 All right, we should be live on Facebook now and recording. So thanks to everyone who has joined so far. We are going to start our webinar on organizing for peace in your local communities in about a couple of minutes. We're gonna wait for some other folks to join us. And yeah, we're looking forward to talking with folks today. Okay, so I think pretty much ready to get started. It's 5.30 and so just wanted to make sure everyone, we respect everyone's time. So thanks for everyone for joining us on our webinar today. We are going to be talking about how to organize for peace in your local community. My name is Carly Town. I'm a national organizer with Code Pink Stavest from the War Machine campaign. Really excited to welcome everyone to our organizing for peace webinar which is put on in conjunction with Oregon Physicians for Responsibility and the Iranian American Friendship Council. So thank you so much. So today we're gonna be talking about how we can build on the momentum from the International Day of Action for Peace with Iran that Code Pink and our coalition partners put on on January 25th. On January 25th, we had over 200 events based in over 15 countries around the world where people joined us from all different kinds of movements. Of course, the anti-war movement but also the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the student movement, the labor movement. So we really want to build on the momentum from our January 25th action put on to advocate for peace with Iran by organizing in our local communities because of course we know that even though the Trump administration has said that tensions with Iran are simmering and things are not as tense anymore, we know that that's not true because the Trump administration after saying that increased economic sanctions on unilateral economic sanctions on Iran and also this latest action that spurred the International Day of Action for Peace with Iran, which was the assassination of General Soleimani was just the latest in years long a maximum pressure campaign that the Trump administration has been putting on Iran. So we know that in order to continue to advocate for peace with Iran, we have to educate people in our local communities and also organize in our local communities. So today we're gonna be talking about how we can actually provide people with the tools and resources to not only pass peace with Iran city council resolutions in their local communities but also how to host congressional town halls with their elected officials to really start to develop in their local towns, in your local cities, a relationship and a dialogue with the local officials and representatives in your communities who actually make these really important decisions about war and peace. So in order to do that, I wanted to introduce our speakers who will be walking us through these two important case studies about how to organize in our local communities. So first we have Kelly Campbell who will discuss the steps necessary to pass the city council resolution in your local community. Kelly brings more than 20 years of experience in peace, justice and environmental health organizing to her role as the executive director of Oregon's Physicians for Social Responsibility. Before joining Oregon's Physician for Social Responsibility she served as the Portland Area Peace Program Director for the American Friends Service Committee and was a founding co-director of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrow's, an organization that has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. Kelly served on the steering committee of the National Coalition United for Peace and Justice and worked as the communications director for Pesticide Action Network North America and as campaign coordinator for Californians for Pesticide Reform. She's the recipient of the 2019 Visionary Leaders Award from National Physicians for Social Responsibility. So really excited to have Kelly on with us. Again, she's going to be walking us through how to pass the city council resolution in your local community. Then we're going to hear from Dr. Goudar's Aizari who will walk us through how to host congressional town halls in our own communities. So Goudar's is a political analyst, writer, radio producer, human rights activist and peace activist by choice and an engineer and educator by profession. He's a member of the Columbia University's Gulf 2000, a think tank with a focus on the Persian Gulf under supervision of Professor Gary Sick. Goudar's is a founder and one of the directors of the American Iranian Friendship Council in Oregon. His writings are published in the Oregonian Asian reporter, peace worker, Portland Alliance, Iranian.com, Iran, Iranian.com, sorry, and numerous other Persian online magazines. He resides in Portland, Oregon. So after we hear from both Kelly and Goudar's who obviously have a wealth of experience under their belts, we're going to break for a Q&A about both presentations, both the presentation about how to pass your city council resolution and how to organize congressional town halls in your local community. We'll break for a Q&A where folks will have the opportunity to talk with both Kelly and Goudar's and also, so while they're giving their presentations, make sure you write down any questions that you have and we'll be excited to talk with you about them then. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it over to Kelly to start us off. So Kelly, welcome. Great, thanks, Carly, and thanks everyone for being here. I am going to attempt to share my screen with you so we can look at some slides. Well, I give this presentation. So as Carly mentioned, I'm going to talk about how to pass a city council resolution for diplomacy with Iran. This is something that we partnered with American Iranian Friendship Council and about 20 other organizations who supported it to pass in Portland last November. So we got a little jumpstart, unfortunately, on the escalating tensions that have happened since then, but I think that our experience can be instructive for others who are looking at passing a city council resolution for diplomacy with Iran. So this is going to be a little bit of a 101 how to do that and some lessons learned from our experience. And I'm looking forward to the Q&A and maybe some discussion with others who may have other experiences with city council resolutions and other ideas that they can add to the mix. So, let's see, there. So the elements of the campaign. Number one, you're going to draft a resolution. Number two, you're going to build your coalition. Number three, you're going to secure city council support. Number four, you're going to plan your hearing. And five is the fund one victory. Hooray, you passed your resolution. These really don't really go in order, though. In fact, number one through three, you kind of need to do simultaneously. Depending on your situation, you're going to need to start working on building that coalition as you're drafting the resolution as you're talking to city council. And that'll become clear as we go through these three different elements. So drafting your resolution. First of all, you want to learn how city council resolutions are written in your city. You should be able to find a template or you should be able to find examples on your city's website or by talking to a city clerk or a city council member. Generally, they have a whereas section, which is where you put in all of the information about the issues that you're dealing with and then a resolved section, which is important because that's what you're seeing what the city is actually going to do. So if you look at ours and we'll send that example as well as the code pink template out, we actually have the city taking position saying we support certain federal legislation as well as directing that the resolution should be shared with organs congressional delegation and with other federal leaders. In ours, we actually also are supporting a developing sister city project that some folks are working on here. So that's also in our resolved section. So you want to think about what are all the pieces that you want to emphasize? What are the concerns of your local community? Are you in touch with your local Iranian-American community? What are their concerns? What are the concerns of veterans? How can this be intersectional? How can you link this back to issues going on in your city? Can you talk about the cost of war? You talk about all the money that you would potentially be spent on a war and how that would impact your city. Talk about the sanctions, the travel ban, the JCPOA. So those are just examples of things that you'll want to include or think about including in your resolution. And finally, you want to workshop that resolution with the partners that you want to support it. So that's really key. You're gonna get a stronger resolution. You're gonna get more buy-in. You're gonna get more organizations excited about participating if they have an opportunity to weigh in on what goes into the resolution itself. So that leads us to building your coalition. So you need to think about what are the organizations and individuals that you want to reach out to? Do you have relationships in the Iranian-American community? And understand that some of those folks may be really scared right now and not feel comfortable speaking out publicly, but perhaps they want to help write the resolution. Perhaps they want to submit written testimony and perhaps they do want to testify, but making sure you're reaching out to that community and building those relationships for the long term. You may also think about the Iraqi community or the Afghan community. Are there other war refugees in your community who can talk about what war does to people and that they could be involved in this? Certainly veterans, veterans for peace, of course was a huge partner for us. Here comes my cat. She wants to be part of this, maybe later. So getting the veterans voice, faith-based groups, students, immigrant rights groups, we found a lot of support from environmental justice organizations because we had already built relationships with those groups on other issues. And so because we had those authentic and ongoing relationships and trust and because of their understanding of intersectional work, some of those groups signed on to this resolution. So you wanna think about what are you asking organizations to do? Are you asking them to help with turnout? Are you asking them to provide a speaker? Are you asking them to do social media to endorse the resolution? Making sure that when you're reaching out to partners, you're clear about what your needs are and your understanding what they are able to do to help you out. And finally, give yourself enough time to do this work with coalitions. So part of what we found when we did this resolution against