Acting in Solidarity
Asking for, giving, and receiving money are all opportunities to express personal values, to act in solidarity with others.
This is the message that Inter Pares shares with activists and community organizers from across North America at Concordia University's Institute in Management and Community Development's Summer Program. Every June for the last 11 years, people from social justice groups and organizations have gathered at the Summer Program to share perspectives, gain insights, and make and renew friendships. In recent years, our longstanding collaboration with the Institute has included helping people develop their capacity to build support for their work.
In collaboration with Kim Klein of Grassroots Fundraising Journal and Mike Roque of Grassroots Institute of Fundraising Training (GIFT), Elizabeth Milan of Inter Pares has developed and facilitated sessions on "fundraising for social change," one of the Summer Program's key themes. This past year, Inter Pares board member Delyse Sylvester, a social justice fundraising trainer, also offered a session on ensuring long-term financial support for our organizations.
Through our participation, Inter Pares has been able to share not only skills and techniques, but also our core philosophy. We bring the message that raising money is a means to build political and moral support for a cause. Just as Inter Pares' financial support to counterparts is a manifestation of our solidarity, so too are financial contributions from our supporters real gestures of commitment to our work.
Inter Pares values our relationship with Concordia's Institute as a way to connect with many actors in North American social justice movements, and as a forum for continued learning. This forum allows the space for shared reflection, and thus the opportunity to build and strengthen civil society - not just abroad, but here at home as well.
Two People Can...
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Excerpt from Marge Piercy, "The Low Road" (in The Moon is Always Female, 1980):
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation
A committee, a wedge. With six
You can rent a whole house,
Eat pie for dinner with no
Seconds, and hold a fund-raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
Ten thousand, power and your own paper;
A hundred thousand, your own media;
Ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
It starts when you care
To act, it starts when you do
It again after they said no,
It starts when you say WE
And know who you mean, and each
Day you mean one more.
ISSN 0715-4267
221 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6P1
Phone (1-613) 563-4801 Fax (1-613) 594-4704
Inter Pares works overseas and in Canada in support of self-help development groups, and in the promotion of understanding about the causes, effects and solutions to under-development and poverty.
Charitable registration number (BN) 11897 1100 RR000 1.
Financial support for the Bulletin is provided by the Canadian International Development Agency.
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| Reviewed June 1, 2004 |  |
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