The Great Lakes Consortium (GLC), through WSOS Community Action Commission, Inc. – as Contract Agent and Manager received a U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs grant for a two-way exchange program from September 2012 through August 2017. This Professional Fellows Program Sustaining Civic Participation in Minority Communities included 57 participants from four East Central European countries and 32 U.S. mentors. Citizen Action of New York, Organizing Director, Rosemary Rivera was one of those participants. Rosemary is documenting her time there through daily blog post aimed at sharing her experiences and lessons learned during the trip. This is the second entry.
Today I was fortunate enough to work with Sondra, the former Executive Director of Community Voices Heard (CVH). We went to heroes park to meet with Sylvia, the woman who runs Budapest Pride. She was wonderful and her English was really good so it was much easier to communicate.
Budapest Pride is an organization whose main project was to organize and mobilize around the yearly pride march. Their funding comes predominantly through some organizations and George Soros. Each year, they have to march in a fenced in area after walking through scores of neo-nazis in order to participate. The fence is said to be for their protection and the march has continuously grown every year. At last count, they had about twenty thousand participants. However, those who attend are told not to wear their “colors” at least until they get inside the fence. Apparently, it can still be very dangerous, but it is a risk that Budapest Pride is willing to take.
On the way through heroes park, we encountered a smaller version of an Occupy Movement. You see, the Prime Minister of Hungary wants to move into the castle (on taxpayer dollars – we are talking about the only European head of state who has openly endorsed Trump!) and move the museums into a park that the community uses. It is a beautiful park and the people mill around, bring their children and enjoy all the beauty it has to offer. In order to stop the plan and bring awareness to the situation, this group has “occupied the park” and taken up residence in some pretty nice looking tents in order to educate the people. The neighborhood itself is becoming more expensive as they are raising the cost of housing and everything else in the area. (By the way, please note that there are already two or three museums there and anymore would make no sense whatsoever). To top it off, environmentalists are joining in because so many trees would have to be cut down in order to create space for these museums which would probably be better placed outside of the City Center.
After our meeting in the park, we walked to the meeting place. Trust me, it was a long walk. Once we arrived, Sondra walked the Pride group through a power analysis. There are 199 legislators in Parliament but after doing the analysis, it was clear that because the majority party (conservative) has two-thirds of the vote, if they don’t like something, they simply change the constitution. I wish it were that easy to overturn Citizen’s United! Anyway, the deeper we got into the analysis, the more I realized just how major a task Budapest Pride was taking on as it’s first real campaign to make change.
The media market is also dominated by the Conservative government, so social media and alternative media markets are really important.
I am a bit tired tonight, but I want to let you all know that I am VERY jealous of how these groups interact with each other. All of them have dynamics that allow for real discourse and disagreement, but NOT ONE PERSON IS DISAGREEABLE. They listen to each other, they value each other and perhaps it takes such an oppressive state to bring such unity, but I really want that kind of unity amongst all of us and our members.
