CAN Midwest Winter Retreat!

This weekend, Urbana-Champaign was host to not only to the drunken debauchery that is "Unofficial". No, instead our campus was host to the amazing Campus Antiwar Network Midwest Winter Retreat, and it was an incredible success! With members from 6 different chapters across the Midwest, Midwest CAN was able to come together in a way that we have not done before, starting the important work on the regional conference in April and also developing what we hope will be an incredibly successful communication structure, so the gains and networking developed over the weekend aren't lost.

First, the retreat really did a great job of allowing the Midwest to network much better. We have decided to set up a system to ensure members are able to not only contact other branches with ease, but that branches stay in touch regularly through monthly conference calls. Such a system should ensure a much stronger unity among the Midwest, which can only be to the benefit of the movement and to the individual chapters.

Along that line, simply being able to discuss politics and local events with other chapters is eye opening. It was discovered by many of the chapters - Iowa, UIC, and Cincinnati, to name a few - that while they have a very solid logistical aspect of their group, they very rarely talk politics. Most of the members from those groups are likely going to return and encourage a real change in their organizations to allow for more political discussions. For our own part, UIUC suffers from the inverse problem. Our level of political discourse is very high, but because of that we have not focused on events and actions. This may have led to a decreased presence on Campus, which can only depress turnouts. With the weather warming up, however, it is very likely that UIUC will once again become more active in the eyes of the student body at large, as we stage more demonstrations and events.

Additionally, the retreat began to get the Sisyphusian boulder which is the Regional Conference rolling. We set a date (April 18-20), confirmed Iowa as the location, and developed both an overarching vision for the conference as well as a number of concrete suggestions of how to invite other groups into the Conference, whom to work with in particular, and what workshops to put on. Most importantly, we developed the system to get the Conference Planning Committee (the CPC) off the ground by next Sunday - in the first official Regional Conference Call.

That is going to be a very interesting and intense call. It is both the first call for the new Chapter Liaisons and the first call for the CPC, and it is also an open call, so anyone can participate (but only the CPC members can vote on issues relating to the Conference). The CPC will have their hands full, reading abstracts of suggestions for the conference and then debating on them, while the Liaisons, in my mind, will also be quite busy formalizing and finalizing what exactly they hope to accomplish.

Our own chapter will need to elect the Liaison and the CPC members (up to two of the latter, only one of the former) on Tuesday. Tuesday will likely be a busy logistical meeting, but it seems that with the high level of political discourse in our chapter anyway, it is OK to have the logistical meetings, especially with events coming up as they are.

We hope to jump on the Green Party's 5th Anniversary protest the week before Spring Break, and really take the lead in organizing it (since so far it does not seem that the Greens have been as aggressive as they could have been with their outreach to other groups - a charge that frankly could be level at us more often than we would like to admit). We also hope to show the film Winter Soldier with the local IVAW chapter the Monday of that Week of Action, and then show parts of Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan on either Friday or Saturday. The fact that that is the start of Spring Break could suppress turn out, but even so simply getting the information out to people to allow them to watch it on their own is important.

We can safely say that coming out of the Retreat we all feel much more energized and strengthened as a chapter, and as a movement as a whole. What we need to do now is translate that energy, that networking, and these wonderful ideas into actions and and events to strengthen the chapter. As was stated during the retreat by Madison's own Chris Dols, "The Midwest is only as strong as the sum of its chapters." And we feel that the chapters - all the Midwest chapters - have the potential to be much stronger now than ever before.