Description
We're a post-political party determined to step up and change the world. If you're interested in a well-planned scheme, executed with panache and designed to improve our lives, you should come party with us.
© Copyright 2008
We're a post-political party determined to step up and change the world. If you're interested in a well-planned scheme, executed with panache and designed to improve our lives, you should come party with us.
© Copyright 2008
With the holidays approaching it’s a time when people are hypersensitive to their communities. Charitable donations increase, and food drives become ubiquitus in many places. Particulalry in a year like this one when the number of jobless and homeless people is on the rise and food pantrys are hard hit, it’s important to preserve and reinforce this tradition.
Despite that, hunger doesn’t exist exclusively during the holidays, and the demand on food pantries is likely to increase as the recession continues. So, now that food drives are on your mind and you’re likely to have some time off work in the near future, begin planning a food drive for March. Contact your employer to get their support. Visit your local food pantry and find out what they need. Though it’s hard to collect in a food drive, fresh produce is often particularly valued at food pantries. Come up wtih a way that will allow people to donate fresh produce and your drive will be particularly helpful.
To help you with your food drive planning, take a look at some of the following links:
St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance’s food drive tips
Today marks the passing of a month since the official founding of the Thinker’s Party. We’ve been busy in that month, and we have a lot more planned for the upcoming month. Let’s take a look at what we’ve accomplished and we we’re working on.
In November
Planned for December
Planned for January
Longterm Plans
The beta version of the website and forums are up and ready for use over at the new main page. Check it out, let us know where you find bugs, if there’s content you think is missing, or if the layout gives you trouble. If pertinent, please include information about your browser and screen resolution so we can recreate your situation.
As long as the holiday doesn’t push us too far behind schedule, we plan to have everything up and running smoothly over there by the beginning of next week.
In the meantime, updates to the blog are going to slow from a minimum of 1/week day to 1/week as, hopefully, discussion moves to the forums.
Happy beta testing, all. 
To cap off this week we’ll introduce you to one of the founding members of the party. We’ll do this periodically to give you an idea of who’s working with the party. This time around we’re introducing the Blog Maven.
Hi all. I’m the Thinker’s Party’s official Blog Maven. That means I’m responsible for maintenance of the blog, and updating it with content. I’m also working on our web page project and getting our forums set up to make sure we have a consistent visual appearance across all three spaces. Currently I’m doing research into the finances and logistics involved in running a school with the hopes of developing a model for privately-funded successful, free schools. I’ll share more of that process later on.
As for me, I’m a Project Manager for a software company with a degree in Linguistics from the University of Chicago. I spend my free time reading, watching movies, and arguing about politics, social problems, and the world in general with just about everybody I know. I’ve worked as a volunteer TA in an elementary school and tutored high school students (in Geometry and Spanish).
I got involved with the Thinker’s Party because I’ve lost any optimism that the government can be changed to take care of the major social problems we face today (My personal priorities being education and energy) and decided not to let that hold me back. If you want to talk about my background or experiences in more detail, or my work with the party, you can contact me at thinkers.party@gmail.com.
Having a knowledge of previous projects similar to your own, or previous attempts to solve the same problems is always useful in your own work. But you don’t have to limit yourself to looking at direct analogues in order to find lessons worth learning. One story that is particularly interesting for its sheer complexity is that of the Almighty Vice Lords, a gang that grew out of Chicago and, while consolidating its stronghold as a gang, did a great deal of good for the community. We certainly aren’t suggesting that any project associated with the Thinker’s Party copy the model used there, but we do think it’s well worth studying and thinking about. Here are a few links to get you started in your research:
http://chicagogangs.org/index.php?pr=CVL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Lords
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vice%20lords
Yesterday we gave some tips for how to successfully get a salon going. Today we’re offering tips for how to make the most of the salon.
