Hey there JP Forum members,

We are closing up shop for the summer, in order to take stock of our last season and plan another great one for the fall of 2009!

For now, you can sign up for our email announcements so that you can be the first to know of our fall line-up of events.

See you in a few months,
Sarah, Chuck and Liz

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But right now we’re hoping we can convince you to make a donation to our work. Our donations “at the door” average only $1 per person - we need your financial support. Click “Donate to the JP Forum” at the right.

Ten reasons to support the Jamaica Plain Forum

1. This is the first email in our entire history asking for money. So you know we’re not the pestering types!

2. Best Cheap Date in JP: Free films, speakers, entertainment and childcare! No parking hassles or babysitter fees. If you go to the Cineplex, you pay big bucks and are forced to watch 20 minutes of commercials.

3. In economically stressful times, we need to come together. The J.P Forum will be your home base for face-to-face discussions about the economy -as well as practical workshops on building urban self-sufficiency.

4. In our first year of existence, we were voted Best Neighborhood Organization in the 2008 Reader’s Poll of the Jamaica Plain Gazette.

5. We are a thrifty, low cost operation that produced over 25 events in 2008. Consider what our programming means to you, and contribute accordingly!

6. There is no dress code, nor do we require a two-drink minimum!

7. You can bring your kids, and for five dollars they get to hang out with teenagers, eat popcorn and watch those Disney movies you probably don’t allow at home. As of yet the Forum has no pet-sitting service, but you never know…

8. Where else can you go to enjoy a delicious potluck with over 50 options?! And, you don’t even have to do the dishes!

9. Upgrading the equiptment means a better experience for you! It’s the difference between watching a film on an ipod vs. a flatscreen!

10. By honoring JP’s “local heroes” we are able to celebrate those who have worked for decades to build, strengthen, and support this community.

Your donations will:

• Help us pay for our new sound system and shade curtains -so we can show movies in the summer!
• Pay for winter heat.
• Buy a new LCD projector

You can donate online via PayPal or send a check made out to “Jamaica Plain Forum” to our office at:

The Jamaica Plain Forum
30 Germania St.
Bld. L
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

]]> http://jamaicaplainforum.org/2009/06/30/support-the-jp-forum/feed/ http://jamaicaplainforum.org/2009/06/05/dismantling-monoculture-with-the-beehive-collective/ http://jamaicaplainforum.org/2009/06/05/dismantling-monoculture-with-the-beehive-collective/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:29:38 +0000 sarahss http://jamaicaplainforum.org/?p=587

The Beehive Collective come to Jamaica Plain with their giant, portable murals that are used as a tool for popular analysis, education and organizing!  The bees create collaborative, hand-illustrated posters of dizzying intricacy which are patchwork “quilts” of personal stories, historical and policy narrative, and bottom-up resistance.

In anticipation of the much-awaited “Globalization in the Western Hemisphere” triptych, we will explore the detailed and powerful messages from the Beehive Collective’s “Plan Columbia“, “The True Cost of Coal” and “Mesoamerica Resiste“.

This trilogy is an engaging venture through a larger than life versions of the Collective’s graphics using banners that dwarf the presenters and a six foot tall fabric flip-book.  In a format they’ve dubbed “picture lecture,” the bees take participants through their own story before the plunge into their graphic trilogy: the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Plan Colombia, and nigh-complete Mesoamerica Resiste works are presented in sequence.  The Beehive Collective heavily encourages audience participation.

The Beehive’s innovative, arts-based education strategy provokes discussion, raises hard questions, and offers a hopeful story in an era of too much bad news.  Presentations consist of high energy, interactive, graphic-based picture-lectures that speak to the overwhelming and complex picture of globalization, militarization, and resource extraction, as well as the small-scale changes and actions we can undertake to build another world.

This event is certainly not to be missed!

Cosponsored by the heARTbeat Collective

Come learn about a mini-movement of “common security clubs,” people coming
together to increase their economic security. This J.P. Forum will be an
overview of how the clubs work ­and an opportunity to join one or help start
one in your neighborhood and community.

These are uncertain times. The economic crisis has reminded us of our
vulnerability: debt, foreclosure, job loss, evaporated savings. Instead of
facing these changes alone, we can come together and see the systemic forces
at work. We can create community security, and move toward larger action to
make permanent changes for our future.

Join us for an interactive evening presenting the Common Security Club, an
organizing approach that promotes learning, mutual aid and support, and
action in the face of the economic crisis. Through presentations,
discussions and activities we will learn something about the current
economic moment, realize that we are all in it together, and look at ways to
take action as a community.

For more information on the Common Security Clubs, visit the website
www.commonsecurityclub.org

Many thanks to the cosponsors of this event:

Ecologist and mother Amy Seidl examines climate change at a personal level through her own family’s walks in the woods, work in their garden, and observations of local wildlife in the quintessential America of small-town New England, deep in the Green Mountains of Vermont.  She explores this changing landscape, and her family’s relationship to it, in her new book Early Spring (Beacon Press).

Amy’s testimony, grounded in the science of ecology and evolutionary biology but written with beauty and emotion, helps us realize that a natural upheaval from climate change has already begun - and how climate change has altered her local experience, and the traditions and lifestyles of her neighbors, from syrup producers to apple farmers.  Ultimately, Amy makes thoughtful decisions on how to share this changing landscape with her young family.

Seidl’s poignant writing and scientific observations will challenge us to look at their local climate anew, and consider how we have adjusted to the reality of global warming.

