Bobbie, Tara, Ty and I attended the 3rd meeting of OfA on the East End, at the Southold Unitarian Universalist Church today, Sat., 2/28/09. Their group is about the same size as ours. Counting the four of us, there were 52 people in attendance. In a previous meeting, OfA East End established several committees: leadership, service, environment, youth and economy. Today we heard reports from all the committee leaders. They have a very ambitious agenda, and a lot of energy. It was great to see. Their service group is taking a similar approach to ours; looking for opportunities for their members to volunteer with existing local organizations. The economy group is already planning to start lobbying local politicians to get behind the Obama stimulus plan, and bring it down to the local level. The head of their youth group is an organizer for Communities that Care, which we heard about in our last meeting, and may be involved with the Springs group.
Interestingly, they had almost the entire executive committee of the Southold Democratic Party in attendance, including Tom Wickham, the one Democrat on the Southold Town Board. The vice-chair of the party made a short pitch for support from the group. In Southold, at least, OfA has the potential to be play a significant role in local politics, as the Democrats there could really use the support of committed activists like the OfA East End members. Unfortunately, the Dems are largely out of power in Southold, and face an uphill battle to succeed in what may be the only town on Long Island that went for McCain in the last election.
The last item on the meeting agenda for the day was drafting a mission statement. After a frantic telephone call to make sure we had the wording right, we shared ours with them. Many in the group liked it, and one or two thought they should just adopt ours, but in the end, they wrote their own, very eloquent statement, which would work just fine for us too.
As we develop as parallel entities with similar goals, I think we will find many opportunities to work together. Now that we've met our North Fork colleagues, I look forward to the pleasure of joining forces as the opportunities to do so present themselves.
They meet the fourth Saturday of every month. Their next meeting will be March 28 at 2:00 p.m.
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