Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

As some of you know, we had this little conference a week ago called Momentum. It was amazing.

The idea was to bring together leaders in the progressive community and expose them to one another and to a set of speakers capable of sharing some of the most important emerging thinking about ideas and policies, and the tools, strategies, and ways of seeing they get considered. To do this, we chose to take a risk: do everything in plenary sessions, limit speakers to 18 minutes each, severely limit introductions and have no questions or comments from the audience. Instead, we created ample “open space” that permitted speakers and participants to explore ideas and topics that folks were interested in. We also mixed in music and art as much as we could.

Over two and a half days, close to 40 speakers and performers appeared on the stage, and we truly experienced the positive momentum that is emerging from the progressive community. Talks were optimistic, stimulating, and new. While expensive to produce, and challenging to assemble, I think we achieved “proof of concept.” I’m just coming back to earth after a week. People literally said it was the best conference they’d ever been to. Several came up and shared that it had literally changed their lives, their programs, or their direction.

What was most important for me was the experience that Tides’ wide reach can translate into a fascinating and engaging convening that brings very disparate interests together in a common experience. In some ways, this is the most unexpected aspect of the conference – this emerging sense that we are really in this together. Folks working on universal health coverage connect very directly to those working on the tragedy of gender based violence; climate change activists can show others the necessity of attention to social justice issues; and capitalists can connect their values and knowledge to the movement for social justice. It was amazing.

One of my favorite talks was by Mary Anne Hitt from Appalachian Voices. She works to stop mountaintop removal coal mining, a truly horrendous practice. Her talk started off as one might expect with the story of what they were fighting and how people were affected by it. And then she brought up on the screen, of all things, Google maps. She proceeded to completely blow the audience’s collective mind. The way they have deployed that tool and turned it into an organizing device had people entranced. This diminutive, slender, soft-spoken woman from the heart of Appalachian coal country ended her talk to a roaring, standing ovation. You had to have been there.

We will be editing and releasing all of the talks on our Momentum 2008 Tides website. It will take us probably a month or so to start to roll them out, but there will be some you simply won’t want to miss.

We are pretty sure we will be doing this again next year, so look for a notice to get on the invitation list. It may be a bit harder to get in than this first effort at Momentum 2.0!

Also of interest:

• A portion of the Momentum John Edwards interview with David Brancaccio appears the PBS’s NOW show. See the video here: http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/429/video.html

• Video about stopping mountaintop removals for coal and energy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9afd2K6xx_I

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9afd2K6xx_I

• Momentum Photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/tidesmomentum/pool