About Amy Seidl

As a practiced ecologist, activist and mother of two girls, Amy Seidl writes with a lucid and passionate eye about the state of life itself in the age of global warming. By drawing on her 20 year career studying ecology, evolution, and butterflies across the North American continent, she illuminates the historical significance and the everyday local impacts of global warming upon the 21st century landscape.

A passionate speaker on contemporary environmental issues, Seidl frequently keynotes and lectures on climate change, renewable energy, local food systems, and the emerging field of sustainability science. Her research in ecological systems and alternative energy makes her a sought-after lecturer on global warming and green design and she emphasizes the need to innovate and build new physical infrastructures that do not rely on fossil fuels.

 Childcare provided for $5. Please RSVP to Sarah at jamaicaplainforumsarah@gmail.com.

Many Thanks to Our Generous Co-sponsors for this Event:

Energy Smackdown

Click here for location and directions!

In its first 100 days in office, President Obama has begun to move the country forward. Bold plans for economic recovery, drawing down troops in Iraq, and reforming health care have been put on the table. But is this the makings of a new era for progressive politics or just a new face on politics as usual in Washington?

Join the Jamaica Plain Forum and the Institute for Policy Studies for a discussion featuring prominent experts and scholars in the progressive community to assess the beginnings of the Obama administration and the chances for long term reform. The speakers will draw on essays from a new
book, Mandate for Change: Policies and Leadership for 2009 and Beyond, edited by Chester Hartman, a collaboration of over 70 authors and activists that offers a set of specific policy proposals for the new national administration on every important domestic and international issue.

The ideas, policies, and resources presented in this volume set forth a fundamental, badly needed “mandate for change” to reinvigorate government and rethink the role of markets and civil society.

About Our Speakers:
Chester Hartman, an Associate Fellow at IPS, is Director of Research for the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, DC and founder/former Chair of The Planners Network, a national organization of progressive urban and rural planners and community organizers.

Chuck Collins is Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and the Working Group on Extreme Inequality. He is a contributor to Ten Excellent Reasons Not to Hate Taxes (New Press, 2008).

Janet Redman is the Co-Director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies where she provides analysis of the international financial institutions’ energy investment and carbon finance activities. Her recent studies on the World Bank’s climate activities include World Bank: Climate Profiteer, and Dirty is the New Clean: A critique of the World Bank’s strategic framework for development and climate change. She has appeared on several radio programs and C-SPAN sharing positive visions for fair and equitable climate action in the United States and overseas. As a founding participant in the global Climate Justice Now! network, Janet is committed to bringing hard-hitting policy analysis into grassroots and grasstops organizing.

Today’s economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it – including pouring trillions of dollars into bailouts for the Wall Street institutions that created the mess – do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system.

Korten identifies the deeper sources of the failure: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating phantom “wealth” without producing anything of real value. Their seeming success created an economic mirage that led us to believe the economy was expanding exponentially, even as our economic, social, and natural capital eroded and most people struggled ever harder to make ends meet

In his new book, The Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, Korten asserts that our hope lies not with Wall Street, but with Main Street: real wealth from real resources to meet real needs. He outlines an agenda to bring into being a new economy—locally based, community-oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits. It will require courageous and imaginative changes to how we measure economic success, organize our financial system, even the very way we create money.

About David Korten:

David Korten is a leading critic of corporate globalization and a visionary proponent of a planetary system of local living economies. His international best seller When Corporations Rule the World , sometimes referred to as the bible of the historic Seattle WTO protest, helped frame the global resistance against corporate globalization. His most recent book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, illuminates the significance of this resistance by placing it in the historical context of 5,000 years of Empire and the organization of human relationships by dominator hierarchy.

David is co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, founder and president of the People-Centered Development Forum, and a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. He is also a founding associate of the International Forum on Globalization and a major contributor to its report on Alternatives to Economic Globalization.

In his earlier career, David acquired a variety of establishment credentials, including MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the Stanford Business School, service as a captain in the US Air Force, and five years as a Harvard Business School professor, a Ford Foundation project specialist, and Asia regional adviser on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Thirty years working as a development professional in Asia, Africa, and Latin America eventually opened his eyes to the devastating consequences of an economic system designed to make rich people richer without regard to the human and environmental consequences. He became a defector from the foreign aid establishment and joined the global resistance against flawed development models.

Many Thanks to the Cosponsors of this event!

The Progressive Project

The American Friend’s Service Commitee: Project Voice

Two JP-based travel experts visit to share tips on regional gems, great local getaways for children, and the rediscovering New England. With an eye towards slimming our ecological footprints, this is a perfect way plan your summer vacation. Come and share your favorite local vacations, trips, jaunts, and getaways.

Residents of Boston, Michael Blanding and Alexandra Hall, know the best way to experience New England from fishing in Gloucester to visiting the shores of Acadia National Park. Michael and Alexandra include unique trip ideas like the History and Literature Tour, Experiencing Small Town New England, and the South Coast Diversion. Native New Englanders at heart, Michael and Alex pride themselves on having driven, hiked, canoed, or sailed every inch of the six-state region, ferreting out underrated restaurants, backwoods museums, and hidden storybook villages along the way.

ASK NOT is a rare and compelling exploration of the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The film exposes the tangled political battles that led to the discriminatory law, and profiles charismatic activists determined to abolish it. As the war rages on, ASK NOT reveals personal stories of gay Americans who serve in combat under a veil of secrecy.

Many Thanks to Our Generous Co-sponsor for this Event

The Progressive Project

TAKING ROOT tells the dramatic story of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai whose simple act of planting trees grew into a nationwide movement to safeguard the environment, protect human rights, and defend democracy-a movement for which this charismatic woman became an iconic inspiration.