Reflections on the No on Y Campaign and an Invitation

Below is an invitation to be part of a meeting with
Barbara Lee's key staff on Thursday, November 18th at
4PM.

YES 72128 69.8
NO 31153 30.2


It appears Measure Y has just barely passed (needing
66.6%). In launching the No on Measure Y campaign we
at Education not Incarceration (http://www.ednotinc.org) knew
from the beginning that we did not have the resources
nor the electoral experience to run a Get Out The Vote
campaign that would give us sure voters and a likely
win. Our goal from the beginning of this campaign was
to change the debate around violence prevention; to
get people to recognize that the institutions of
police and prisons are not making us safer, but that
education and other social services will make our
communities more healthy and more safe.


Our goal was also to strengthen the movement against
the Prison Industrial Complex and for social resources
to build a healthy community. We have been extremely
successful in these things. We also want to tout an
extremely important victory in Los Angeles where an
increase in sales tax that would have funded up to
5,000 additional police officers and sheriff's
deputies was soundly defeated.


We were up against City Hall and likely over $200,000
($100,000 of which came from the firefighters union
due to a backroom deal that included irrelevant fire
services on a "violence prevention" initiative) plus
supplemental questionably legal and definitely immoral
"informational" mailers from groups such as Safe
Passages and the City itself. Nevertheless we ran an
incredible media oriented campaign with $1,000 and the
power of grassroots community mobilizing.

We successfully put forth the message that education
and other social services, not prisons and police will
make our community safer. We successfully garnished
main stream media coverage of this issue including in
the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, and
Contra Costa Times and all local TV and radio
stations. We were sometimes covered in 4-5 different
forms of media a day, and generally 1-2 times a day
for the last 3 weeks. We distributed 10,000 newspapers
with in depth analysis about the importance of
investing in education not incarceration and about
20,000 flyers challenging the need for more police in
Oakland.


We united a huge range of organizations (see our full
list of endorsers at http://www.noonmeasurey.org), ranging
from SEIU 24/7, to a unanimous endorsement from the
Oakland Education Association, to the Bay Area Local
Organizing Committee of the National Hip Hop
Convention, ACORN, The International People's
Democratic Uhuru Movement, Californians for Justice,
Oakland CAN, Just Cause, Justice Now, Critical
Resistance and many, many more.


We made it clear that we would have defeated the
initiative if there had not been the 40% allocated for
social programs that made some politicians or
organizations support the initiative or stay neutral
who we would have expected fighting on our side.

Now that the campaign is over, it is important that we
work to heal torn relationships with some of those who
are normally our allies, who supported Measure Y. We
would like to invite you to a meeting on Thursday,
November 18th at 4PM at Congresswoman Barbara Lee's
office with staff person Jeffrey Thomas (in the
Federal Building at 1301 Clay Street, Suite 1000) and
other community leaders, such as Greg Hodge, Wilson
Riles, Fanny Brown to discuss how we can build and
strengthen an agenda for funding for education and not
incarceration, to build successful programs to real
violence prevention in our community. Please RSVP to
me Jonah Zern at 510.654.8613 or jzern1 [at] yahoo.com if
you would like to represent an organization or
constituency at this meeting, please include your
phone # in your RSVP.


We look forward to working with everyone in the future
and also invite the community to attend our Education
not Incarceration (http://www.ednotinc.org) meeting on
Monday, November 8th from 7-9PM at the Neibel Proctor
Library, 6501 Telegraph in North Oakland.