WHAT'S IN YOUR FUTURE?
HERE'S WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Last summer there was a Neighborhood Summit here in Santa Rosa. It was run by Tanya Narath, the director of a private non-governmental organization (NGO) called Leadership Institute of Ecology and the Economy (LIEE) that entangles itself in partnership with the City (it's stated purpose is to 'educate leaders to create public policy'). The LIEE is the source group for the
'green' members of the city council, a political incubator, and
espouses the virtues of smart growth, form-based zoning, visioning,
redevelopment, transit-oriented development, high density development,
UN Agenda 21 et al. Tanya Narath is also the chair of the city's Community Advisory Board. The Community Advisory Board is in a position to decide who gets what money when neighborhoods apply for 'grants' from the City. A bit stinky.
Last summer, at the Santa Rosa Neighborhood Summit, Tanya Narath hired Jim Diers of Asset Based Community Development, to come and give a seminar (in the city council chambers) on 'Making Neighborhood Associations.'
What's a City/NGO-sponsored neighborhood summit, you ask? It's a trumped-up group of hand-picked 'neighborhood leaders' who have been instructed in Asset Based Community Development and the Delphi Technique. Their goal? To create neighborhood associations that are managed and manipulated by facilitators who have learned 'consensus building' and are using it to further the city's plans. They call it 'strengthening Santa Rosa' and 'balancing the individual's rights with the community's needs.' This is Communitarianism. You are manipulated into thinking that your ideas are shaping whatever it is the city is creating, but really you're just window-dressing. What do they want to do? Besides the old favorites of getting you out of your car and trying to get you to put over-priced solar panels on your roof, they are pushing Asset Based Community Development (ABCD).
Ok, it's the third time we mentioned it. What is it? And why should you care?
Using this model, the communities who hire ABCD speakers to influence their citizens are looking for an opportunity to create artificial community consensus. By creating farmed neighborhood associations they sideline actual community participants who often do not agree with the city policies. These artificial groups use the Delphi technique to block participation by real community members who raise points that are avoided by city-sponsored neighborhood groups. Under the guise of creating 'sustainable communities' neighborhood associations will be developed that are run by hand-picked city insiders who will rubberstamp city programs like redeveloping neighborhoods and redesigning streets. This visioning is supposedly community based but is not. They shut down any dissenting voices and marginalize, ridicule, attack, silence, and ignore those who do not agree.
Vital to ABCD is the process of mapping community assets. What is that? Mapping: actually putting you on a physical map with the link to your questionnaire. Asset: YOU are the asset. 'Mapping community assets' is a way of controlling and managing a group of people and directing them to use their skills in a pre-determined way to 'benefit' the community. Who decides what benefits the community? The hand-picked 'leaders'. By mapping a community are these groups determining who has something to offer the collective and who does not? What happens to those who do not contribute to the collective? How are they 'leveraged' into contributing?
Who gets your services for nothing? The favored, team-player, Agenda-driven non-profits. These are the groups that push Smart Growth, New Urbanism, governance by unelected committees and fake neighborhood associations.
Notice the words Vibrant and Walkable have appended themselves to every activity in the city? This is due to the SMART GROWTH movement. LIEE, a private non-profit group supporting this movement, is using techniques to find out as much about you as possible in order to get you to volunteer. They call it MANDATORY VOLUNTEERING. And if you find that funny now you won't when they get done with it. This Neighborhood Summit meeting on March 16th was a planning session for how they are going to get you to fill out an 11 page questionnaire (click here to read the questionnaire).
Another thing to notice is how Portland and Seattle are always held up as the model for Santa Rosa. Never mind that each of these cities has over 600,000 inhabitants, and Santa Rosa has about 170,000. We are supposed to use them as a model. In what way? Bikes and energy, and now, VOLUNTEERISM.
Now, all of this seems unrelated and maybe even a big 'so what'. But if you put this into the context of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, you'll see that the end game is to know everything about you and to use that information to manipulate and manage you. Through the use of Global Information System (GIS) mapping techniques, volunteers (church groups, neighborhood associations, bike coalitions) will be used to MAP you, provide your skill set to the 'community' and enforce MANDATORY VOLUNTEERING to favored organizations through social pressure.
UPDATE:
Ok, they had their meeting. We were there. No substance. Wednesday markets and community gardens. All about how great Portland and Seattle are and how many volunteers they have. The big news was that these Departments of Neighborhoods have tons of taxpayer-paid employees AND that the neighborhood associations are actually RUN BY THE CITY. The city hires consultants who put facilitators in each neighborhood and then they run the neighborhood and control all of the meetings. Get it?
