Lone Star Democracy Builders Association

Last Saturday, Glenn and I attended the second general meeting of Austin Moving Forward, a group that's trying to organize Austin's progressive groups into a coalition that can tackles the problems of our city. It's a worthy goal, and the last meeting provided plenty of examples of groups like this making a difference in cities like Los Angeles.

One of the big issues with the last meeting was the lack of diversity in the crowd, and the organizers made an effort to address that with this meeting. The lead speaker was Greg Hamilton, the African-American sheriff of Travis County. He talked about taking on the good ol' boy networks in law enforcement and his experiences with talking to diverse communities. He had a great story about meeting Martin Luther King III and Coretta Scott King on a visit to Atlanta, and he reminded us that we need to hear all the voices, not just those that are the loudest.

After this opening talk, we gathered into groups by table to work on enumerating our core values. The theory is that as an coalition, we need to discover how to state our shared values in a way that will highlight what's in common among the different organizations. That will let us find the connections in the issues that will let us all work together.

The facilitator at the table where Glenn and I sat was former Austin City Council member and LBJ School professor Bill Spelman. There were five other people at the table, including Valinda Bolton, a Democratic candidate for seat 47in the Texas House. Our group quickly filled up a big sheet of paper with ideas about things that were important: government as an empowering resource, civic responsibility, stewardship of shared resources, having fun, caring for all people. We talked more about the core of these different ideas and chiseled it down to a few key statements that we presented as part of the wrap-up. There were about 15 tables, and we all took a slightly different interpretation of the assignment, but by the end of things, there was an encompassing vision of what's important to Austin's progressives appearing, although I don't think we were able to come up with any strong priorities.

As part of the synthesis of all of these presentations, several tables strongly felt that we needed to look at racism in Austin. I tend to agree with other elements in the room that the problem isn't strictly racism but is more a symptom of how Austin handles class differences, although many of those differences are due to the legacy of racism and a system that makes it so difficult to get out of poverty.

The Moving Forward group has some good plans for the future. Their immediate action is to take all the values listed at this meeting and try to come up with a set of values that the coalition can publish as a motivational statement. They are also forming a committee to work with that data and develop a list of issues of local importance that will be used to organize the next general meeting. They are also working on improving their web site and using it to point to the many progressive organizations in Austin, providing an organized resource for people to find groups that fit their interests. I know I'm looking forward to helping them out in this process.