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Calendar of Events
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WEEKEND
DEMOCRACY SCHOOL SCHEDULE
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LOCATION and CONTACT
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August 2, 2008
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Spokane, WA
ONE DAY DEMOCRACY SCHOOL
contact: Shallan Dawson
E-mail: sdawson@cforjustice.org
(509) 835-5211
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August 16, 2008
August 17, 2008
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New
Hampshire
Two
ONE DAY DEMOCRACY SCHOOLS
Contact: Gail Darrell
E-Mail: geodarrell@yahoo.com
(603) 269-8541
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August 22-24, 2008
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Washington County, PA
Contact: Michael Vacca
Phone: (724) 948-3887
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September 19-21, 2008
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Spokane, WA
Contact: Shallan Dawson
E-mail: sdawson@cforjustice.org
(509) 835-5211
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September 26-28, 2008
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New Hampshire
Contact: Ellen Hayes
E- Mail: Ellen@ACEne.org
website:www.ACEne.org
(603) 252-1411
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October 3-5, 2008
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New Hampshire
Contact: Gail Darrell
E-Mail: geodarrell@yahoo.com
(603) 269-8541
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October 10-12, 2008
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Chambersburg, PA
Wilson College
Website: Daniel Pennock Democracy School
Contact: Stacey Schmader
E-Mail: info@celdf.org
(717) 709-0457
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October 12-14, 2008
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Oakland, CA
Business Ethics International (BEN) Conference
Contact: Anne Pernick
E- Mail: apernick@corpethics.org.
(503) 459-6673
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October 24-26, 2008
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Spokane, WA
Contact: Shallan Dawson
E-mail: sdawson@cforjustice.org
(509) 835-5211
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October 24-26, 2008
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San Francisco, CA
Contact: Shannon Biggs
E-Mail: shannon@globalexchange.org
(415) 575-5540
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November 7-9, 2008
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New Hampshire
Contact: Gail Darrell
E-Mail: geodarrell@yahoo.com
(603) 269-8541
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November 7-9, 2008
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Washington County, PA
Contact: Michael Vacca
Phone: (412) 680-1627
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November 14-16, 2008
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New Hampshire
Contact: Ellen Hayes
E- Mail: Ellen@ACEne.org
website:www.ACEne.org
(603) 252-1411
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November 21-23
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Maryland
Contact: Bob Fireovid
E- Mail: bob.fireovid@verizon.net
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Weekend Democracy School
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Get More Information:
The Daniel Pennock Democracy School is a stimulating and illuminating course that teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing toxic dumps, quarries, factory farms, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.
Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people's movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material, and a copy of Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.
Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. In 2006, there are over a dozen locations across the country offering Democracy Schools, so peruse our list and find a school near you!
Weekend classes continue to be offered at Wilson College in historic Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
The Schools are built around carefully designed readings, clear presentations and group discussions.
- Each School reveals how it came to be that the law enables corporate managers to dictate their values, and impose their projects on communities.
- Includes an intense, comprehensive history of the judicial bestowal of constitutional rights of persons on corporations.
- Learn the secret of how People’s Movements have cut to the essence and won their struggles to be “found” in the constitution.
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- Experience the Pennsylvania Story – an ongoing struggle to take the power to govern out of the Corporate Boardrooms and put it back in our communities where it belongs.
- For people of all ages, interests and occupations
- Classes consist of small groups of 10-15 people like you.
If you take no other training this year, do the Democracy School. It is a superlative unfolding revelation of how corporations have hijacked democracy. It meticulously deconstructs the historical arc that brought us to this precipice. But most importantly, it then departs into the highly pragmatic and inspiring work now underway that is slowly turning the tide . . . This Second American Revolution may be the most important political work going on anywhere in the country or the world.
-Kenny Ausubel ‘05, Founder and Co-Executive Director, Bioneers
Democracy School was a mind-blowing experience. During the School, I was forced to come to grips with the understanding that I really knew very little about the true structure of law that controls our activism. Democracy School is a must for everyone who seeks to be liberated from our defensive, after-the-fact reactive organizing strategies.
-Krishnaveni Gundu, ’05, Calhoun County (TX) Resource Watch
Join:
Richard Grossman, nationally known writer, lecturer and co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). Co-author of “Fear at Work: Job Blackmail, Labor and the Environment,” and “Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation.”
Thomas Linzey, Esquire, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). Author of local Ordinances and co-author of the Model Brief to Eliminate Corporate Rights .
Ben Price, Project Director for the Corporations and Democracy Program.
Democracy School is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pennock, a 17-year-old boy from Berks County, Pennsylvania, who died in 1995 after being exposed involuntarily to land applied sewage sludge. Daniel's parents, Antoinette and Russell Pennock, have traveled across Pennsylvania to end the practice of sludge disposal, by which waste management corporations reap massive profits hauling and spreading sludge on farmland. Their work has inspired ours.
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PA County Schools
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Legal Defense Fund Takes Community Training
To Rural Counties Across Pennsylvania
Contact: Ben Price, Project Director
717-243-6725 BenGPrice@aol.com
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is bringing its Daniel Pennock Democracy School to Counties across Pennsylvania for special one-day training sessions designed to prepare citizens, neighbors, farmers, municipal officials and activists to take the strategic offensive by asserting local decision-making with the force of law in order to protect against the destruction of community-based businesses, family farming, and the natural environment.
Communities across Pennsylvania are being changed in ways that ordinary people find harmful. Local citizens are banding together to stop the invasion of their hometowns by factory farms, corporate sludge haulers, giant cartel retailing operations, privatized water systems, toxic landfills, sprawl, low wage/no benefit jobs-- and they are discovering to their horror that they have no say about big corporate projects.
It has become all too clear that there is a need for a strategic transformation of our efforts in every community in Pennsylvania. The proof is all around us that relying on regulatory agencies to protect us is a tactic that isn’t working. With each attempt by communities to preserve their rural quality of life by making local decisions about the kind of agriculture, energy production and commerce they prefer to support, the state legislature, under the influence of industry lobbyists, passes preemptive legislation and usurps grassroots democracy. After decades of submission to corporate-friendly environmental and land use laws, things have gotten much worse, not better. When we ask the simple question, “Who decides what communities will look like in the future?” it is crystal clear that the answer is not “the people who live there.” That’s why the Legal Defense Fund is taking Democracy Schools to the counties -- to challenge citizens to change gears and adopt a new strategy for organizing their communities.
The county-level schools are designed to help participants uncover the hidden history of how the Regulatory System permits large agribusiness and development and retail corporations, representing small groups of people hiding behind them, to inflict harm on communities and claim legal protection for their actions.
The County Democracy Schools are one-day versions of the weekend-long Democracy Schools offered by the Legal Defense Fund five times a year at Wilson College in Chambersburg. They have been scheduled in seven counties across Pennsylvania, and more are in the works.
We will help participants examine why they aren’t making the rules for their communities, and open a discussion in each county…as a way to begin the over-due organizing of rural communities that is so desperately needed across the Commonwealth.
If you, your organization or municipal government would like to host a one-day Democracy School, contact Ben Price at the Legal Defense Fund: 717 243-6725 BenGPrice@aol.com
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