1) Listen, and take notes. The note taking is particularly important if you are doing a series of salons because it will make it much easier to notice a pattern of complaints or issues across the groups. You don’t have to do the note-taking during the salon itself, though. If you’re more comfortable waiting until afterward to write down your observations, then do that.
2) Start the group off on talking about what they like about their community. Knowing what works, and why it works, is an important part of being able to figure out what doesn’t and why. It’s also helpful in figuring out the community’s priorities. If the project you want to work on is a low priority for the community that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean you’ll have a different set of challenges you’ll need to prepare for.
3) Help the people at the salon get comfortable with each other and the situation. Be welcoming, facilitate introductions, give people the opportunity to share a little information about who they are, why they’re there, and their relationship with the community. This will make it easier for them to share thoughts and opinions later.
4) Just because somebody is timid or quiet doesn’t mean they don’t have something to say. Sometimes speaking in front of strangers is intimidating for people, but you don’t want to lose their insight because of that. Try to actively involve the quiet people. Keeping one or two individuals from dominating the conversation can help with that, but so can reaching out to the quieter people and directing questions at them. If you get the sense that they don’t want to talk, don’t force them too, though.
5) Give out an email address or other way to contact you with followup thoughts. Now that you’ve established a relationship with these people you’ll want to cultivate it.
That’s five tips we consider important for a beginner, but there are hundreds more out there. Share any you have from similar experiences in the comments below.
What does somebody interested in joining the party and helping out do? The first thing we’d recommend is let us know, either by commenting on the blog or sending us an email. Tell us a little bit about yourself, who and where you are, and what you’re interested in working on. The tricky question is, if you don’t already have a project in mind, say your community seems to be well supported in every way as far as you know, what do you do?
We’ve found that several answers to that question can arise from organizing a salon-style gathering in your community. Gather a manageable group of people together and get them to talk about what the community’s strengths and weaknesses are - what’s missing, what works badly, what could work more efficiently. These events are for you to listen to how others view the community, and begin to actively involve them in it on a small scale. You’re there to ask a few questions and listen - save recruiting help and other members for later.
Here are some tips for how to run these salons successfully:
1) Know the area you want to work in and make sure to target all of it. Are you in a big city and want to focus on one particular neighborhood? Then set the salon in that neighborhood. But if you want to work on an issue that affects the entire city, move the salon location around to attract people from different parts of the city. This is a good way of learning different perspectives on an issue and developing an understanding of the big picture.
2) Try to set the salon in a comfortable public area. Bookstores, coffee shops, libraries, and community centers are the typical places, but don’t be afraid to get creative. Go where the people are - they might not come to you. Wherever you do hold the salon, develop a relationship with the owners of the location first. Tell them what you’re doing, how many people you expect to come, and make sure they are okay with having their place used that way. Business owners are part of the community to, and (in our experience so far) they’re often willing to host these events if they have forewarning - especially if they sell food or beverages.
3) These are not recruitment sessions for the Thinker’s Party. Don’t invite people to come and talk about their community, then try to persuade them to join an organization they’ve probably never heard of. You can talk about it if people ask, or list on your publicity materials that the event is sponsored by the Thinker’s Party (please only do this if you are working with us on it), but otherwise leave the salon for listening.
4) Advertise where people will see. That means fliers at the establishment where you’ll be holding the salon and where members of the community frequent, Craig’s list postings, ads in local papers or on local events pages, etc. Do not depend exclusively on the internet for your advertising since there are still lots of people who will never see it that way. If you contact us we can help you develop the materials you need and locate good places to display it.
5) Have fun. Getting involved with your community and meeting new people should be exciting. Remember that.
In a comment to our last post, square pegs said, “I would like to start telling people about the Thinker’s Party. I would love to be able to point to it and say, “This can be the real mechanism for positive change!” But right now, I’m just not sure what I would say.” This is pulled out of context from a longer comment with other good points in it, but we thought this portion of the comment warranted a specific response. So we present to you the 30 second explanation for just what the Thinker’s Party is.
