 All right, welcome everybody. Thank you so much again for being with us today. This is our civic engagement workshop on how to pass a resolution. And my name is Aliza Cosme. I'm the advocacy manager at Care San Francisco Bay Area. And I'm going to invite just our staff to also verbally introduce themselves, starting with Hania. Assalamu alaikum everyone. My name is Hania and I'm an intern this summer with Care, the government relations intern. I go to school in the Bay Area and I'll go ahead and pass it off to Simina. Assalamu alaikum. My name is Simina Usman. I'm the senior government relations coordinator for the office. And I think you were saying cities, Santa Clara, and your favorite thing to do or no is not just an attack. All right, I'll pass it on to Mohamed. Okay. Assalamu alaikum everyone. My name is Mohamed. I'm the community engagement coordinator for Care SFBA. And I'm so excited to be here. Thank you. Thank you all so much. We have such an awesome team, Mashallah. And, you know, they work so hard in general. And I know that they've been working really hard in preparation for today. So a really huge shout out to them all. And thanks everybody for starting to introduce yourself in the chat again with your name, your city, and your favorite thing about summer. It's great to see everyone and meet some new people. And I just want to do a quick land acknowledgement to acknowledge that we are on unceded, aloney land. And, you know, we want to recognize the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism both here and across the world and extend our respects to the aloney people. And I also want to acknowledge our partners who have really helped us, you know, spread the word about today and are just in general really great collaborators, which include Stanford Muslim Student Union, IKNA Council for Social Justice, the SF Bay Area Chapter, Lighthouse Mosque, and MCC East Bay. I see we have Brother Maneer here. Thank you. And also the Town Hall Alliance. So with that, I want to go ahead and conduct a quick poll as we get started, because we really want to make sure that we are tailoring our workshops to kind of where the community is at. And, Alhamdulillah, we have such a diverse, you know, community and everybody has different rich experiences. So this is just a question to kind of gauge for the people who are in our audience today. And it's totally anonymous. So please be honest. How confident are you in bringing people together to shed light on and build solidarity around a cause that's important to you? So you can interpret it, you know, however you want and just share what you think on a scale of one to five, one being least confident, and five being most confident. Sorry, I should have clarified that. So one, you're kind of like, I'm new, I'm learning. And five, you feel really confident. Give it another second. Okay. Thank you for that. And we will keep that in mind with the rest of our time together. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it to Hania to go over the goals for today. Thank you. Yeah. So again, thanks all for coming today. We hope that by the end of this workshop, everyone here will be able to identify kind of what purpose resolutions have and what role they can play when we're thinking about political organizing in our communities. And that comes along with kind of understanding how we get resolutions past. And we're going to kind of end today thinking about ways to strengthen current resolutions or think up new ones in our communities. So just keep in mind that today is supposed to be a broad overview, but we will be sending out the slides and a recording along with a guide and sample language for proclamation afterwards. And if you have any questions or comments as we go through this presentation, please feel free to use the chat. And I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Samina. Thank you so much, Hania. So yeah, so what is a resolution resolution is basically an acknowledgement, whether it be by a government entity like a city council or a state of California or county board of supervisors that acknowledges or celebrates an important event or an issue or a position. Alternatively, your local government might call it a proclamation. And so what does a resolution do? Basically, it increases public awareness of the community or an event being celebrated or highlighted. It motivates elected officials to be better allies by putting the event and related issues at the forefront of their minds. I think that this is actually really key because oftentimes, you know, people like, like, look, we I'm going to give an example. You have the Muslim community in Santa Clara. Santa Clara has the largest mosque in California. And then that's the MCA. And so when you have passed these types of resolutions, like maybe acknowledging if there's a particular date or a particular like how many years that MCA has been an institution, it reminds the elected officials, hey, look, we've got a sizable Muslim community right here in your city. And it gets them to think of ways of how to incorporate them into other areas as well. It also will motivate elected officials to who are in higher bodies, like to pass things in their jurisdiction as well. So you might have a city council or you might have another entity passing a resolution about a federal issue. And that encourages congressional members to vote in a particular way. Sorry, my cat is about to close my computer. Forgive me. And I think one other added benefit is that it creates the opportunities for community members and community organizations to get together to become better allies with each other. So let me give you an example of a few resolutions that have been passed in the Bay Area. And so and a number of you might have worked on these particular resolutions. So one of them was that Alameda County and also actually San Francisco County had