Then came the questions from the audience. Who paid for the two day trip: airfare, hotel, food, transportation? (They tried not to answer this but the audience demanded a response.) The City. Will the City pay for water for community gardens? No. How are they going to get thousands of volunteers when no one even has the time to manage their own lives? No answer (were they afraid to talk about the questionnaire? They didn't mention it.) What makes the City think that we want their engineered, fake neighborhood associations and rah-rah toadies? They were stunned by this question. PANICKED BY IT. They said they didn't have to answer it, that it wasn't really a question. Another audience member said she felt it was another layer of government and she didn't want it. Someone else in the audience said it felt like her individuality was being taken away through these programs enforcing 'community.'
ALL OF THIS BEGS THE QUESTION: WHO WANTS IT BESIDES THE CITY? Our government is engaged in gathering information about us, managing us, inserting themselves into our lives. TURN THE DAMN STREET LIGHTS BACK ON AND LEAVE US ALONE.
***
Below is the 'invitation' from Tanya Narath:
Please join us for a city-wide meeting and conversation on strengthening neighborhoods and communities:
Wednesday, March 16
7:00 – 8:30 PM
Finley Community Center
Cypress Room
2060 W. College Ave
Overview: Both Seattle and Portland are internationally known leaders in creating vibrant neighborhoods and healthy cities. As a follow-up to last summer’s breakthrough Neighbors Summit, Santa Rosa sent a delegation to Portland and Seattle to see what we could learn from their experiences to help us reach our Neighbors Summit goals. At the March 16th event, the members of this city delegation will report on what they learned and suggest how the experiences of Portland and Seattle might apply to our work to strengthen Santa Rosa. The report will be followed by an open discussion of the lessons learned and their relevance to Santa Rosa.
Presenters on the visit to Portland and Seattle: (NOTICE THAT TWO CITY EMPLOYEES AND TWO NON-CITY EMPLOYEES WENT ON THIS TRIP PAID FOR WITH YOUR TAXES)
Ed Buonacorsi, City of Santa Rosa, Recreation, Parks and Community Services Department
Marc Richardson, City of Santa Rosa, Recreation, Parks and Community Services Department
Tanya Narath, Neighbors Summit, Community Advisory Board, and Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy
Hank Topper, Neighbors Summit and Community Advisory Board
Moderator and Commenter: Oscar Chavez, Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County
If you have any questions about the event, please don’t hesitate to give me a call at 843-0870 or reply to this email.
Thanks,
Tanya
Tanya Narath
Chair and North area representative, Community Advisory Board
555 5th Street, Suite 300A, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
T 707-578-9133 F 707-578-9134
CAB web site: http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/departments/cityadmin/cab/
Santa Rosa Neighbors Summit web site: http://santarosaneighborsummit.weebly.com/index.html
Last summer, at the Santa Rosa Neighborhood Summit, Tanya Narath hired Jim Diers of Asset Based Community Development, to come and give a seminar (in the city council chambers) on 'Making Neighborhood Associations.'
What's a City/NGO-sponsored neighborhood summit, you ask? It's a trumped-up group of hand-picked 'neighborhood leaders' who have been instructed in Asset Based Community Development and the Delphi Technique. Their goal? To create neighborhood associations that are managed and manipulated by facilitators who have learned 'consensus building' and are using it to further the city's plans. They call it 'strengthening Santa Rosa' and 'balancing the individual's rights with the community's needs.' This is Communitarianism. You are manipulated into thinking that your ideas are shaping whatever it is the city is creating, but really you're just window-dressing. What do they want to do? Besides the old favorites of getting you out of your car and trying to get you to put over-priced solar panels on your roof, they are pushing Asset Based Community Development (ABCD).
Ok, it's the third time we mentioned it. What is it? And why should you care?
Using this model, the communities who hire ABCD speakers to influence their citizens are looking for an opportunity to create artificial community consensus. By creating farmed neighborhood associations they sideline actual community participants who often do not agree with the city policies. These artificial groups use the Delphi technique to block participation by real community members who raise points that are avoided by city-sponsored neighborhood groups. Under the guise of creating 'sustainable communities' neighborhood associations will be developed that are run by hand-picked city insiders who will rubberstamp city programs like redeveloping neighborhoods and redesigning streets. This visioning is supposedly community based but is not. They shut down any dissenting voices and marginalize, ridicule, attack, silence, and ignore those who do not agree.
Vital to ABCD is the process of mapping community assets. What is that? Mapping: actually putting you on a physical map with the link to your questionnaire. Asset: YOU are the asset. 'Mapping community assets' is a way of controlling and managing a group of people and directing them to use their skills in a pre-determined way to 'benefit' the community. Who decides what benefits the community? The hand-picked 'leaders'. By mapping a community are these groups determining who has something to offer the collective and who does not? What happens to those who do not contribute to the collective? How are they 'leveraged' into contributing?
