Local Group Leaders

[Mia14]

Are there any others here who lead or are in a local LGBT-related group that meets or does work in the 3-D world?

I'm working on a local group myself and I'm always looking for new things to do. Recently, our little group merged with another little group and may soon be looking into things like nonprofit status and other legal filings.

Any advice?

What events has your group done in the past?

Any tricks to getting people off their couches and active? We've got so many people that are hard to motivate...

[Zerbie]

Maruti Das posted some months back about a group he was involved with - I think it was a new group just starting up. You might try contacting him to find out what worked/didn't work for his group.
Nathan would also be a good person to chat with about this sort of thing.

[kara speltz]

Originally Posted by Mia14

Are there any others here who lead or are in a local LGBT-related group that meets or does work in the 3-D world?

I'm working on a local group myself and I'm always looking for new things to do. Recently, our little group merged with another little group and may soon be looking into things like nonprofit status and other legal filings.

Any advice?

What events has your group done in the past?

Any tricks to getting people off their couches and active? We've got so many people that are hard to motivate...

For a number of years, we tried to have a local Soulforce group in the San Francisco area, without success. Then several months ago, another Soulforce/Catholic Worker friend and I gave a three series workshop at our Church on nonviolence. We got about a dozen people each week. That was followed by another member of our parish putting on a retreat with a well known Catholic nonviolence advocate. From these two separate events, we had a mailing list of about a dozen folks interested in nonviolence.

We formed a three person core team that has since then put on an amazing series. We meet at our parish twice a month. One of those monthly meetings is a brainstorming one, the other is a larger event. Some meetings are just prayer and discussion among a small group others are larger gatherings of up to three dozen or so. To date, we successfully showed an excellent movie called, "The Narrow Path."

The following month we sponsored a special program for Palm Sunday. Connecting the torture of Jesus to the torture of prisoners, we created a Prayer Card. We invited people to pray for prisoners at Guantanamo, asked them to sign a petition against torture and to take home the name of a prisoner to continue pray for. We got hundreds of signatures, and expanded our mailing list.

This month, we're showing a film on Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement and putting on a workshop on language and nonviolence.

It has amazed me what this tiny little group has been able to accomplish because we have such a committed group.

Kara