From: Steve Whitaker <swhitaker@braverangels.org>
Hello, everyone!
Thanks to everyone who made the Birmingham Area Braver Angel’s alliance meeting last Wednesday. We covered a lot of ground in just our second meeting, ever. We are still getting some of the rough spots polished but I think the meeting went quite well and I was excited to see all of the attendees (of course, I expect to see more of you at the next meeting). Below are a few highlights from the meeting:
Two of our members, Sean and Mark, gave us a recap of everything they saw and heard at the National Convention in Gettysburg. I would encourage everyone to use the YouTube link at the bottom of this recap to see some of the events hosted at the convention, as well as other great content put out by Braver Angels.
Sean gave us a good overview of the new initiative announced at the National Convention, Rise for America. This is an exciting new initiative in which the national organization would like to see everyone participate. In short it consists of participating in one or more of the following:
Host a Documentary Party
Attend and Amplify a Braver Angels Workshop
Coordinate a Braver Angels Ambassador-led Presentation
Train to be a Debate Chair
Create your own Event or Action Step
As a local Alliance, we’ll be putting a lot of energy into seeing how we can meet the Rise for America call!
Mark led us through a skills training session on active listening. We hope to include a skills training session in all of our meetings going forward. We all need to be able to “walk the talk”, and skills training is the foundation for that.
We discussed the roles we are hoping to continue filling locally so that we can get become more active in bringing Brave Angels activities to the Birmingham area. It will be critical to grow the pool of people in our area who can serve as Ambassadors, Moderators and Debate facilitators.
Speaking of critical needs, we also touched on the fact that our Blue Chair, Barbara, had to step down for personal reasons. Our State Coordinator is working hard to help us find a new Blue Co-chair. Braver Angels believes in always maintaining a Red-Blue balance, so this is probably the most important immediate need.
We spent a few minutes covering some other immediate priorities for our local Alliance:
Continuing to grow our local alliance.
Developing a set of workshops focused on bringing the critical skills promoted by Braver Angles to local high schools.
We will let everyone know when we schedule our next event. Until that time, here are some great resources to look over:
Braver Angels official website: https://braverangels.org
Become a member: https://braverangels.org/get-involved/#become-member
Free skills training (online): https://braverangels.org/what-we-do/take-an-ecourse/
Braver Angels YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BraverAngels
Braver Angels Rise for America: https://braverangels.org/rise/
I hope everyone takes time to look at the materials made available by Braver Angels, and I hope to see even more of you at our next gathering,
Steven Whitaker
Braver Angels Birmingham Area Red Co-chair
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