Organizing for America | Interview4Obama: FORM: Being Advisors to the Obama Administration

FORM: Being Advisors to the Obama Administration

By Madama Ambi - May 16th, 2009 at 5:29 pm EDT

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Tags: activism, FAB, government, OFA, policy, White House, women

The idea behind Feminist Advisory Board for Obama has always been to find ways to make visible and audible the voices of the people who can speak about their lives and their needs directly to the ones who make policy. Since I formed FAB (November 2008), the landscape has changed, not radically, but we know a little more of how the Obama administration is comporting itself. I know more about some members of this group and I know more about the femisphere. Some of my ideas about women's needs have grown into huge ideas (needia), and other of my projects have taken a back seat while I've been roaming the femisphere like Lewis and Clark on an epic journey.

Which brings me to my subject today: form. Form is important, structure can be determinative. Which comes first, the what, the who, the where, the how or the when? Where is the why?

WHERE Member Jon Pincus feels that a wiki is the best place to support group communication. I don't agree, but I'm interested in hearing from other group members. What OFA gives us is this listserve, and each of us has an OFA blog that feeds into the blog for FAB. So, for instance, in addition to sending you this email, I could post this to my blog on OFA and then cross-post it to FAB and other groups within OFA, and anyone who is a member of MyBO/OFA can read and comment. Furthermore, what gets blogged at MyBO/OFA gets crawled by Google, so our blog posts will show up in public searches. We also have 157 members on FAB/Facebook, where anyone can post to the wall or to the discussion board. Also, the FAB/FB group is open, so even non-members can participate and read what is posted.

WHAT Two members of this group have asked if we have a Mission Statement, and I answered that I have ideas about one and then I invited each of these members to head up the committee or the wiki or whatever you want to call it to develop a Mission Statement. This is how I lead--I ask people to take responsibility for the projects they bring to the group. I can't do it all and I don't want to do it all. I want to contribute where I have skills, expertise or leadership energy, and I want members to do the same.

HOW Taking a page from National Organization for Women's organizational model, I have some ideas about creating something on the order of "Officers" within FAB. I will spell this out in a separate posting. If you have ideas about organizational models, please step up to the plate. You don't need permission from me to be a leader in this group. Got an idea? Go for it.

WHEN Along with my idea for appointing "Officers" (a term I'm not crazy about, actually. I prefer "Advisors..."), I'd like to see this group produce a monthly or a quarterly Advice Memo that we would then submit to appropriate government officials. Because I called this group Feminist Advisory Board for Obama, some people have assumed that I have an insider track to the White House. I don't. True, I supported Obama for president and know many people who did the same, and some who went on to have jobs in the administration. Still, I am NOT an insider. My activism will always be as an outsider because I happen to believe that once you get on the inside, you find yourself preserving the status quo. In my view, you cannot be an activist, an agitator, a critic or a change-agent from the inside. This is just my opinion, and I welcome yours.

WHO It's just us. We are the change we've been waiting for.

WHY I think we all know why. If you didn't already have a sense of why, you wouldn't have joined this group...I think...

Please post your feedback, your thoughts, your ideas, your criticisms, to this list and/or to your OFA blog and FAB's OFA blog. Or post to FAB/FB and cross-post to OFA. If you don't understand how that works, first go nose around OFA and see if you can figure it out. If you can't, post your questions to the group list.

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