Important capacity builder - Park District Advocacy Conference thisSaturday, March 29th

"...What YOU can do for YOUR Neighborhood"

Neighbors& Stakeholders,

This weekend is the all important Park District Advocacy Conference at South Shore Cultural Center. This is another chance to continue building the capacity which brought us Midnight Circus, movies in the park, Jazz in the park, a new playground and new found respect from a cunning mega-beast like the Chicago Park District. These things didn't happen because of the good intentions of the Park Dist., but because advocates fought hard for them to surface in our neighborhood!

On the way to overall victory in the fight to correct our city, we must slay an awful, wicked dragon who stands in the middle of the pathway to success - the Chicago Park District with it's evil archaic corporate culture as an anti-grassroots organization. In that regard it is a corrupt institution, locked against change, looking to lock down any meaningful change and preserving a status-quo of lazy staff, inept, egotistical park managers and wily, indifferent administrative personnel who have allowed a tremendous resource to border on disastrous waste! This very foul state of affairs can be corrected with disciplined, committed, consistent local advocacy! Thank God for people like "Friends of the Parks, who've battled incessantly for decades to keep this vicious beast of an institution somewhat honest and viably operable in most neighborhoods.

This year's conference follows last year's decent showing by our neighborhood. But a strong attendance is again needed this year, as we are incrementally turning the tide for our neighborhood. We need more neighbors on hand to learn how to deal with the process of engaging the system which can go very, very far in changing the violent atmosphere this city has become. But it will only change if we make it change. This conference and the comradeship of the advocates involved will show us how!

We lost a lot of capacity ( for 2014) from all the cancelled meetings in January and February. We need folks out on this one. It might as well be YOU!

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