Meeting Minutes

Smaller group from Juneau, Gustavus, Dillingham, and Fairbanks

• Lots of groups organizing at local level. There is now a stand-up Alaska trying to organize protests/events. Showing need for party to move forward on policy pieces.
• Questions: What can we do for small communities where there isn’t a local organized group? Start small. Non-partisan events like potlucks. Upcoming Earth Day/Arbor Day event. How to organize for individuals or small groups in small communities. Linking people.
• Fairbanks- split things into different groups for different interests. Things that need doing. Mutual aid. Protest. Direct action. Music group. Art.
• Gustavus: Spontaenous women’s march. Walked through town with signs and banners. Few meeting when someone got together. Took notes. Started email list and facebook page and settled since then on having a google group.

Local levels choosing how they are organized. Can be informal/no bylaws though bigger communities might need more structure.

• Folks zoomed in from Sitka, Juneau, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Kenai, Dillingham, Gustavus, Petersburg. Again, a mix of people who have been in this convo for a while and important fresh voices & perspectives.
• We network groups statewide, with an eye toward also keeping folks safe even as we are more publicly networked
• Pat & Supanika’s sketched out a proposal for how we can might find agreement and areas to work on statewide. Local groups can communicate interest/support for particular issues, and the state wide coalition of community chapters can agree to take up issues with high thresholds of support, but individual chapters/community can continue to work on what matters to them. Pat has a good cartoon that shows how this can work. The idea is to be truly bottom up and allow local groups to set their own agenda, but also advocate for issues that really matter to them and be able to lobby or link up with other groups.
• We discussed the need to be inclusive and aware of Alaska Native ways of meeting and organizing as we grow. We don’t want to be a white-dominant group that crumbles over time. We identified two priorities to stick with over time
  1. Decolonize our party structure and meeting format to include indigenous voices
  2. Tribal consultation on the party and platform structure as a whole, including ideally have each neighborhood group consult with their tribe(s) at the local level.
• We want to be aware that some people are feeling the weight of fascism for this time, but we need to not overburden people with those feelings who have always felt that weight of state sanctioned violence and oppression
• We got a report from Sitka, where a lot of protest is happening, but no one group is organizing or coordinating.
• We agreed it’s cool for folks to start a “Friends & Neighbors” group in their community or neighborhood, as a way of getting started.
• We agreed to meet Sun March 16th, 2025 at 11 am. 

• Folks zoomed in from Juneau, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Kenai, Dillingham, Gustavus, Petersburg. A mix of people who have been in this convo for a while and important fresh voices & perspectives.
• We looked at Stand up Gustavus and Petersburg Friends & Neighbors as examples of local groups that could network with larger groups
• We want more functional networking of existing political organizing efforts from around AK
• Some people zoomed in looking for a group “with motion” to plug into 
• We talked about the benefits and also risks of working with a larger party that already exists such as the Working Families Party. It is very difficult to get a group past inevitable disagreements into a workable organizational structure without a pre-existing pattern and support. But it is also very difficult to have to brand an effort to Alaskans that may carry baggage or be insensitive to Alaskan issues
• We had consensus that it would be good to form a “political group” which is the precursor to forming a political party in Alaska. 
• We talked about being inclusive of mutual aid, and about organizing at the precinct/neighborhood level. What can we learn from existing political parties? Why don’t they work for us?
• Next steps: Synthesize some of our previous take homes & visions into a short document that could be shared with others to gather feedback; continue to hold weekly “Cozy chats” to network our groups and share thinking. Big thank you to Supanika for helping folks gather and facilitating ; )

Our initial discussions began as a group of Alaska neighbors who met over Alaska Twitter back in 2022 and began discussing a vision for a new Alaska Party. 

We hosted out first Zoom chat on July 28, 2022 with 11 strangers with a common goal.

We shared a bit about our own feelings, local issues, and our reasons for gravitating towards this idea of a potential new party.

We had overlap/resonance around the following ideas:

• We’re organized year round
• We organize for the long game
• We create community, have meet ups for people to feel good, find friends
• We embrace transparency with leadership, money, structure
• We find common ground by using intentional communication and looking for shared experience 
• Our plans are Alaska-specific, we pursue policies that resonate with Alaskan issues
• We are bottom up and determine our priorities democratically
• We meet people where they are and listen
• We get started by assessing what other orgs are doing and find gaps, work collaboratively, look to score small wins and build on those in a way that will draw more people to us
• We’re very well organized and have the capacity to train volunteers, build skills, educate voters

We formed a signal chat and then hosted out second conversation in August of 2022 and discussed further:

• We address the grief of losing democracy/climate by building organized community around positive social change
• We are organized and practice/train in solid relationship and communication skills so we can be effective in terms of emergencies / disaster response 
• We fill in organizing gaps and add value to what exists already
• We are action-oriented, our processing leads to action in real life
• We make use of RCV strategically
• We are committed to transparency as our core value
• We are committed to being representative of our communities demographically and we will pause and course correct if we veer from that. We don’t talk for groups that aren’t meaningfully represented in our membership
• We allow for small groups to form around members’ interests with decision making and support from the larger group.
• We are in it for the long haul, we repair relationships and organize for longevity of the group
• We are open to non-hierarchical structures and are engaged in healthy discussion to find the structure that works best for us
• We are committed to course correction and continuous improvement
• Our meetings are a microcosm of what democracy should look like 

Our To-Do’s

• Develop an elevator pitch for what our group is, what are our three main goals/points
• Create a google group for email communication 
• Create a Discord for organizing our conversations & side conversations 
• Shift contact info to private documents to protect personal information 
• Possibly modify our intake survey for phase 2 (i;e. Busy people)
• Work on creating a google spreadsheet for project / subcommittee management- you can recommend a group / project and sign up for ones you’d like to work on

November 2022, the elections came and went and momentum for the project stalled for a bit…