Sunday, February 19th from 2-4pm

From the organizers:

Citizen's Soapbox will hold a meeting on Sunday, Feb. 19, where we will work together to determine a community agenda that we'd like to see our representatives support. This is open to anyone in the community and will be an opportunity for citizens to voice their policy priorities in an open, non-partisan format.

While our last meeting focused on an initiative to resist current policies and actions, this meeting will focus on setting a future-looking, prioritized legislative agenda that reflects our values. As we're talking about future-looking solutions, it is an opportunity to enter a non-partisan head space.

We're calling it our first Community Congress, a body made up of community residents gathered to practice self-government: to hear each other on proposals for legislative action, discuss the merits, and vote to collectively determine the will of the gathered community through democratic decision making. Here's how the meeting and follow-up will work:

• Speakers will have three minutes (harshly refereed!) to make their case for an actionable legislative priority to the body.  Once everyone who wants to has had a turn to go once, participants can have another shot if they want (depending on time).
• Following these statements, we can have a period of Q&A from the body on any of the proposals.
• If you plan to propose a legislative agenda item, please send us the following via email by Friday, February 17 and we'll create a schedule of speakers: (1) your name and city/town/village of residence; and (2) a 2-3 sentence write-up of your legislative priority. 
• Following the meeting, we'll email these proposals out via an online poll for people to rank in order of priority to see if we can identify top group priorities.

We hope you use this next week to think about solutions and put together a persuasive argument. We look forward to sharing ideas.