Facilitating Radical Graphics Campaigns - Beehive Collective Presentation at UCONN, November 2

Join the Beehive Design Collective's discussion on how they facilitate radical graphics campaigns and the meaning behind their work.
Monday, November 2, 2009
8:00pm - 10:00pm
Dodd Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut
Event Info on Facebook

Here are their words about the Plan Colombia campaign:
This graphic is the product of many intercambios about the issue of colonialism in the Andean Region of South America that took place between our collective and organizers over the spring of 2002 in Ecuador, Colombia and the U.S. These exchanges of information and inspiration were collaboratively sewn together into a quilt of images, that are organized into a circuit of progressions and contrasts that inform and engage the viewer throughout their journey of the graphic. The long history of colonialism in the Americas, currently manifested in the Andean Region as "Plan Colombia", is a strong metaphor of the multi-faceted destructive influences of U.S. foreign policy and corporate monoculture on a global scale. This graphic attempts to expose the lie of the drug war as a smokescreen for multinational corporation's interests in extraction of the rich biodiversity and natural resources of the Amazon and her peoples. It is an anti-war poster that speaks in the mythology of our times… the cancerous monomyth of corporate globalization, and its antibodies of grassroots resistance. In an attempt to overcome the tendency of images to simply portray "what we are against," this graphic illustrates this story in three "layers" to help the viewer experience the different aspects of an extremely complex, and brutal situation. The mission was to give an illustrated explanation of not just the nightmare, but to also give weight to the inspiring stories of hope, courage and struggle of those that are directly experiencing it. As North American youth that have endured the destructive and racist brainwashing of television, videogames, cultural appropriation and advertising imagery, our collective felt it was essential to produce this representation in collaboration with organizers in the Andean region, to get the story straight. The result, is thick with those voices. The tools produced from this collaboration are being distributed, as anti-copyright material, for use in campaigns in both the South and North of the Americas. More

The Beehive's mission: To cross-pollinate the grassroots, by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images that can be used as educational and organizing tools. In the process of this effort we seek to take the "who made that!?" and "how much does it cost!?" out of our creative endeavors, by anonymously functioning as word-to-image translators of the information we convey. We build, and disseminate these visual tools with the hope that they will self-replicate, and take on life of their own. More about Beehive

Steelworkers Form Collaboration with MONDRAGON, the World’s Largest Worker-Owned Cooperative

[27 October 2009 - United Steelworkers - H/T Len Krimerman] Pittsburgh -- The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada. The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of "one worker, one vote."

"We see today's agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada," said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. "Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities."

Josu Ugarte, President of MONDGRAGON Internacional added: "What we are announcing today represents a historic first – combining the world's largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world's most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America."

Highlighting the differences between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and union co-ops, Gerard said, "We have lots of experience with ESOPs, but have found that it doesn't take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control. We see Mondragon's cooperative model with 'one worker, one vote' ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street."

Both the USW and MONDRAGON emphasized the shared values that will drive this collaboration. Mr. Ugarte commented, "We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first. We are excited about working with Mondragon because of our shared values, that work should empower workers and sustain families and communities," Gerard added.

In the coming months, the USW and MONDRAGON will seek opportunities to implement this union co-op hybrid approach by sharing the common values put forward by the USW and MONDGRAGON and by operating in similar manufacturing segments in which both the USW and MONDRAGON already participate.

The full text of the Agreement is available online.

About MONDRAGON: The MONDRAGON Corporation mission is to produce and sell goods and provide services and distribution using democratic methods in its organizational structure and distributing the assets generated for the benefit of its members and the community, as a measure of solidarity. MONDRAGON began its activities in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon by a rural village priest with a transformative vision who believed in the values of worker collaboration and working hard to reach for and realize the common good.

Today, with approximately 100,000 cooperative members in over 260 cooperative enterprises present in more than forty countries; MONDRAGON Corporation is committed to the creation of greater social wealth through customer satisfaction, job creation, technological and business development, continuous improvement, the promotion of education, and respect for the environment. In 2008, MONDRAGON Corporation reached annual sales of more than sixteen billion euros with its own cooperative university, cooperative bank, and cooperative social security mutual and is ranked as the top Basque business group, the seventh largest in Spain, and the world's largest industrial workers cooperative.

About the USW: The USW is North America's largest industrial union representing 1.2 million active and retired members in a diverse range of industries.

Creating Cognitive Dissonance in the Classroom

In Ben Johnson's blog at Edutopia, he writes (17 September 2009): "Cognitive dissonance is created by a dedicated teacher who challenges the students' beliefs about their own capacity to learn." In the Creative Community Building program at the University of Connecticut, we seek to create such experiences in the undergraduate classroom (face-to-face and online). Consider signing up for any of three Spring 2010 courses to be offered in Storrs and Hartford, Connecticut, as well as online:

• Creativity + Social Change - Tuesdays in Hartford, Connecticut
• Community Organizing and Social Movements - Mondays in Storrs, Connecticut
• Introduction to the Co-Operative Movement: History, Philosophy and Prospects for the Future - Online
  

Creative Workers as "The New Untouchables"

What examples do you see in your community's schools, where creative thinking is being encouraged, taught and applied? Where are your kids most creative -- in school or out of school? What opportunities for being creative do you provide to your kids at home?

Before we can teach for more creativity in school -- which we absolutely should be doing -- we need to help teachers, administrators and parents rediscover their own creativity so that they can recognize and encourage it in others.

[20 October 2009 - New York Times - By Tom Friedman] That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education. As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.” ... So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. More | Public Responses to This Column: "To Promote Creativity, Let’s Start in the Schools"

Public Space ... For Ads or Art?

Who controls public space? Should it be filled with ads? Or art? Or both? What examples exist in your community where commercial signs and messages have been banned?

[25 October 2009 - New York Times] A Battle, on Billboards, of Ads vs. Art ... It was a bizarre cat-and-mouse game, played on Sunday across scores of makeshift billboards in New York. One group of artists and activists spread across Lower Manhattan, transforming innumerous wheat-pasted posters — the ones that readily sprout over scaffolding -- into their own canvas. They would whitewash the posters and then create their own work, or allow anti-advertising advocates to spread their own messages. But just as quickly as they whitewashed and put up art, workers arrived to put up new posters where the artists had obscured the old ones. More