Oh, Mallory

Dear Friends, We write to invite you to attend a workshop that will take place at the annual Left Forum conference this weekend in NYC. The session, Movement-Building Centers and Rekindling the Imagination of the Left, takes place on Saturday during Session 4, from 5:00 to 6:50 pm in room W604. The workshop focuses attention on Movement-Building Centers ? community gathering spaces that facilitate organizing, networking, media-making, arts, skill shares, education and research outside of corporate and academic settings. A roundtable discussion will be hosted by organizers with two such centers ? Suren Moodliar from encuentro 5 in Boston and Liz Mestres from the Brecht Forum in NYC. Mallory Knodel from May First/People Link will guide discussion as to ways we might use online space to complement our real-space activities. The aim of the workshop is to have a wide-ranging exchange of experiences and ideas on how networking or other forms of collaboration might strengthen us all. Particular attention will be paid to steps that could impact our ability to achieve scale in responding to the knowledge dissemination and creation tasks of the current political moment, and to build more effective national and global collaborations. This panel continues a dialogue initiated at the 2007USSF (see full description here) and will lead into a similar one at the 2010 USSF, with the goal of building a network of such movement building centers. We hope you will join us and bring your experience and questions to the table. A full Left Forum schedule is here. If you plan to attend, please RSVP to amy@brechtforum.org so we can get a sense of who will be at the table. If you are not able to attend but still would like to be kept in the loop about the USSF workshop and network, we'd also like to hear from you.