passed a resolution with the South Asian community to condemn Modi's Citizens Amendment Act and also the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens in India, which, you know, all of these issues, these amendments that were passed, they were discriminatory against Muslims or caste-depressed minorities, women, Indigenous peoples, and other vulnerable populations who were to become stateless or scapegoated or targeted for discrimination. And so to have Alameda County pass this type of resolution in solidarity with the South Asian community saying that they're condemning these type of amendments that were passed, collectively, if you have enough cities that do that, it really sends a strong message to India and the Indian government that says, hey, look, this is not acceptable. And indeed, they did hear from the Indian government about this. So they're paying attention. I'll give you another issue that was introduced or that was considered by the Santa Clara County Human Rights Commission. And what I find very interesting about this resolution is that you had the NAACP who brought up, who introduced this resolution against caste-based discrimination. So you might be familiar that especially like in the Bay Area, there have been companies that have been accused of discrimination based on a person's caste. And so what they're saying is that we need to factor in caste and have that as a protected class so that people will not just be protected based on their ethnicity or based on their religion, they're also protected based on their caste as well. And so what I found interesting is that you had a number of organizations, a number of community members from all different backgrounds coming together to speak in support of this resolution. You had about, well, a total of 500 people who attended this hearing. You had about 290 people who spoke about this issue with 60% of them being in favor of having caste as a protected class. So I just found this as an incredible way to bring together communities of different backgrounds, of different religions of, you know, with different issues, but coming together to speak in solidarity about this. I thought that was incredible. And another resolution that was actually multiple resolutions that were passed by a number of Democratic Central Committee groups in support of HR 2590, which is the Palestinian Children and Families Act. Again, we're 5-1-3, we can't be in, we're not in speaking in support of any particular political party, but what we're saying is that I found this very powerful that you had a number of Democratic clubs that were speaking out, that had their members vote in favor of these resolutions that supported HR 2590. And if you have enough jurisdictions that support this particular issue, it definitely sends a strong message to congressional members who are responsible for voting on this particular bill. So it's very powerful. It's a way that other community members can also weigh in and have power in weighing in on this type of issue. I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Mohamed to, oh, actually, sorry, not yet. Let me give you another example of different proclamations. And that's the Muslim Appreciation and Awareness Month. It initially got passed by the California State Assembly. It was introduced by Assembly Member Bill Quirk. He had worked with a community member, who is the sister Moina Shaikh, who had worked with the Assembly Member to encourage him to introduce this resolution. She reached out to CARE for help with the language, but we were able to get this resolution passed in 2016. And this is our sixth year of having this resolution going. Now, what was going on in 2016? That was the presidential election, where you had then candidate Donald Trump saying that he wanted to have a total and complete shutdown so that, you know, to prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. It was a very politically charged environment stores. And but to have an Assembly Member want to introduce something in support of the Muslim community, it was incredibly powerful at that time. And by the way, he received death threats for doing so. So, you know, it shows, like, how powerful this type of a resolution is. Now, thereafter, we had then City Council member, San Jose City Council member Ash Kaurat, he saw this resolution. He's like, Hey, I want to amplify this in the city of San Jose. I want to pass this over here, too. And so at the very end of the month, we were able to get a resolution or proclamation passed in support of the state designation of August being Muslim Appreciation and Awareness Month. And that started us thinking, Hey, look, let's reach out to other city councils and other jurisdictions to see if they can support this resolution. And it's been passed in about 18 different cities and counties. And also we had the Santa Clara Unified School District that also passed a resolution in support of this month. And multiple cities have passed it numerous times since then. And so it sends a powerful message that these cities are in support of their Muslim constituents, that they recognize what these Muslim constituents bring to the table, what how they have improved and have been part of the community, and also recognize the history of the community. And so what we try to do with each of these cities is we amplify some special things about these particular cities or the Muslim communities in these cities and the organizations as well. I think one notable organization I'm going to mention is Support Life Foundation that I always that I tried to mention in you know, a number of proclamations for the amount of food that they've distributed to community members across the Bay Area. I can't remember the number right now, but like I don't know how many tons of food that has been distributed just in Santa Clara County alone, because you know, due to the pandemic, we