Rather than try and describe Speak in the abstract, I'll just recount what I can remember of what we did. Hopefully that way it's more interesting, and gives a flavour of what Speak is all about... Its mostly from my perspective, perhaps if Birgit has time she'll make a post too.
The event lasted from Friday night until Tuesday morning, but we were only there until late-afternoon Sunday. Friday evening was fairly laid back. We ate together (wonderful Pasta and a Tomatoey Vegetable goodness), talked together and prayed together.
On Saturday, we arrived part-way into a session, "Being a rhythmic community" by Scott Allbrecht from the Catholic Worker Farm, just north of London. They take people in off the streets and live together with them in community. Scott put it something like "living with other Christians is just too easy". He has found the experiences very tough but also very rewarding - that living in this way can teach you how to love and how to be loved. He also believes strongly that unless love is active, religion is worthless, pointing out that Jesus love was active through his death.
At the farm, they also do a lot of gardening - supporting a philosophy of using one's hands, of doing physically active work. A challenge then is to find a place in one's 'rhythm' of life for such work.
Then, we moved on to considering Civil Disobedience as a form of protest. This was certainly a little more controversial, but perhaps rather challenging. No one seems to disagree that when laws are utterly unjust, people will, and are justified in rising up in disobedience against them. The interesting thing is what we do about laws that are perpetrating injustice, or leading to injustice against others, rather than ourselves. Now we start to take in things like the 'legality' of arms fairs, military bases and so on. Does the illegality of the consequental actions trump the paper legality at home? Scott certainly doesn't think so. The other interesting, small point, is that part of reconciling the Bible's contempt for unjust laws with Paul's direction to obey the authorities in power is to obey to the letter 'just' laws... even if they might seem stupid. But on that particular topic, there is apparently a whole book, by Karl Barth.
Much of the rest of the day was taken up with considering how to nurture a Speak group... how to organize events, distribute workloads. All backed up with lots of prayer. Some of the tips on event planning were especially interesting - I found them applicable to a wide range of voluntary projects, not just Speak groups. I've pasted them in below:
As part of 'caring for one another', we put our names in a hat and chose someone for whom we had to be an 'Angel'. The assignment was to do one nice thing for that person each day. I limited my duties to making cups of tea, but my (anonymous) Angel made me a lovely note and left it on a table at the front (below).
Saturday evening was a really powerful and thoughtful experience. We sat in the large tent reading and picking up newspaper stories on world events. We also added headlines and questions of our own that weren't in the news just then. We then spent a lot of time in quiet and not-so-quiet prayer and thought. We picked out a story on the election troubles in Afghanistan, and wrote a few headlines of our own on the plight of women there, those in prison in Kenya for not paying medical bills, and continued suffering of people in Haiti. As the others made their way to tents for sleeping-in-the-cold attempt 2, Birgit and I headed back to Bristol and had a pot of tea in the hostel lounge.
Sunday was a lot more campaigns and action focused. We heard about the corporate accountability campaign, although thanks to Bristol's excellent bus service we missed most of it. We did get some material on the campaign though. The thrust is that companies are now so global, its very very hard to keep them accountable for anything they do in ill-protected parts of the world. Birgit and I know this only too well from the Bhopal campaign. I really see this campaign, despite the strong legal and technical focus, as being one of the foundation of how we can move forward on development. If we can create a global legal framework, or at least a system in the UK to hold UK companies accountable for their actions abroad, we could begin to reduce exploitation, and have it naturally replaced by sustainable development. There'll be more information on the campaign on the Speak website soon.
Next up, campaigning against the Arms Trade. This isn't a new campaign for Speak, but they want to make it the focus of Soundcheck 2010, their large conference in London next year. They, along with CAAT (Campaign against the Arms Trade), have already had a large measure of success in seeing the Defence Export Services Organization (DESO, a special organization that promoted UK arms sales around the world, and the only industry-specific lobbying organization in government, and an organization situated in the Ministry of Defence, rather than the DfTI... I could go on) shut down by Gordon Brown. Alas, DESO has now been reincarnated as DSO, now within the DfTI, and with fewer staff, and without a CEO from the arms industry in charge. Nonetheless, Speak and other groups are rightly demanding that the arms industry gets no special treatment by government above other industries, and they will be campaigning on the streets of London for this next year. Lots more info on the campaign can be found at Campaign against the Arms Trade, with Speak-specific resources to come soon. We talked a lot about Mobilization, the process of galvanizing people who aren't particularly connected with Speak into action for the day of protest. We each had to make a list of people we thought we might be able to ask - send me an email to find out if your on it ;-)
After lunch, we learnt about 'Music Speaks', Speak's new record label to publish justice-preaching artists. We also had some live music from some attendees. Where it gets especially creative is the link between this and Speak events. They are really pushing for groups to organize events and give Music Speaks artists a venue. Hence the message is spread, and fundraising can happen to support campaigns further. Fundraising, I should mention, was a recurrent theme through the conference. It can be hard to justify donations to Speak when there are so many other good, and somewhat more direct ways to help the poor. The flipside is that without campaigning to change some of the laws and practices stacked up against the poor, this direct help might always be needed. There are campaigning groups out there that receive large 'corporate' funding, and don't ask for monetary support (the ONE campaign springs to mind). Speak does receive some support from other NGOs, but it isn't enough to do everything they feel called to do. They also believe that committing a small amount of money can strengthen the bind between a member and the network. This seems to be like a bit of a chicken and the egg conundrum... perhaps part of the solution lies in having groups set fundraising goals with of course the help of their members, but also including events, that can build even more support.
Finally (for us at least) Symon Hill (a grassroots PR consultant, or rather, a media-savvy person), did a wonderful workshop on using the media to get your message across. This really pushed us to think about what media to pursue, and how to phrase our message. The central, sad but true message is that the media is used and manipulated by those we are campaigning against. If we don't use that columnspace or airtime, somebody else will.
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