(from a meeting list)
- Produced 10 issues and one supplement of Nonviolent News
- Did feedback survey on Nonviolent News
- (Got into the) Financial black
- (Conference/exhibition) Events; MAW programme with Tony
Kempster and Christine Titmus
Peru exhibition at West Belfast festival
Brendan McKeague nonviolence training
- Useful planning day
- Branched out from Belfast
- Visited, involved with Magilligan army base issue
- Consolidated as group
- Numbers involved steady, increasing
- Developed training policy
- Submissions to Healing Through Remembering on ideas for
a living museum
- Two articles in Peace News
- Involved with army recruitment leafleting
- Various queries coming via website, responded to
- Website extensive, looks credible
- Support for other groups – Justice Not Terror, Alternatives
to Violence Project, Faslane
- Met various enquirers, postgrad students etc
- Street theatre on TV violence
- Participation in Peace People/Irish School of Ecumenics
nonviolence series
Not bad for a purely voluntary group! Mind you,
getting into the black financially was due to both a grant
and increased subscriptions (so – those who subscribe,
please keep it up!). That said, there were things we could
not do, either because they were beyond our capacity or those
asking were looking for the next to impossible. But with more
people involved we could do even more……
INNATE meets monthly in Belfast to discuss issues
of concern and discuss programme. ‘You’ are very
welcome to attend; dates usually appear in Nonviolent News.
If you want to meet with someone from our group anywhere on
the island, please get in touch, or we do our best to respond
to e-mails and phone queries (as a voluntary group it may
be immediate or it may on occasions take us a while). Alternatively,
we are happy to hear from you with suggestions for programme,
or issues we should pay attention to.
The challenges which face our world are being
added to by the march of global warming with its recipe for
disasters and conflict on a global scale. War continues to
be a method of policy making (or at least an attempt at it)
despite the current, and partial, discrediting done by the
hugely significant failure of US and British policies on Iraq.
Northern Ireland stumbles uncertainly towards political devolution
but with many unresolved issues and great misunderstanding,
and work to be done that will take a generation or more. The
Republic stumbles on in its Celtic Tiger way while paying
scant regard to real justice issues at home and abroad.
It is our job to try to explore responses to
some of these issues, doing our best to bring a nonviolent
perspective to bear. We hope to continue to be imaginative
and creative in our work in 2007, and we ask for your help
in any way possible – even if that is ‘helping
yourself’ by providing us with information as to what
you are up to in your neck of the woods so we can let other
people know, and to enable networking and cooperation to happen.
Wishing you a peaceful 2007 and every success
in your work and struggle for a better world,
Rob Fairmichael, Coordinator, INNATE,
February 2007
