At our March 18 General Assembly, participants of the assembly committed to inviting members of other local groups to our Unity Group meeting March 25 at Hathaway’s Hideaway to explore possibilities for unity and coalition building as we head into spring. The focus of this idea was originally to explore a show of support for the Advocates for the Library Green, the group supporting the utilization of downtown Ann Arbor’s multistory underground parking garage as a greenspace similar to Boston’s Post Office Square. Any ideas generated will be presented to the Library Green in their meeting immediately afterward at 2pm. However, this is certainly not the ONLY purpose of this invitation; most participants in the Occupy scene in Ann Arbor will probably agree (feel free to correct me in the comments!) that local organizing has been plagued by minor misconceptions between otherwise like-minded participants about “who is running what”. The interesting thing about a spontaneous movement is that, well, things tend to be spontaneous. Attend any given Occupy Ann Arbor meeting or assembly, and although you’ll see certain faces repeatedly, the same weekly meeting may have completely different participants from week to week. This leads to a little confusion or discord on occasion, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a local participant tell me that they stopped attending a particular meeting “when it fell apart”, completely unaware that the meeting they were referring to was more active than ever! This meeting – like almost all Occupy Ann Arbor gatherings – is open to anyone who wishes to get involved, but the groups that participants of the March 18 GA agreed to contact include Occupy UM, Occupy For All, WCAT, Advocates for the Library Green, Inter-Cooperative Council at UM, Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, the University of Michigan SSU, UM GEO & LEO, UM Professional Nurse Council, the Imagine Community, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. We’re hoping to have at least a few new faces present; maybe one will be yours! If you have questions or suggestions for the meeting, we’ve also dedicated a publicly available forum to the topic.