war with Iran, we did it in conjunction with a resolution supporting the nuclear ban treaty. And we'd already been working on that statewide and had passed a state resolution around that. And so a lot of the groups who endorsed the state one were ready to jump on board with the city one, no problem. Some of those groups though had processes they needed to go through in order to get a decision to support the diplomacy with Iran resolution. And so some of them were interested but it didn't have time. So the more time that you can give yourself, I mean, understanding we wanna do this all now, right? But you also wanna be building those relationships, making sure groups have enough time to be able to make a decision and to understand how would a potential war with Iran impact the stuff that they're working on already? So I think that's really important when you're building for the long haul is to be having those conversations with folks. So here you can see the organizations that did officially endorse our work on this resolution. And you'll see some kind of obvious ones. They're like Code Pink and other peace groups as well as some faith-based groups, veterans for peace as I mentioned, but you also see the environmental community, the Sierra Club, 350 PDX, OPAL, which is one of our prominent environmental justice groups here as well as Unite Oregon and immigrant rights groups. So finding ways to build those bridges and bring in other voices, I think was really important for this and will be important for our organizing going forward. Another thing to think about is gathering individual petition signatures. We gathered signatures from about August until November when this passed. And so we could do that online, we could do that at events and then those names were submitted as part of our testimony to city council. It also gave us people's contact info so we could reach out to them and say, hey, the hearing's coming up, can you show up? Can you bring your friends? Do you want to testify? So it's another good way to build your coalition is to get individuals, give them an opportunity to weigh in. So the third prong of this is securing support from city council. So first of all, you wanna learn how city council resolutions work in your city. Does it have to come from the mayor? Can it come from any city council person? Is it called a resolution? Is it called something like, our state ones were called memorials. So when we, again, when we did that work, it was just different language, understanding how they're formatted. The more that you know about how these things work, the more you're gonna look like you know what you're talking about when you're going to talk to city council members. And the city will help you to format it so that it officially fits their formatting for these because they're all slightly different. But again, the more that you understand how these resolutions get passed in your city, the better. I would also suggest researching what previous anti-war or Iran related resolutions your city might have passed. Portland actually passed a similar resolution to this in 2007 that Goudar's and others helped pass. So that's referenced in ours. Your city may be a nuclear free zone from the 80s. You might have passed a no war with Iraq resolution. So go back and do that research because it'll help you to see, A, how some of those looked. B, do you wanna include a reference to that in your current city council resolution? And C, maybe there are city council members who were involved with that, who are still there and you're gonna wanna reach out to them because you know how they voted on it the first time. So then you're gonna want to set up meanings with your city council members and or their staff to talk to them about the idea of this resolution. And when you set those up, you wanna bring in if you have trusted coalition members that maybe have good relationships with city council members, bring them to the meeting. This is really kind of a fact-finding meeting to see what do they think about this idea? Do they have concerns that we need to address? Do they have ideas about how to approach it? What you're looking for here is also finding your champion. You wanna find a city council member who is willing to be the lead on this and that person is gonna become really important as you'll see. So once you have secured your city council member to take the lead, then you can confer with them about how to approach the other city council members. They may say, as our city council person did is, hey, you already talked to them, don't worry about it. I'll take it from here, make sure we have the votes or they may help you strategize behind the scenes about what they know about people's particular concerns and the best approaches to the rest of the members. And then finally, you're gonna set the date for your hearing. So again, hopefully your champion is helping you figure out what's a good date in terms of what else city council is dealing with. And you're gonna wanna see, like, do they have evening meetings? That might be a better time for you to be able to get the community to come out. Do you wanna do it around an anniversary, like the anniversary of the war in Iraq and mid-March? Would it make sense to do it then? Making sure that it fits with city council priorities and being respectful because this is a very important issue. They're dealing with a lot of other important issues all the