A Belated Birthday Present: Strategy Groups

By Clarence Thompson

This weekend in this city of Portland, there have been agents of evil at work trying to tear apart the social fabric of our society.  But while their efforts have been very overt, there have been others at work in hidden, subsurface ways to build and strengthen communities of color who are now under threat.  I am happy to be part of the builders and not the destroyers.

And over the last two weeks I have gotten what I consider to be a Divinely-granted belated birthday present.  We now have a strategy group forming to help guide the development of the North Portland Flying University classes, and there are additional people from the community who are interested in forming a strategy group to guide the general strengthening of the Black and Latino communities in Portland.  Hopefully we can start weekly strategy meetings next month.  At last we have a group that is willing to tackle the hard work of thinking, learning and planning our organizing efforts.

There is also an additional bit of good news.  A new writer has joined our textbook-writing team.  He is a Black civil engineer from sub-Saharan Africa, and he is helping us to finish our upcoming Book 4.  Good news, indeed!