want to make sure that these organizations are amplified and their good work is amplified, because you know, I mean, you know, I mean, it's incredible and we should celebrate that as well. We should celebrate these groups for being part of the Bay Area, being part of the community. And so, and you know, this is an important way to also recognize certain people, like the statewide designation, recognize a number of scientists or elected officials or judges or key notable people that lived in that live in the state of California in their resolution. So this is a great way to do that. So we can go more into the Muslim appreciation month proclamation. I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Muhammad, who's going to talk about how to pass a resolution. Thank you, Samina, for all this information. So I'm going to talk about the few steps that we should take before getting resolution started working on a resolution when you do start working on one. The first thing is to always form a committee, ask your friends, ask local community leaders, community activists, and just always remember, if you are doing a resolution and trying to get a resolution passed on an before an impacted community, make sure they are involved in the process early on. Make sure that once language is being drafted, they are involved before that because we don't want to speak for people. We just want to amplify the voices of the marginalized communities we are advocating for. So firstly, so I would give you an example. If I am trying to get a resolution passed in Fremont and I know that there's community leaders that I am in contact with that have good relationships with the local city office, I would get them involved. I would get an advocacy organization or a few local activists involved who are experts on the issue to make sure that the language and the process we are doing it from is good. This really brings out the self-accountability. When the group is a little bigger, it makes sure that you are not overlooking something major because language makes a difference at the end of the day, so you want to make sure that we are using the right language and we are doing it the support of the broader community and just not by something on your own because very often you end up losing track. The second thing is when you are, so the second step would be starting to draft the resolution. Very often the resolutions you are trying to pass, there is language available on it on the internet. If it's HR 2590, there's local resolutions in support of it already, so you don't have to go through the process of redoing the whole language. You just got to make sure that it fits and it's updated. Same with Muslim Appreciation Month, the language is out there, so when you are drafting this language, use that as a reference, use that as a guide, but also I also want to amplify, like Samina mentioned, that amplifying other organizers, organizations, massages, local community groups, so when you are in this process of drafting it at the end, it would be nice to recognize a local mosque, a little nonprofit that has done work in a particular area. In last year's Ramazan resolutions that Samina worked on, we saw local MSAs get recognition too for their work, so I think it's very important to build the community's confidence that their work is seen and inshallah that it will be amplified and recognized by the broader community because very often in our communities, some of the most vibrant community leaders are somebody, someone that like outside the community haven't interacted with because they've been so busy serving the community, so after you have your committee, you have your sample language, you want to reach out to elected officials. If you don't have a contact with a local city city council, school board, or even student government, email the executive branch and ask them for, hey, we are, we want to get this proclamation or resolution passed and would you be willing to do it for you? Another approach would be if you know in your group or in your community, there's an ally, there's somebody, one city council that has amplified work of Muslim community and supported them throughout his tenure, you want to make sure you reach out to them and you're like, hey, we're introducing this proclamation, can you please, can you please spot, can you, sorry, can you please introduce it? And nine out of 10, most of the time they do more than happy to do it. You would also want to make sure you did the research on their track record, you want to make sure that like you're not reaching out to somebody that has a track record of opposing your community of passing bills or resolutions or just putting out statements that has impacted the community act that is you are trying to advocate for in this proclamation. And once you do all that, find yourself a sponsor and the sponsor start championing in it, it's important to you know rally the community, make sure community is there when this proclamation is presented and passed to show that our community is very vibrant, it is something our community has people from all races, ethnicities, cultures, and even employment, like our community is not just XYZ, it falls across the spectrum of diversity and hopefully by now your resolutions should be passed. Yeah, I think I'm going back to Samina for this. Yes, thank you so much, Muhammad. I think you brought us some important points about making sure that different community members are or that we've reached out to different groups, especially if they are the impacted community groups, I think that's first and foremost in order to build your committee in order to then draft a resolution that's really reflective of the issue reflected in the community and then of course to reach out to those elected officials and find and it goes back to building those relationships with those elected officials and of course