Upping the Resistance: Civil Disobedience Training with Trainers Alexis Danzig and Jamie Bauer

Training will cover the following basics:
1) the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence
2) civil disobedience as one method of direct action
3) affinity group organizing, and the role of support
4) arrest and consequences
5) tips for the day-of an action

Cost: $10 requested donation. No one will be turned away for a lack of funds. Lunch will be provided.

RSVP by January 26th to dougdecandia@gmail.com or surjwestchester@gmail.com.

Background on presenters who are ACT UP veterans and working with Rise & Resist these days.

Jamie's (pronouns: they/theirs) first arrest was in the City Council Chambers in 1982 when the NYC City Council voted down the gay rights bill.

Jamie was active in anti-militarism work with Women's Pentagon Action, and was one of the NYC and Washington DC trainers for the mass CD at the Supreme Court after Bowers vs. Hardwick was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1987.

They were working with War Resister's League in 1987 when a call came in requesting assistance from a new group forming to do direct action to raise awareness about the AIDS crisis. Jamie joined ACT UP and provided civil disobedience trainings, demonstration logistics, marshaling, police liaison work, and support for the group (and with various affinity groups) for the next eight years.

Alexis grew up going to anti-Vietnam War marches with her mother, and took part in anti-rape feminist actions and anti-nuclear organizing at college. After her father died of AIDS in 1988, Alexis joined ACT UP and was trained by Jamie to take part in her first CD, at the FDA in Rockville, MD, where Jamie and Alexis were members of the same affinity group. Jamie and Alexis worked on the logistics/CD-training team with ACT UP, helping to plan and run demonstrations together during the almost five years that they overlapped in ACT UP. Alexis was part of the marshaling team for the Dyke March attended by 20,000 lesbians and bisexual women planned by a national coalition of Lesbian Avengers that took place the night before the 1993 Lesbian Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation March on Washington.

Jamie and Alexis have worked with and have provided demonstration logistics and marshaling support to Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers, WHAM! (clinic defense for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers under attack by Operation Rescue), RUSA-LGBT (an LGBT Russian-speaking human rights group), GO Brooklyn, religious and sanctuary groups, and other ad hoc direct action organizations.

Together and separately, Jamie and Alexis have trained hundreds of people in NYC and up and down the East Coast in the American tradition of principled nonviolence, direct action, legal protest, marshaling techniques, and civil disobedience.