Save the Date: March 25, 2010

Brian Rusche from the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition (JRLC) joined us at our meeting on Sunday, and one of the things we talked about is an annual event they organize called Day On the Hill. People from all over Minnesota come to St. Paul for a day, and meet with their state senator and representative to discuss issues pertaining to social justice. You can join together with other people from your district to visit your representatives and tell them how important these issues are to us. Brian emphasized, as Lee Carlson does, that face-to-face meetings with your representative are one of the most effective kinds of advocacy we can do.

The date for 2010 is March 25, which is a Thursday. Put that on your calendar and plan to attend--last year they had 850 people. Since we come from different districts, it is important for as many people to come as possible!

Minnesota Without Poverty to become 501(c)(3)

I received an email today from A Minnesota Without Poverty, which stated in part:

We are writing to make sure you are up-to-date about the new home of "A Minnesota Without Poverty" and to solicit your financial support. A Minnesota Without Poverty is now on its own. That's right. AMWOP is now becoming its own 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. This is an exciting change!

With its early roots in the Lutheran faith community, in 2008 AMWOP expanded its ecumenical and interfaith focus by becoming a program of Minnesota Council of Churches, seeking to engage all people of faith in building the public will to end poverty as fundamental to their life of faith. In January 2009 the recommendations of the Legislative Commission to End Poverty were reported, and the Steering Committee decided that the best structure for AMWOP to serve as a catalyst in implementing these potentially powerful recommendations is as a separate 501(c)(3) organization.

A Minnesota Without Poverty will continue to be rooted in our faith traditions while also seeking to engage all sectors of society—faith, government, business, people in poverty, education, communities of color, non-profits, and foundations,—in this crucial work to end poverty.

Along with some other information, they were also asking for donations from anyone who would be willing to help out financially. Their address is:

A Minnesota Without Poverty—NDC

663 University Avenue

Suite 200

St. Paul, MN 55104

HAUMC Change Agents Blog

Greetings, fellow change agents! We had our third meeting tonight at Ingrid's house, and I asked if it would be OK if I set up a blog for our group. This blog is not an "official" HAUMC publication, although at some point in the future if we wanted to have a blog under the auspices of haumc.org (and someone knew how to set that up ;-) we could certainly move there.

Blogspot is owned by google, so this is a free service available to anyone who wants to set up their own blog.

Any member of the group can become an author. I think the procedure is I would send an email "invitation" to the mailing list, and anyone who wants to respond to it can become an author. Being an author means you can write a blog post. Anyone who reads the blog can comment on a post by clicking the "comments" link under the post.

I thought this might be an easy way for us to communicate between meetings. If someone finds out about something, you could post it to the blog and we could read about it. We can also post meeting announcements, minutes, and so forth. Please make suggestions about anything I have already put up that you think could be changed (wording of the welcome message, other links, etc.).

One other point of logistics: the blog can be set up to be open to anyone (that is how it is currently set up), or we could restrict it so that only people we know can read it. (You would basically need to have your email address on an approved list.) If anyone feels that there is a reason to restrict the readership, we can easily change the settings.

I will create a list of links along the side of the blog that I have learned about that relate to our mission. You can also use this blog page as a handy shortcut to those links.