time and you wanna build those relationships for the long haul. So being sort of about, hey, we wanna give this thing pass but also being respectful of their time and figuring out where this will fit into city council's agenda. So here is a picture of our champion, commissioner Amanda Fretz. So she was really excited about this. She helped edit the resolution. She communicated with other city council members to get their support for the resolution. She helped determine when to schedule it and she gave a nice verbal introduction at the city council meeting to explain why this was so important. And that really helped to set the stage for the hearing itself. So that brings us to the hearing. You're gonna wanna find out, can you have invited testimony? Hopefully you can. Learning about how testimony works. Is there a public signup period? How does that work? So if you haven't been to city council meetings before, I suggest you go to some city council meetings, learn about and respect the time limits that they're gonna give you for your speakers. Check out what the layouts like, check out the format. It just makes sense to know kind of what you're walking into there and that'll help you strategize about what it should look like on that day. So if possible, you wanna set the stage for your hearing by having one person give an overview of what the resolution is, what it does and why it's so important. And then to have others give invited testimony to speak from different perspectives, making sure that they're making your key points, trying to make sure that people aren't too repetitive. Ensuring, and when we did work on this Iran one as well as the nuclear weapons one on the same day, it was important to us that the communities most impacted were the main spokespeople. And I think that that was really important. And sometimes, especially older white peace activists, everybody wants to talk, maybe we don't all have to talk. Maybe there are other people who have stories to tell that are gonna be more impactful. So I would just challenge those of us who've been around for a while doing this work that sometimes it's better to have new folks up there. Sometimes, and it's definitely better to have the most impacted communities be able to speak for themselves. We actually did have that happen in ours. And we had a city council member as she gave her vote, say that the testimony that she heard this day was gonna echo in her mind forever. So that was pretty powerful. And that's because we had people telling authentic stories from their personal point of view. Think about visuals. Can you have signs or banners in your city council chambers? We weren't allowed to. So we did not have that. We did have people all wear blue. Can't really see that in this photo that well, but kind of worked. We had buttons. You could have stickers. Think about any of their creative visuals so that as city council members are sitting there looking out at the people in the audience, they can see these people are with you. Maybe you all wear pink if you're coat pink. So you're gonna wanna pack that hearing room. You wanna get as many people out as you can. You're gonna contact your petition signers. You're gonna contact your coalition members. You're gonna use social media and try to get as many folks out there to really show that there's community support for this. And finally, you're gonna think about what a media strategy would be. So a news advisory before the hearing, you might wanna do a press conference. We didn't do that, but you can do a press conference or rally. You wanna have a news release ready to go when you win so that all you have to do is push the button and it goes out to the reporters and make sure you're thinking about City Hall reporters because they're gonna be your main audience for those. I would also see about, if you can get a photo taken with your city counselors or with your coalition partners beforehand or right after, that can be super helpful for social media and getting that out. And another thing to think about is op-eds or letters to the editor. Could you have your city council champion do an op-ed about this? And again, social media throughout, we had someone live tweeting the whole thing so that people could follow along who weren't able to be there. And finally, victory. Hooray, you passed your city council resolution. This is a picture of folks supporting both of our city council resolutions along with our mayor and two of the city council people. So they did come out right afterwards and take a photo with some of us and that was exciting. So we were able to use that photo to share it with our partners, to celebrate, to announce that we won. And things to think about at this point are some kind of celebration event. Should you go up for happy hour afterward? Do you have a coalition meeting coming up that you can celebrate this victory at and start thinking about next steps? What are your next steps? Do you wanna take this to the state? Or is there a nearby city, a university, some other entity that you wanna also try to pass these resolutions in? I would suggest you follow up with your local congresspeople and make sure that they have seen this. Hopefully in your resolution, the city will share it with them but it doesn't hurt for you to also share it with them and make sure that they understand that this has happened among their constituents. Thanks to all your city council