celebrating together is very important too and getting the word out, letting people know that this indeed happened. So here's some general tips in terms of how to draft a resolution. Oftentimes you don't need to reinvent the wheel, you don't need to write your resolution from scratch, you can look and see other resolutions that have like similar content that have been passed in other cities or other jurisdictions and you can just modify the language to suit your issue or your need. You can also look at, even if the issues are not even related at all, you can see okay like this issue is somewhat similar, you know maybe we can incorporate that type of language or into your own resolution. Another thing is again building relationships with your elected officials prior to asking if they can introduce a resolution. You'll get a lot more attraction if you have those relationships already but again it's not just about trying to get something out of the elected official and that's why you're building that relationship. I mean I think it's just important to know what's happening in your city, to be involved in your city, to see how you can be an asset as well. But it really is key to have those relationships with the elected but again it's not absolutely necessary either even if you cold call an elected official and be like hey you know I'm so-and-so, I live in this city which has a size of a Muslim community and we have a mosque over here and we really love to amplify their efforts especially around COVID relief or whatever you want to say. You don't necessarily have to have that relationship but it just really helps you a lot. Now you know it's important to spread the word about the proclamation or the resolution prior to the introduction of it because you're going to need to have community members come out and speak in support of it especially if it's a contested issue such as the one that the NAACP had introduced about the CASB system. I mean to have you know 290 people speaking in support or against this particular resolution you know you need to have enough people on both sides or you know hopefully on our side to be speaking on that issue because that will influence the elected body and whether or not they are going to be supporting or rejecting this particular resolution. And then again you know what's that saying if a tree falls in the wood, in the woods if people don't know about your resolution then you know it's not going to make as much of an impact so it's important to let people know about these particular resolutions whether it be through social media whether it be through press releases it's just important for people to know about it. And again going back to the issue about finding strength in community partnerships that's incredibly key it's not just about you know relying or reaching out to those who you usually reach out to it's important to reach out to a variety of groups we try to like let's let me go back to the Muslim appreciation among proclamations we try to reach out to a number of mosques not just only one or two mosques that are in the area when we're trying to introduce this resolution or this proclamation and same thing with other issues such as like the the issue about caste-based system I mean I was just in awe of the groundwork that was done by the organizers to reach out to a variety of groups that didn't necessarily have even a salvation background or whatnot but they came out and spoke in solidarity and that's where you build that community power but I think where you build that community power isn't just about asking people to join and speak out about your issues it's also about you coming out and speaking about their issues as well you know so I have gone to a number of city council meetings to speak in support of protections for those who are undocumented to make sure that you know we we stop API hate to you know to speak on a variety of different topics in order to show that we are true allies to them and that's how it builds that allyship with other communities as well so that they'll come out and speak for you as well but again it's not about just building those relationships so that we can hopefully get something in return it's just about doing the right thing and just being a good person and speaking in favor and speaking in support of different issues and then just you know remember that this proclamation of this resolution doesn't just have to stop right at that city it's a way to to jump off to to create more concrete things to be able to create either you know ordinances that have like that better have a change in the law it can also help to influence higher higher offices and higher positions such as like in congress a vote that way so if you have enough local bodies that are pushing for an issue it is more more of a chance of you getting something passed in a bigger body as well so i'm going to go ahead and pass it over to obiza great thank you all so much um samina mama then hania what awesome insights on how this tactic really is there's a lot more to it right then you might think um at first glance and it's a really great awareness builder and you know it's a really great way to also just build power in the community um and now we want to actually have some discussion with you all um so i'm gonna i'm just going to stop the the recording for a minute i think one thing i want to do is invite brother say it as we get ready to close out um i think you have a quick announcement and um as he gets ready to make that announcement i'm gonna go ahead and do our poll again uh let's see can we do this correctly uh all right so um now that we've kind of had our uh presentation and discussion uh we'd love to see how people feel um if there's been any change on a scale of one to five one being least confident and five being most confident how you feel about uh working to bring people together around a common cause