The first meeting for the CascadiaNow! University of Washington Chapter last Friday was a great success. For those interested, they have started a new facebook page here, and more details should be coming as they get underway. If you attend the UW and would like to be involved, contact cascadianow@gmail.com and we'll put you directly in touch with Thomas, who is the current group coordinator.
If you think you can make it, a Doodle poll has been set up for the next meeting time, which will held in the first two weeks of winter quarter.
Key notes from the first meeting include:
1) Our goal is quite specifically to not become another political party club, of which there are many at UW already, because Cascadia isn't a party, Cascadia is a culture, and there is room for people to be diverse in thought and action within it.
2) We'll be hopefully having at least monthly seminars, panel discussions, and open forum moderated debates on specific issues. One idea was to make a game of the process, and remove the possibility of falling back on traditional two-party politics of issues by having all sides vote on "traditional buzzwords" to self-censor during discussion, thereby making us take circuitous routes with our logic and keeping us from falling on rhetoric.
3) We will hopefully be able to get Cascadians at UW to help in the greater citywide and regional effort to create a local business association in order to promote and reward local businesses for keeping labor and production local and environementally friendly, and to use their participation in our association as a way to boost attention for the Cascadia movement. Imagine seeing little "made in cascadia" stickers on merchandise. Hard to be relegated to the shadows once that starts We also said that we would like to draw in professors from the university to help promote our seminars and provide better information. Imagine the benefit that could be gained from having a sociology professor volunteer to do a talking piece on Cascadian culture, and they invite students from their class to sit in for extra credit. We'd be looking at a good opportunity to raise awareness and recruit activists.
4) Lastly, and most simply, we discussed logistics of starting up the RSO, a brief timeline of goals, and the importance of networking the UW organization with others in the region.
If anyone who was there feels something was left out, feel free to add on, but those are the notes as I had them.