members. Make sure you're thanking everyone who supported, following up with anyone who had concerns or who didn't support and following up with any media. This would be a good time to try to pitch an op-ed about why this is so important. So that's how it works here in Portland. And Udars is gonna talk now about the town halls that were complimentary to this. And if he has anything to add, I'd love to hear his thoughts on the city council as well. So thanks everyone. Great, thank you Kelly. Can you just stop? Yeah, thank you. Perfect. Right, I guess if you have my screen then, I'm ready to go. As Kelly said, we worked together on a town hall sessions, a town hall sessions. Basically it was two town halls that we had last year during the spring and summer. First with Congressman Erl Blumnauer, who is the representative of district three of Oregon. And then with Congresswoman Suzanne Boramichi. She is basically the district one representative. And these two districts basically intersect from the center of the city of Portland. And so we had the constituents of each in different part of the city to meet with their Congress member. Other alliance with different experience also joined us in this event, including physician for social responsibility and other groups. We have a local organization called Portland Shira's Sisterhood Community that they are also participated in both town halls. About 200 people in each of these town halls attended and met with the representative. Our relation with Congressman Blumnauer actually goes back to around 2006. That was basically the last years of President Bush. And with the escalation of war in Iraq, there was an opportunity that one of our members of the organization who served in Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer in 60s approached me at the university and asked if we can organize a group of concerned citizens about Iran. And obviously, she was one of the volunteers and frontiers of this. And we basically started this American Iranian Fisher Council organization. And one of our first attempt was that basically meeting with Congressman Blumnauer. Congressman Blumnauer was a kind of a co-counsel member with Gretchen Kafuri, our Peace Corps volunteer friend, and she arranged for us to meet with her. And this relation basically continues up until now. One of the positive aspects of this relation is that Mr. Blumnauer once in a while contact us and if something happens with the relation to Iran and basically the past 10 years he has been in connection with us asking for comments when something comes up in the Congress. And we also try to meet with him. So often, for example, during the JCPOA discussion during President Obama, we met with him, we met with all representatives and senators of our area. And so these connections helped us recently and in January, both Congresswoman Bonamitchie and Congressman Blumnauer contacted me early January, right after the assassination of General Soleimani and the escalation between Iran and the U.S. and offered to meet with the community and give them some sort of assurance that the legislators will be supporting the community. And these are all good signs of having this kind of relation. Objectives for this town hall was basically to give awareness to Iranian community that what are the rights as a citizen, how they can influence the political process, let them have a face-to-face meet connection with Congress members. And it also provided Congress members a channel to communicate with the community and to hear their stories and offering basically the real life examples and experiences of the people whose relatives, fathers, mothers, brothers were not able to travel because of travel ban and et cetera, et cetera. And so all of these objectives were basically to humanize the image that's being created for Iranians by mainstream media and how we can counter that discrimination and biases against Iranians. The help that we got from the Congress people was that they could ask directly from the people who are being impacted by these policies and try to give them, again, an assurance. Our ask was basically to see if there is any tangible support that the Iranian community can give to the Congress people and how they can support the community and how they are planning to fight against sanctions, inclusion of Iran and travel ban and all the discrimination policies that is happening that day out. And also one of the main questions of people who attended this town hall was about the war authorization and how Congress can prevent an attack on Iran. And I think in all of these aspects, we were able to get answers and provide information to the Congress people. The format was basically our target audience were Iranian Americans. If you are planning to do something like this and you all want to have connection or you do not have connection with Iranian community, there are lists and connections that one of the national organization, NISC, NIAC has the, and they have a meet-ups in different cities. When we were planning our town hall, we actually connected with NIAC and told them when and where it's going to be. And one of the surprises for our meeting was that from their connection, we found a person who is a city council member in one of the suburban areas of Portland who attended the meeting. And we didn't even know that there is an Iranian elected to a seat in that city council. The other important group that