Thursday, May 31, 2007

Bonnaroo here we come...

Once again you'll find the Lokahi team at the gigantic Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee later on this month. We'll be set up doing outreach for the ONE Campaign, building more and more support to make poverty history, and we can use some help!

With Bonnaroo being as massive as it is, we are only allocated a limited number of passes, basically enough for our core team to get in and set up. But we want more people on the ground spreading the word about what we are doing, and are looking to find people that have tickets and are already going to be at the concert during the four days that would like to spend part of their time volunteering for the ONE Campaign. Volunteers hang out for a few hours: get trained by us, then float about the crowd talking to people and getting them involved. It's a great way to take an active step in fighting extreme poverty, get involved with ONE and meet new people, plus we'll set you up with some very cool free ONE swag for your efforts!

Dan talks to Bonnaroo ONE supporters

If you are interested in participating, please send us a myspace message or email us.

Again, unfortunately, this opportunity is only open to those whom are already going to Bonnaroo and have tickets, but we'll be at lots and lots of other venues this summer that anyone can join us at - go here for more info how to do so!

Thanks!





Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Social networking sites and online organizing

Check out this article, written by one of our favorite bloggers, Danah Boyd, on the use of social networking websites and the internet for political organizing. She brings up some really interesting points in regards to how social networking sites can in some ways serve as a ‘public sphere’, and likewise the need for candidates and organizations to treat them as such. There is a lot of potential to reach out to unprecedented numbers of people – especially youth – in the upcoming years via this method, getting them engaged and involved with important issues. That said, there seems to be a trend amongst big organization and candidates to put up the same polished/pr approved messaging and image as they would in all of their other forms of communication. The lack of personalization is a big red flag – no one reads it for real, and because an online presence has such a big impact on how an organization or candidate is viewed, it will become increasingly important for web presences to become more and more ‘genuine’.

Anyway, as we are always interested here at Lokahi in ways to better link online and on the ground organizing, we though we’d pass this article on…





Wednesday, May 23, 2007

A busy weekend...

Sorry for the lack of updates this month - the last few weeks have been spent getting things figured out and squared away for our upcoming summer touring season. This past weekend however, Lokahi was back at work with our old partners the ACLU of Southern California. We took the ACLU message of civil liberties and rights for everyone to this year’s Long Beach Pride Festival. We talked to lots and lots of folks and got a bunch of people involved with the organization. It was a great start to our soon to begin summer outreach season!

We are STILL finalizing plans for summer, but we promise that we’ll have more info and some big volunteer announcements coming ASAP!

Thanks again for your ongoing support – we look forward to seeing everyone this summer!

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Spreading the word...

For those of you interested, we finally made a simple web banner for Lokahi. It looks like this:



If you'd be so kind as to post it on your blog, Myspace page or web page we'd be very grateful! Spreading the word about what do always helps us get more and more people involved as volunteers.


To post the banner, just copy and paste the code below into your template setting for a blog, or under your 'About Me' or 'General Interest' section of your Myspace page:



We've been pretty busy lately, mostly preparing for summer tours and working with our after school students. We'll have a mass email going out letting you know more about volunteer opportunities once we finalize our plans for this summer, which should come any day now, we promise!

Thanks again for your support!