Tentacle to Work Days

I had two occasions of Take-a-Tentacle-to-Work-Day. The first is when the Elder came to my work at Tides for the Momentum conference at the W Hotel is San Fran on July 20-22. As the conference said, it was "an invitational forum where some of the most creative minds in the progressive movement come together to challenge, inspire and energize each other."

I think that Tides pulled it off, there were definitely many speakers whose words have stuck with me. The plenaries were formatted with 5-6 speakers and each speaker had less than 20 mins to present what was the most inspiring-interesting-thought provoking message that their work presents at this present moment in time. The sessions were broad and called: Neighborhood, Wars, Health, Media, Earth, Money and i´m missing one. There was no formal Q and A with speakers but lots of time for open space conversations and mingling. The Elder and I sort of vibed off our debrief each night over dinner as we shared our experiences to the house of what dug into us and reverberated in our senses. Most notably was the woman from the End Mountain Top Removal organization in Ohio (?). Her presentation was amazing and everyone needs to see what the mining companies are doing to extract ore these days-- seriously, they are chopping off mountains, like entire ranges where forests grow and life exists. And it´s creating job-LOSS and health-DECLINE for the folks that live there. Check them out: http://www.ilovemountains.org/. Peeps need to see what´s going on.

Here´s the rest of the conference details, b/c there were lots of great speakers: http://www.tides.org/momentum/about

The other tentacle to work day was with Chris, Sleepopus. We met over tea to talk about how her org could focus more in a health frame in their transportation and land use coalition efforts.