The two organizations collaborating to bring "The Democratic Arts: Tools for Social Change" to the USSF are the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy (POCLAD) and Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (DUHC).

DUHC has been doing grassroots community organizing in the redwood country of Northern California since 1997. Our mission is as follows: DUHC educates citizens about the illegitimate seizure of our authority to govern ourselves. We design and implement grassroots strategies, which exercise democratic power over corporations and governments. We seek to create a truly democratic society by provoking a non-violent popular uprising against corporate rule in Humboldt County that can serve as a model for other communities across the United States and beyond! In June of 2006 we celebrated a victory for all those struggling for genuine democracy, by passing a county ordinance to prohibit out of county corporations from contributing to our elections. The ordinance is worded such that corporations cannot claim constitutional rights to overturn it. For more information please visit our website at www.DUHC.org, and for more information on our recent victory check out the Z magazine interview at: http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Dec2006/mcleodpr1206.html.

POCLAD is a group of eleven people contesting the illegitimate "rights" of corporations and those who sit in corporate boardrooms to be in charge of our lives and work, communities and environments, our economy, political life and future. Our analysis evolves through historical and legal research, writing, public speaking, and working with organizations to develop new strategies that assert people's rights over property interests. We assert the need to shift from protesting corporate assault after corporate assault to changing the law and claiming our promised rights of self-governance. POCLAD engages activist organizations, community groups and student audiences in conversations addressing the fundamental question: Is democracy possible when corporations wield constitutional "rights" and so much wealth and power are concentrated in so few hands? More information can be found at our website, www.POCLAD.org.

Our facilitators consist of three women, two of whom identify as LGBTQ. One is a 25-year-old artist, and two are over 65 years of age. Our workshop best fits into the activities scheduled for Thursday, June 28th. Our agenda will include presentation, role-play, small group discussion, and exercises. We can accommodate up to 30 participants.

Our event will be a four-hour workshop designed to equip participants with an understanding of the democratic arts, the tools for practicing them, and their application to social change. The ideas we want participants to take away relate to demythologizing the Constitution and questioning the widely held assumption that the US is or ever has been a democracy. We would like participants to become more familiar with the practices inherent in a real democracy, and have them explore the assumptions, behaviors and skills necessary for practicing it.

Our workshop connects to each of the USSF crosscutting themes of analyzing root causes, learning from historical experiences, building international solidarity, and envisioning alternatives. We'll begin by establishing a common framework of oppression in this country. We believe that a root cause of these oppressions can be traced to a government that advances and protects the rights of property over the rights of people. Real democracy, actual rule by the people, is seen by the governing, corporate class as dangerous to the long-established stable order that denies people's right to self-governance.

It is one thing to know that the WTO and "free" trade panels use various forms of institutional oppression to further the neoliberal agenda, and another to realize that this model has deep roots in U.S. history, has been aggressively pursued by this country, and flows out of a government constitutionally designed to serve the few at the expense of the many.

We will use a majority of our workshop time to present, discuss, model and practice the democratic arts. However, in other workshops the organizations we represent will provide information about past resistance to oppression, such as the Levelers' movement in 16th century England and the Populist, Abolition and Suffrage movements in the U.S. There are also many present-day movements that challenge the "Divine Right of Property," and we will touch on those as well.

As we discuss the nature of democracy, we will address the absurdity of trying to have "the real thing" within any nation seeking Empire. In this way we will draw out the importance of solidarity and internationalism. We hope to help participants envision another way of working together by learning and practicing effective meeting design and process, cooperative decision-making, conflict resolution strategies and problem-solving techniques. These represent critical tools for the growing global justice movement.

We will engage participants through interactive and experiential techniques. The workshop models the elements of a meeting. Participants will reflect on and share their own experiences, and grapple with what it takes to be a self-governing people. Our activity will be conducted in English. We won't be providing oral interpretation, but our handouts will be translated into Spanish.

One of the biggest challenges facing the active democracy movement is people's lack of faith in our own sovereignty, our capacity to govern ourselves. Believing in ourselves and a cooperative democratic human nature is essential to wresting ruling power from property, especially property in the corporate form. This workshop is an attempt to build that belief and develop the skills that can help us put it into practice.

Since the alternative we propose to the present system of global corporate and elite rule is democratic self-governance, the assumptions, behaviors and skills described above are designed to help people establish and strengthen democratic practice in their organizations and communities. At the present moment in the US, the most effective examples of citizen governance can be found in towns, townships and counties where people have most direct access to one another and their public officials, and are organizing to create everything from a human rights commission or single payer health program to a ban on genetically engineered food or corporate constitutional rights to interfere in their political process. Not only do these and other actions improve the lives of people “on the ground,” they offer models and strategies that can be adapted to a variety of issues, communities and cultures. It is not enough to gain power; we must also gain the capacity and skills to share power in a sustainable way.