The purpose of this Vital Conversation is for participants to agree upon a strategy and instrument for the political empowerment of Local Communities to direct their own affairs and steward their own natural environment.
Specifically, our discussion here focuses upon:
1. Changing Tactics: Switching from activism which demands from (or tries to work within) the current system to embrace a radical new community-rights-based approach for the political empowerment of Local Communities
2. Establishing Civil Organizations: Indispensible to the grassroots democratization process happening now worldwide is the establishment of People’s Assemblies, organizations created by community memberships (civil society) so as to meet, debate, share information, make collective decisions, and self-organize collaborative efforts in order to most effectively address community issues and opportunities.
3. Collectively assessing the usefulness of the proposal’s Local Community Declaration of Rights as an instrument or tool for local community empowerment – as an enabling “springboard” to a genuinely democratic, decentralized system
To Clarify:
The Subject of Rights is a Subject of Responsibilities
“A democracy worthy of the name requires universal recognition of a wide constellation of rights related to all areas of public life and social reproduction…
“It is understood that a subject of rights is also a subject of responsibilities, insofar as [each] is part of a community built around a common project. These responsibilities extend to the environment we inhabit, and include accepting the responsibility to care for it, protect it and enable its reproduction, and in doing so, our own.”
Movimiento por la Democracia [Spanish Movement for Democracy] 5 February 2014, English edition 26 June 2014, A Charter for Democracy
Join this Conversation at the Online Forum of the Global Holocratic Assembly — here.
Discussion Papers
The entirety of Volume Two of the Earth Holocracy Proposal: The Local Community Declaration of Rights is relevant to this discussion.
Key Papers:
Human Rights and Rights-based Activism
The Local Community Declaration of Rights
Articles of the International Bill of Human Rights used in the Local Community Declaration of Rights
The fifth, sixth and seventh articles of Volume Two explore the inspiring work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund – whose ‘Community Bill of Rights’ is used as a model for the format (and the ‘legalese’) of the Local Community Declaration of Rights, and whose community-rights-based activism (including the establishment of hundreds of “democracy schools”) leads the way in effectively asserting the right of Local Communities to be Self Governing: see the following volume two articles –
- The Local Community Declaration of Rights and the Community Bill of Rights
- The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
- Defeating Corporations
For an introduction to People’s Assemblies, see
- People’s Assemblies and the era of Direct Democracy
- The Movement for Real Global Democracy
- The Direct Democracy Movement’s ‘Quick Guide on Group Dynamics in People’s Assemblies’
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