The Thinker’s Party is a networking organization designed to inspire and support individual attempts to solve social problems within local communities. They hope to develop not only a network of experts in various social issues and their potential solutions, but of sources of funding for these projects.
It has the same flaw as most elevator stories, i.e. it’s a touch stodgy and dry, but it contains what we consider to be the most important message about who we are. We encourage you to make it your own and share what you find exciting about what we’re doing.
That said, we’d like to thank everybody who has taken the time to provide feedback about what we’ve done and said so far. It’s ranged from “Only kooks call it a manifesto” to “there’s too much apathy for that to work,” and we’ve appreciated every bit of it.
It is now a week after we first addressed the idea of spending time with the Thinker’s Party as the selfish choice. Much of the argument left off at urging you to run your own cost benefit analysis to determine the value of supporting the Thinker’s Party for you. We aren’t recovering that ground now, but will provide some sample scenarios that may simplify your decision-making process.
For purposes of these scenarios, let’s assume that you are in all ways an average American. According to the Census Bureau, the average income in the United States in 2007 was $50,233. The American Time Use Survey put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that men who work full time worked an average of 8.2 hours a day and full-time women worked an average of 7.8 hours a day. Since we’re averaging, we’ll call that an even 8 hours a day for 2080 a year on a 5 day work week. That makes your average working hour worth $24.
The following chart pulls data on time spent in leisure activities with figures for how much those activities generally cost. The time data is pulled from the American Time Use Survey and the cost figures are linked to their source.
Socializing and communicating .73 hours per day (This includes a wide range of potential expenses, but we’ll assess it at $0 since there’s no inherent cost)
Watching television 2.62 hours per day ([$75/month*12 months per year]/[18.34hrs per week*52weeks per year]= $.94)
Participating in sports, exercise, and recreation .32 hours per day ([$70 per month*12 months per year]/[2.24 hours per week*52 weeks per year]=$7.21 per hour). This puts the price of your time during working hours at $24 an hour. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth it.
If working time is too valuable to you, you could give up your leisure time. The leisure activities are effectively negative earnings meaning that if you do something else instead, assuming the non-fiscal value of the activities are equivalent, you get back that money. (Note: In practice this is a fallacy i.e. if you spend one less hour watching TV you don’t get $.94 back) Right out if all you’re donating to the Thinker’s Party is time,and you’re doing it instead of your other typical leisure activities, you are making money.
Earlier today a Thinker’s Party member received this question from somebody who’d just discovered the party: If people expect the government to administer social programs and solve social problems and our plan to push them out of that role is to do it ourself, won’t people just think that the government is still doing it? How will we make sure those perceptions change.
This is a good question that goes straight to one of the Thinker’s Party’s long term goals, which is to have the social sphere completely divorced from the political sphere. In order for that divorcing to happen successfully, we argue, we must create independent programs capable of supporting and nurturing the social sphere. Once we’ve done that, the government will be free to withdraw back into the political sphere - but only if the people allow it. If they think the government is still controlling the social sphere, they won’t let that happen, and we will fail to reach this particular long term goal.
To be frank, at this point we consider the likelihood that we will successfully take over and support all aspects of the social sphere minimal enough that ensuring we get credit for it when that happens is not a great priority. We consider it much more likely that we’ll make a significant impact in one area or another, and the methods involved in doing that will be enough for communities to understand where the resources and efforts are coming from. To go back to yesterday’s marching band analogy, the greater community surrounding school A might not realize that all of the band’s governmental funding has been cut, but everyone intimately involved with the band will. Since they’re the ones invested enough to fight for band funding in the first place, they are the audience where assignation of credit is important, and by virtue of the network and process in place they will already know. In other words, our PR will take care of itself where it matters through the very processes that create the need for it.
Of course we dream of wild success and major societal changes within a generation, and if we find that widespread ignorance of how those changes came to be is an obstacle, we will deal with it in the best way possible at the time.
Previous Entries