisions are made in committee, which do not meet at camp. So in effect they are sequestered. Insulated from the hobo on the street.
I only saw them in meetings. If I spoke up in meetings, I was in effect springing ideas on them. I’m not part of any committee. So the Parliamentary process put any proposals, observations or suggestions of mine way at the end of the meeting. And we often ran out of time.
Therefore, I took to writing up unofficial agenda items, emailing them around and handing them out in printed form. This is the diplomatic intro for each of the first hand-outs, until people started getting used to them.
These Documents: Old-fashioned agendas were typed up beforehand and distributed at the meeting. I’m doing this in the old-fashioned way so that, if anyone ever tells you, “Conrad has his own agenda,” you can reply, “I know. He gave me a copy of it.”
Because many of the working groups’ work loads do not allow people to spend as much time as they might like in camp, and because I, being homeless, spend most of my time in camp, I want to convey the facts on the ground and my overall sense of what they mean.
Getting Everything on the Wish-List (of Activist Goals)
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This Man's View 