so let's take a few seconds and everybody can answer again and then we'll share the results and then i'm gonna hand it over to brother say it for a second to make his announcement so um great so thank you for your feedback thank you so much again for your participation uh and brother say did you want to go ahead so just quickly uh i am the lead for ikna csj barrier chapter and uh if uh anybody is unfamiliar with uh ikna council for social justice we are a social justice organization as our name says our focus areas are global injustice hunger poverty inequality islamophobia and just immigration policies and muslim prisoner support project um as part of our global injustice focus area we're planning to launch a competition uh by next week uh that competition will be attracting uh creative works from uh mainly uh high schoolers and college students uh in uh commemoration of the world's uh in the indigenous uh day i think it's called international world's indigenous people so the focus of that competition will be um kashmir and palestine as well as the indigenous population especially the local aloni and other tribal population so uh we want to see some creative works there uh the the submissions will be due around uh august seven and then august 14 we are going to have an in-person event which is quite bold i guess these days but it will be hopefully in a park in an open open air type setting where we're planning to announce winners of this competition as well as some educational events around uh some of these issues that are that are happening so we'd love everybody here to part spade in the competition and in the event itself and i am happy to answer any questions and would love it if you guys can share with uh with your friends families and uh your your circle thank you so much uh sister lisa i took a little bit longer you like a lot of it all right um so we can go ahead and go through some resources um we just wanted to like uplift these links and uh documents as y'all take on these really exciting projects so uh we've listed a website here usa.gov slash elected hyphen officials um if you go on that website you can find the contact information for your elected officials so you know as you think about finding a champion in your local government definitely please use that resource uh to identify folks and if you still can't find um anyone then you can email samina and her email is also listed there for reference i will pass it off you know uh thank you hania um we have an exciting um month coming up august uh is muslim appreciation month and we have a lot of planning and a lot of events coming up one of the things we are going to do firstly we are sending you a paper guide with the text for proclamations that you can work on locally in your towns and even though it's something that's tailored to california the principles could be applied in any states and uh for references could be used anywhere uh so please if you know somebody who would be a great fit to lead local efforts make sure you uh you know direct them towards our page for muslim appreciation month um link i have just chatted with you we're also doing a campaign uh muslim in the bay area have been here for a really long time and we have over the past year seen activists organizers community leaders students just you know when things got tough we got out food drives protests uh local advocacy efforts we saw artists present art that really you know gave um a better understanding of what uh what was going on locally so we want to recognize these folks so uh we are um if you go on our bitly which i'll be set setting up feel free to nominate your friends your families your colleagues who have done work that should get a shout out and in shalom you'll have a celebration for them and recognize them for their work and there's their continuous commitment to social justice and leadership locally so so yeah and in the meantime if you have any questions um or you get a resolution pass we would love to hear that from you you can reach me out on my on my email at mccander and at care.com or and please share pictures we love seeing pictures and we would love to amplify them um amplify them on our social media as well um yep all right thanks so much everyone again for attending um i'm really excited to see what like where everyone's efforts go in the future um please please stay in touch with us about your progress with campaigns and uh any like resolutions you're trying to get past through social media and we've shared emails as well um feel free to sign up to volunteer as well if you're interested in kind of engaging with our work and continue to engage with future workshops um if everyone could take a moment now to kind of just share one word or a few like a short phrase about how they're feeling right now after this workshop that would be great and i can i can start uh feel free to use the chat or just speak out and we can popcorn it um so i am feeling energized and excited and i can popcorn to um a singer thank you i am empowered i will pass it on do i have to pick someone aliza i am hopeful and i'll pass it to Abdullah um i feel i feel like i feel like i can't do it in one word like like i learned a lot like i can't wait to kind of you know just go into do action and stuff now you know i'm really young and i feel like this really helps me get my voice heard and stuff so thank you and anyone else who wants to say what uh what their word is or phrases just go ahead and and say it or chat it so we're seeing confident optimistic ambitious motivated anyone else awesome well uh uh yeah everyone's on the same page everyone's feeling good and uh sounds like you know we have some plans in the works so again thank you so much everybody like Hania said um on behalf of our entire team and uh looking forward to following up with you all thanks everyone have a great rest of your night thank you thank you