Citizens Intent on Reforming Corporate Accountability (CIRCA)

Ohio Democracy School

DATE: January 27-29, 2006 (Friday evening, all day Saturday, Sunday morning)
LOCATION: Campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio
FEE: $250 before 12/1/05, $285 after (some scholarship funds may be available)
CONTACT: Eme Lybarger
e_star9@hotmail.com
(614) 499-2815
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What's Democracy School?

At the most fundamental level, our weekend-long Democracy School addresses why democratic self-governance is impossible when corporations wield constitutional rights to deny people's rights, and how we are able to rectify these wrongs.
Democracy School was created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD). Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003, and the number of schools is growing rapidly. In 2004, the Democracy Schools have been held five times at Wilson College, three times at Boston College, once in Brattleboro, and once at the North Carolina Blue Ridge Assembly. Participants have come from across the country, including California, Iowa, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Washington, Alabama, Vermont and Pennsylvania.

Democracy School teaches a paradigm shift, a dramatic new way of looking at our role as citizens in a democracy, and how to assert our inalienable rights as a sovereign people. Attendees explore the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and learn how to "reframe" single issues to confront the rights used by corporations to deny the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people's movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with Democracy School are a 190-page notebook of background reading material, and a copy of Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.

Attorney Thomas Linzey founded CELDF in 1994 with Stacey Schmader to help communities organize to oppose corporate assaults on republican democracy. Richard Grossman and Thomas Linzey authored many of the written materials that attendees receive for the School.

Dedication: Democracy School is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pennock, a 17-year-old boy from Berks County, Pennsylvania, who died in 1995 after being exposed involuntarily to land applied sewage sludge. Daniel's parents, Antoinette and Russell Pennock, travel across Pennsylvania to end the practice of sludge disposal, by which waste management corporations reap massive profits hauling and spreading sludge on farmland.