[Youthsurvival-network] Fwd: The need for neighborhood councils

[ForAfricanWomen@xxxxxxx]

Charity begins at home for African women and women of African descent.

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• Subject: The need for neighborhood councils
• From: ForAfricanWomen@xxxxxxx
• Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 13:02:32 EST
• Full-name: ForAfricanWomen

African Women's Charity Organization
P.O. Box 23074  Oakland, CA  94623-0074
(415) 789-7360
Email:  ForAfricanWomen@xxxxxxx
Website:  http://hometown.aol.com/forafricanwomen/myhomepage/index.html

Building an African Women's Movement and Forming International Sisterhood

The need for neighborhood councils

As a critical part of the Independence movement, we are asking all of our neighborhoods to organize a neighborhood council. The people on the council should be elected and/ or agreed on to serve the whole neighborhood. They will be responsible for the well being of the neighborhood. It is very important that the people who serve on the council have the confidence of the people they are serving and the people be able to add to or subtract from the council as they see fit. The council will have regular meetings and the people will have access to the council. These councils will be autonomous and also be a part of the African independence movement. The purpose is for the control of our lives based on our own organization that is accountable to the people. We want these councils to come up everywhere we are living and we challenge the entire African Women's Charity Organization members to make this a priority. With the organization and growth of these councils there are unlimited things that we will be able to accomplish. A key is knowing that people in our communities are already organized, we just want those key people who have been doing that work to be a part of the larger collective so we can have more power. We want to build a movement worldwide from the ground up.
We are in the process of building powerful African Women's and Youth Movements throughout the world that will connect all African women and youth, inside and outside of Africa. This is a very important part of the African independence movement. An African Women's movement is necessary to educate, mobilize, and organize the largest number of African Women as possible. Our vision includes collectively solving our problems to obtain proper childcare, housing, collective kitchens, transportation, healthcare, clean drinking water for all and employment/skills, etc. We must build a strong infrastructure in Africa and we must be tightly organized outside of Africa.
We are calling for the masses of African people to start living in houses together in a collective manner. We are not just talking about living with your family, but also living with people who are not your family. We want to build new families who are totally committed to the Independence of Africa. For instance, there are a lot of young people who are of an age in which they want to start living on their own but do not have the means to afford a place by themselves. We are calling upon these youth to start living together collectively so they can pool their recourses and be able to afford to live in places that they could not afford to live in if they were by themselves. This is just an example, but the same thing applies to all of the African population. The key to these collectives however must be commitment to the African Independence movement. Collectivism is a very important principle in African culture that cannot be ignored. In Collectivism the family is more important than the individual, the community is more important than the family, the nation is more important than the community, and humanity is more important than the nation. We must apply the principle of humanism in which every human being is respected, simply because they are a human being. We must fight individualism to the death in which the individual puts his or her interest as more important than the interest of the group. We must choose ourselves by choosing the people, because if the people are taken care of then the individual will benefit also. We must also have a very serious work ethic in which all-able body human being work for the benefit of the group, and we must fight against exploitation wherever it raises it head. We must remember that the basis of exploitation is always theft.
We must also organize things like collective kitchens in which the people can eat at public kitchens that the people build instead of the inefficient way of every family cooking its own dinner every night. These and many other things we can do by organizing ourselves from the bottom up. We think that this kind of organization is critical for the survival of the masses as things become harsher in terms of economics.


Charity begins at home for African women and women of African descent.
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