Vote for yourself in November!

We invite you to vote for yourself in November!

What? You’re not on the ballot? You don’t get to decide how your city works?

We need to change that.

What is our strategy?

This question concerns all of us who seek a more just and sustainable world.

If we are to move from the politics of reacting to the latest outrage or crisis–and unwittingly letting the forces that oppose us define us–we must answer this question.

What is our strategy?

Too many of us either don’t have an answer to this question, or we answer it in terms that are hopelessly broad–e.g. “build unity” or “raise consciousness”, or underwhelmingly narrow–e.g. “be nice to my neighbors” or “tell my friends about the issue”.

The lack of clear strategy often leads to magical thinking about social change: e.g. “a wise and noble politician will save us”, or, “when everyone is angry and protesting in the streets all at once, then we will have a just society”.

In order to achieve the long-term culture shift we want to see, it is necessary to mobilize people, but it is not enough to mobilize people. We need to create new patterns of participation, embodying new social habits, so that we the people are engaged in an ongoing, values-driven way, rather than in a reactive, crisis-driven way.

Beyond critiquing the old structures that don’t serve us, we need to create new structures that do serve us.

What do these structures look like? How do we build them?

What is our strategy?

CDP represents one answer to this question.

We are getting ourselves mission-ready to launch the petition drive. Over the next few months we aim to have a critical mass of volunteers trained and ready to go, so that once the signature drive starts, we will have what it takes to win.

The people of Oakland–including you–will be in charge of the budget.

It’s time to change the conversation from “Who will you vote for?” to “Vote for Yourself!”

We invite you to join us.