are very interested and connected with us from, again, from 2006 is the Iranian Peace Corps Volunteers Organization. We helped them organize or basically inaugurate their organization with a conference in 2011 in Portland. And so we have had this connection. Ironically, there are a lot of Peace Corps volunteers in our city, about 1700 or 1800 Peace Corps volunteers served in Iran during the 60s up until 1976. And so they are basically residing in all cities and the states. And when they have their biennial conference, these are coming from different cities and they are a main participant in our activities for Peace with Iran. We wanted to have a two-way conversation. So it wasn't just lecturing by a Congress member or whining from us. So this was a two-way conversation. We told our stories and they told us what they can do or what they cannot or gave us basically assurance and also some advice. The town hall was moderated and for moderation we asked one of the Iranian community leaders. She's one of the former directors of the city department. And so she was very well respected by the community and by the city officials. And she did the moderation for the meeting. Our schedule was basically twofold. One was, as I said, storytelling. We have recruited some kind of variety of Iranian members of the community with a diverse background, gender profession, and also some non-Iranians. And so they would do their, they narrate their stories and then there was a question and answer and at the end, Congress member would do the conclusion and comment. The event, as I said, started with a brief welcoming by moderator and then introduction of the Congress member. And after that, Congress member Bluenauer gave a kind of a brief of what he's looking for. Then he went and sat in front of the hall and note down the comments or the stories that people were giving. We had about 15 people sign up to speak and among them the 14 were able to speak about three to four minutes each. And as I said, this was a very diverse group of people. Then we went to, after testimonial, we went to the question and answer. We basically decided to not have a speaking question. We distributed a question card. The reason is that some of you who are intimately connected to the Iranian community, you should know that there is a friend of Iranians who are actually not supporting this kind of activity and they may try to interfere with the process. And so in order to not giving up our time and space, we decided to have question cards distributed and the moderator basically went through these questions, combined them together if need be. And then he asked the question and congressman would respond. And at the end, we didn't want to basically disqualify anybody. So we collected all the question cards and asked people if they wanted to have response to put their name and address or phone number. So, and then we gave all these cards to the staff with the congressman. And they were able to respond to them if a question was not asked or was not included in the discussion at the end. Because there was a time limitation as well. The testimonials were basically mostly was about a concern of a possibility of a war. And so we tried to provide a variety of differences and issues from personal stories, personal issues that people had to like academic scholars who presented their views on Islamophobia and other issues that are related to our community in large. Then there were some Americans who had traveled to Iran, including people who have traveled with coat pink to Iran. And they were able to basically give their story from the travel that spoke about their experience in Iran, how they were dealt with, with the Iranian community, the government in Iran, including, I believe they had a visit, short visit with foreign ministers, Arif. And also they were able to attend a session of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis. And they spoke about these as well. The QA section was basically, as I said, mostly not screened. Even the storytellers, we did not know what they are going to talk. And they were not required to let us know what they are going to speak. So it was pretty free flow. And the question answers, even more so, including the questions that was asked in favor of interference in Iran. One of the attendees asked the Iranian people are now tired of this regime and they want to change. And Congressman Balloonhour basically tried to answer that concern. At the end, Congressman wrapped up with basically the final thought that he had his suggestions about, first of all, the running of Iranian Americans for office. This was basically, I guess, included because of that individual that I just mentioned had run for the city council member. And in addition to that, Mr. Balloonhour said that he is going to share this with his friend in the Congress, with his colleagues. And try to have them set up a similar town hall, especially in California and New York, Texas, and DC area where there is a congregation of Iranian in the community. And so I want to finish with the message that I mentioned that Congresswoman Bonamici and Congressman Balloonhour left in early January for us. And this is what they said. And you can basically feel the positive impact of these town halls. Hello, this is Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici calling for Goudar's. I'm sorry I missed you. It is Thursday and I just wanted to reach