Who gets your services for nothing? The favored, team-player, Agenda-driven non-profits. These are the groups that push Smart Growth, New Urbanism, governance by unelected committees and fake neighborhood associations.
Notice the words Vibrant and Walkable have appended themselves to every activity in the city? This is due to the SMART GROWTH movement. LIEE, a private non-profit group supporting this movement, is using techniques to find out as much about you as possible in order to get you to volunteer. They call it MANDATORY VOLUNTEERING. And if you find that funny now you won't when they get done with it. This Neighborhood Summit meeting on March 16th was a planning session for how they are going to get you to fill out an 11 page questionnaire (click here to read the questionnaire).
Another thing to notice is how Portland and Seattle are always held up as the model for Santa Rosa. Never mind that each of these cities has over 600,000 inhabitants, and Santa Rosa has about 170,000. We are supposed to use them as a model. In what way? Bikes and energy, and now, VOLUNTEERISM.
Now, all of this seems unrelated and maybe even a big 'so what'. But if you put this into the context of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, you'll see that the end game is to know everything about you and to use that information to manipulate and manage you. Through the use of Global Information System (GIS) mapping techniques, volunteers (church groups, neighborhood associations, bike coalitions) will be used to MAP you, provide your skill set to the 'community' and enforce MANDATORY VOLUNTEERING to favored organizations through social pressure.
UPDATE:
Ok, they had their meeting. We were there. No substance. Wednesday markets and community gardens. All about how great Portland and Seattle are and how many volunteers they have. The big news was that these Departments of Neighborhoods have tons of taxpayer-paid employees AND that the neighborhood associations are actually RUN BY THE CITY. The city hires consultants who put facilitators in each neighborhood and then they run the neighborhood and control all of the meetings. Get it?
Then came the questions from the audience. Who paid for the two day trip: airfare, hotel, food, transportation? (They tried not to answer this but the audience demanded a response.) The City. Will the City pay for water for community gardens? No. How are they going to get thousands of volunteers when no one even has the time to manage their own lives? No answer (were they afraid to talk about the questionnaire? They didn't mention it.) What makes the City think that we want their engineered, fake neighborhood associations and rah-rah toadies? They were stunned by this question. PANICKED BY IT. They said they didn't have to answer it, that it wasn't really a question. Another audience member said she felt it was another layer of government and she didn't want it. Someone else in the audience said it felt like her individuality was being taken away through these programs enforcing 'community.'
ALL OF THIS BEGS THE QUESTION: WHO WANTS IT BESIDES THE CITY? Our government is engaged in gathering information about us, managing us, inserting themselves into our lives. TURN THE DAMN STREET LIGHTS BACK ON AND LEAVE US ALONE.
***
Below is the 'invitation' from Tanya Narath:
Please join us for a city-wide meeting and conversation on strengthening neighborhoods and communities:
Wednesday, March 16
7:00 – 8:30 PM
Finley Community Center
Cypress Room
2060 W. College Ave
Overview: Both Seattle and Portland are internationally known leaders in creating vibrant neighborhoods and healthy cities. As a follow-up to last summer’s breakthrough Neighbors Summit, Santa Rosa sent a delegation to Portland and Seattle to see what we could learn from their experiences to help us reach our Neighbors Summit goals. At the March 16th event, the members of this city delegation will report on what they learned and suggest how the experiences of Portland and Seattle might apply to our work to strengthen Santa Rosa. The report will be followed by an open discussion of the lessons learned and their relevance to Santa Rosa.
Presenters on the visit to Portland and Seattle: (NOTICE THAT TWO CITY EMPLOYEES AND TWO NON-CITY EMPLOYEES WENT ON THIS TRIP PAID FOR WITH YOUR TAXES)
Ed Buonacorsi, City of Santa Rosa, Recreation, Parks and Community Services Department
Marc Richardson, City of Santa Rosa, Recreation, Parks and Community Services Department
Tanya Narath, Neighbors Summit, Community Advisory Board, and Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy
Hank Topper, Neighbors Summit and Community Advisory Board
Moderator and Commenter: Oscar Chavez, Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County
If you have any questions about the event, please don’t hesitate to give me a call at 843-0870 or reply to this email.
Thanks,
Tanya
Tanya Narath
Chair and North area representative, Community Advisory Board
555 5th Street, Suite 300A, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
T 707-578-9133 F 707-578-9134
CAB web site: http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/departments/cityadmin/cab/
Santa Rosa Neighbors Summit web site: http://santarosaneighborsummit.weebly.com/index.html
