[noborders-brum] NoBorders meeting minutes - 20/7/2006

[Shiar]

Below are the minutes of last meeting. Sorry for the delay.

-- 
Shiar

-------------------------

NoBorders meeting minutes - 20/7/2006

1. Angel's legal complaint

Following a number of articles and feature on Indymedia, as well as the
leafleting at Celebrating Sanctuary last month, that exposed the Angel
Group, the asylum housing providers who fund the event, someone wrote a
comment, using Julia Davey's daughter's name (J. Davey is the owner of the
company), claiming, among other things, that she hired a stripper to
entertain her employees and evaded taxes. Angel's solicitor wrote to
Indymedia asking for the comment to be removed or they'll go to court and
put an injunction on Indymedia. Whoever is in charge of legal matters
chose to take the comment out to avoid any legal troubles. But it seems,
at least, that we caused Angel some trouble.

There was agreement that we should do more about this. A letter to
Celebrating Sanctuary -that should have been done long ago- criticising
them for being funded by such asylum dodgey profiteers is still something
to do. The main points that should go in the letter were agreed on. There
was also a willingness to do something about other housing providers, such
as Aston Brook and Clear Spring. Some stories of miserable housing
conditions and asylum seekers suffering because of that were told.

2. Solihull Demo

Next one is on Friday, 28 July. It was agreed that the 'theme' for this
month would be Children in Detention (last time, it was death in detention
etc.), since Nellie has been doing a great job with NCADC ringing up
families in Yarl's Wood detention centre and compiling their kids'
stories. The outcome of her work has been printed out, with the help of
JohnO from NCADC, as a multi-page leaflet that could be distributed before
and at the demo. Nellie is gonna ask for NCADC's permission to do that.

We need to be more organised. For example, last time everyone assumed that
someone else would bring a megaphone, but in the end no one did. A check
list before each demo would be good idea to overcome that.
- Megaphone
- Pots and pans
- Banners. There is a banner-making session on Tuesday evening. Please
come and help.
- Leaflets. We need more copies of that demo call-out leaflet. Please put
anything that needs photocopying on the list and there are people who
could do it.
- Anything else?

3. NoBorders event

Now that we've got a place (the Social Centre), we can have one more
easily. It was agreed that this one should be more educational and aimed
more at refugees rather than just a fundraiser. It was agreed to hold it
in 2 weeks' time, on Fri 4 Aug. Suggested activities include talks,
screenings, food, music (especially by refugee musicians and bands), stuff
for kids etc. We need to discuss the details more.

4. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to discuss other things on the
agenda, especially a NoBorders 'office' at the Social Centre and what we,
as Noborders, can do there (refugee support, English lessons, voucher
swapping etc.). We also agreed that we need a leaflet about this. We'll
hopefully talk about all this next time or, preferably, people can make
use of the 'communication revolution' and use the mailing list more often
:P

-------------