out. And I'm thinking about you. I really appreciated the discussion that you hosted and put together last August. And I'm thinking about everybody in the community and understand the stress you must be under. I know so many of you in the community have family in Iran. And I just want you to know, urging the president to stop escalating the confrontation. We're about to vote on the resolution limiting the powers and rebinding as a constitutional requirement that Congress be involved. So don't hesitate to reach out. We want to hear from you. My organ number is 503-469-6010. And my Washington DC number is 202-225-0855. Look forward to talking with you soon. Bye. So this is Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici calling for Goudar's. I'm sorry I missed you. It is Thursday. I'm going to repeat it. Ah, got it. Thank you. It's not playing any more Goudar in your opinion. Is that the end of your presentation? Yeah, basically it was that message from Congressman Blumenauer too, but I don't think I... I think only... Goudar, this is Earl Blumenauer calling. Sorry I missed reaching you in person. I wanted to discuss with you setting up a meeting with the Iranian community. I'm obviously deeply troubled with Trump's reckless actions. I want to make sure that we're able to meet with and perhaps help reassure Goudar's. This is Earl Blumenauer calling. Sorry I missed reaching you in person. I wanted to discuss with you setting up a meeting with the Iranian community. I'm obviously deeply troubled with Trump's reckless actions. I want to make sure that we're able to meet with and perhaps help reassure the community that we are with them 100% and we will fight to avoid crazy stuff if there's a moment to chat this week. I'd like to visit with you to get something moving to be able to help set up a meeting, help reassure folks, be able to take other steps that you think might be helpful. I'm open to any and all suggestions. I hope things are well with you in the new year as crazy as they are with the Trump administration. We have our work cut out for us. Look forward to visiting when you have a moment. Thank you very much. Awesome, thank you so much Goudar. Did you want to say anything else to conclude the presentation? No, no, I'm done. Ready for Q&A. Great, awesome. Okay, thank you so much. So just wanted to let people know that that concludes our presentation. So just want to say thank you again to Kelly and Goudar for giving us some insight about what it looks like to actually pass the city council resolution and also to host the congressional town hall in your local community. So now I wanted to just open the floor up for people who had any questions for either Kelly or Goudar's or for me about how moving forward that what will this will look like or anything, any questions you had about their presentations in particular. So for people who are joining us, I'm going to give you the option to go ahead and unmute yourself now. So if you have a question, just go ahead and unmute yourself and you can just say your name and I'll call on you to start asking questions. You're also welcome to type questions in the chat box. So Garth is saying thanks, need to look through the samples for question. Thanks again. So I think people were understandably impressed by the presentations. I think they were really comprehensive. I guess while we wait for some folks to hop on and ask some questions, I would ask both of you, I'm wondering when over these two strategies of passing city council resolutions and also hosting congressional town halls, I'm wondering if maybe each of you could give a sense of when it's useful to do each or why one would wanna pass the city council resolution versus host a congressional town hall as a strategy. Like what are some of the benefits to each of these as a strategy? Maybe Kelly could start if you're comfortable. Oh, you're muted. Should be in the bottom left-hand corner to unmute yourself. While Kelly is un-meeting herself, oh, it says then, oh, I'm sorry. I'll just, that's weird. Let me unmute you right now, Kelly. I mean, you should be, ah, sorry about that. I wasn't sure. So sorry. Problem. I guess I would say, it's worth thinking through both and. I mean, that's kind of what we did, right? I think you got from Gouda's presentation the fact that this really affected city council members so deeply. I mean, those town halls were in June and in August and that they were calling the community in January when things heated up. And that even though these were people who were generally supportive, they both really got so much out of that and I think are taking a deeper awareness into their work in Congress. And so I think it was strategic for the long haul to like build those relationships. Suzanne Bonamici called me personally for the first time ever. I didn't reach out to her. She reached out to me in January as well and was calling other people who had been involved. So I think that it was a difference in the level of relationship that was built by doing those town halls that is gonna be important going forward in terms of policy around Iran or other anti-war policies. So I think it may look different in your community if your Congress people aren't as sympathetic as ours were to begin with and that would be interesting to see what does that kind of town hall look like? But I think that was really key. And then city council, again, it's another way to kind of build up