Drumming for Change

The Kingston Drum Circle is a newly formed group of drummers and percussionists who will be meeting weekly at various parks this summer to build community, express musical creativity and to connect with the earth through ancient tribal rhythms. The first gathering will be this Friday at 6 p.m. at the Academy Green Park on Albany Avenue and Maiden Lane.

For this first session, the drummers will be “Drumming for Change” to help support sending volunteer delegates to the 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit later this month. Attendees and participants are encouraged to donate spare change in an effort to support social change by connecting our local efforts with national and international movements. Participants should bring their own drums and percussion instruments. If you have an extra drum, please feel free to bring it.

At the U.S. Social Forum, the volunteer delegates will present a workshop titled: “Green Power to the People: How a Garden-based Democracy Can Transform Civic Participation,” which will explain and analyze how several recent citizen-based projects such as the formation of a city-wide garden coalition, KingstonCitizens.org, the CAC’s Climate Smart and Green Jobs Pledge visioning sessions, and KingstonDigitalCorridor.org among other initiatives, are reinvigorating civic participation. The U.S. Social Forum runs June 22 to June 26. Over 25,000 attendees are expected this year.

At Drumming for Change, the delegates will briefly discuss the U.S. Social Forum and ask how Kingston citizens can connect with its movements. They will then hold a presentation in Kingston later this summer to bring back some of the other national initiatives learned at the event in Detroit, which includes a food justice people’s movement assembly aimed at sharing “local solutions” and facilitating “greater coordination of national strategies of action.”

About the U.S. Social Forum: The U.S. Social Forum, started in 2007 as a biennial regional forum after the World Social Forum first began meeting internationally about nine years ago, with the vision that “another world is possible.” The World Social Forum provided an alternative forum to the World Economic Forum by creating a grassroots space for citizens to inspire each other and create solutions for a more socially and environmentally just world. Following discussions at the World Social Forum, a U.S. Social forum was created in 2007, declaring that “another US is necessary” and drawing 12,000 people. This year’s event would be the second U.S. Social Forum, in preparation for contributing local and globally linked US solutions to the biennial World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in January of 2011. For more information on its history, see: http://www.ussf2010.org/about and http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/.

2 thoughts on “Drumming for Change”

Leave a Comment