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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT size=3><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hi
all, </FONT></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT size=3><FONT face=Arial size=2>Please
circulate this invite among your contacts. It would be great for folks involved
in concrete economic alternatives to participate in the planning of this event.
Hope to see you on Sunday. </FONT></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV>Thanks, </DIV>
<DIV>Emily</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>"Another World Is Possible." This is the slogan of the
World Social Forum. Since its first meeting Brazil, in 2001, the World
Social Forum has become the largest gathering of social movements
in the world. The Social Forum is united in its opposition to
<EM>neoliberalism </EM>(ie. the dominant economic model that of free
market, free trade, minimal government, privatization, deregulation) and
imperialism, and in their commitment to building 'another world,' grounded
in sustainability and social justice. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>There have been numerous regional social forums throughout
the world, including one in Boston in 2004. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>We would like to invite you to come to an
open meeting to explore the idea of holding a <STRONG>W.
Mass. Social Forum.</STRONG> </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> <FONT
size=4> <STRONG> When: Sunday April 2,
4:00-6:00</STRONG></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=4><STRONG> Where:
Florence Civic Center, 140 Pine St., Florence. Ground floor auditorium (enter
from Pine St. side)</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>If you are interested, please read over the WSF
Charter of Principles copied below. This will give you a good sense of the
points of unity, purpose, and the process of the social forums.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>If you are interested in finding out more about the WSF in
general, check out the website: <A
href="http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/index.php?cd_language=2&id_menu">http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/index.php?cd_language=2&id_menu</A>=</FONT></DIV>
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<TD class=barrasecao width=323 bgColor=#ffead9 height=15>Charter of
Principles</TD>
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<P><SPAN class=noticiadata>08.06.2002</SPAN><BR><SPAN
class=noticiatitulo>World Social Forum Charter of Principles</SPAN></P>
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<TD align=left width="100%"><FONT class=noticiatxt>The committee of
Brazilian organizations that conceived of, and organized, the first
World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre from January 25th to 30th,
2001, after evaluating the results of that Forum and the
expectations it raised, consider it necessary and legitimate to draw
up a Charter of Principles to guide the continued pursuit of that
initiative. While the principles contained in this Charter - to be
respected by all those who wish to take part in the process and to
organize new editions of the World Social Forum - are a
consolidation of the decisions that presided over the holding of the
Porto Alegre Forum and ensured its success, they extend the reach of
those decisions and define orientations that flow from their
logic.<BR><BR><B>1.</B> The World Social Forum is an open meeting
place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas,
formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and
interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil
society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the
world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to
building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships
among Humanking and between it and the Earth.<BR><BR><B>2.</B> The
World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized in time
and place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre
that "another world is possible", it becomes a permanent process of
seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the
events supporting it.<BR><BR><B>3.</B> The World Social Forum is a
world process. All the meetings that are held as part of this
process have an international dimension.<BR><BR><B>4.</B> The
alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition
to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational
corporations and by the governments and international institutions
at the service of those corporations interests, with the complicity
of national governments. They are designed to ensure that
globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world
history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all
citizens - men and women - of all nations and the environment and
will rest on democratic international systems and institutions at
the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty of
peoples.<BR><BR><B>5.</B> The World Social Forum brings together and
interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from
all the countries in the world, but intends neither to be a body
representing world civil society.<BR><BR><B>6.</B> The meetings of
the World Social Forum do not deliberate on behalf of the World
Social Forum as a body. No-one, therefore, will be authorized, on
behalf of any of the editions of the Forum, to express positions
claiming to be those of all its participants. The participants in
the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body,
whether by vote or acclamation, on declarations or proposals for
action that would commit all, or the majority, of them and that
propose to be taken as establishing positions of the Forum as a
body. It thus does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by
the paarticipants in its meetings, nor does it intend to constitute
the only option for interrelation and action by the organizations
and movements that participate in it.<BR><BR><B>7.</B> Nonetheless,
organizations or groups of organizations that participate in the
Forums meetings must be assured the right, during such meetings, to
deliberate on declarations or actions they may decide on, whether
singly or in coordination with other participants. The World Social
Forum undertakes to circulate such decisions widely by the means at
its disposal, without directing, hierarchizing, censuring or
restricting them, but as deliberations of the organizations or
groups of organizations that made the decisions.<BR><BR><B>8.</B>
The World Social Forum is a plural, diversified, non-confessional,
non-governmental and non-party context that, in a decentralized
fashion, interrelates organizations and movements engaged in
concrete action at levels from the local to the international to
built another world.<BR><BR><B>9.</B> The World Social Forum will
always be a forum open to pluralism and to the diversity of
activities and ways of engaging of the organizations and movements
that decide to participate in it, as well as the diversity of
genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities,
providing they abide by this Charter of Principles. Neither party
representations nor military organizations shall participate in the
Forum. Government leaders and members of legislatures who accept the
commitments of this Charter may be invited to participate in a
personal capacity.<BR><BR><B>10.</B> The World Social Forum is
opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist views of economy,
development and history and to the use of violence as a means of
social control by the State. It upholds respect for Human Rights,
the practices of real democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful
relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, ethnicities,
genders and peoples, and condemns all forms of domination and all
subjection of one person by another.<BR><BR><B>11.</B> As a forum
for debate, the World Social Forum is a movement of ideas that
prompts reflection, and the transparent circulation of the results
of that reflection, on the mechanisms and instruments of domination
by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome that
domination, and on the alternatives proposed to solve the problems
of exclusion and social inequality that the process of capitalist
globalization with its racist, sexist and environmentally
destructive dimensions is creating internationally and within
countries.<BR><BR><B>12.</B> As a framework for the exchange of
experiences, the World Social Forum encourages understanding and
mutual recognition among its participant organizations and
movements, and places special value on the exchange among them,
particularly on all that society is building to centre economic
activity and political action on meeting the needs of people and
respecting nature, in the present and for future
generations.<BR><BR><B>13.</B> As a context for interrelations, the
World Social Forum seeks to strengthen and create new national and
international links among organizations and movements of society,
that - in both public and private life - will increase the capacity
for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization
the world is undergoing and to the violence used by the State, and
reinforce the humanizing measures being taken by the action of these
movements and organizations.<BR><BR><B>14.</B> The World Social
Forum is a process that encourages its participant organizations and
movements to situate their actions, from the local level to the
national level and seeking active participation in international
contexts, as issues of planetary citizenship, and to introduce onto
the global agenda the change-inducing practices that they are
experimenting in building a new world in
solidarity.<BR><BR><I>Approved and adopted in São Paulo, on April 9,
2001, by the organizations that make up the World Social Forum
Organizating Committee, approved with modifications by the World
Social Forum International Council on June 10, 2001.
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