[noborders-brum] Minutes of NoBorders meeting 25.5.2006

[Shiar]

First of all, it would be nice if more people were bothered to turn up to
meetings. When you don’t come to meetings, decisions are made by fewer
people, and the rest are kept as “passive participants”, which’s not very
healthy, is it?

1. Solihull demo

We discussed some logistics and details, but they’re irrelevant now as the
demo has already taken place. There are, however, some lessons to be
learnt: We need to publicise it more beforehand; we need to organise what
we do there better (for example, more people confident to speak on
megaphone, chants, slogans etc.). Hopefully, next one (Thurs, 29th June)
will be much better, especially that it’ll be a national day of action
against reporting centres and will fall within the Refugee Week.

- I do apologise for not mentioning ARC on the leaflet. That was my
personal fault. Please add it to the leaflet before printing out new
copies for next month. Actually, it would be better to have a new one
altogether; one that focuses on the national day of action and the refugee
week – Shiar.

2. Refugee Week

As agreed in the previous meeting, we are organising a number of
activities during the Week (see last meeting’s minutes), most notably the
Tour of Border Regime.

It was agreed to make the tour more interactive. In addition to the actual
“tourist attractions”, we could have creative, virtual locations, which
also solves the problem of not being able to walk to some of the places.
Suggestions included a virtual reporting centre and a detention centre
(cage or something like that). Details of how to materialise this need to
be discussed further.

To be done by next meeting:
- a letter to Celebrating Sanctuary about the Angel Group (Alex);
- a critique of the Refugee Week (Alex & Shiar);
- a leaflet to be distributed during the week (this could simply be a
short version of the critique);
- a map-leaflet for the tour (Shiar is working on it and will put it on
Make Borders History’s wiki soon).

3. Various

- Ask other groups and people for names of detainees to visit them in
detention.
- Raise awareness that people are entitles to travel expenses for
reporting to the immigration office (Nellie to double-check this).
- Sorry for the delay in doing the vouchers feature and leaflet. That was
basically due to technical problems with my Linux partition. They’ll be
ready very soon.
- We need to talk more about the politics of NoBorders and what we stand
for and against.


-- 
Shiar