Occupy! Goddard: A Conference on the OWS Movement and Student Activism

Leopold designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment, and economics and helped form an alliance between the United Steel Workers Union and the Sierra Club. He attended Oberlin College and Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Les will speak about what the occupy movement is in response to, the social/economic context that fostered and inspired it.

Molly Knefel is a writer and comedian in Brooklyn. She hosts a thrice-weekly internet radio show with her brother John called Radio Dispatch. The show combines news, politics, and comedy, and features interviews with activists, artists, performers, and writers. She also performs live all over New York City. Molly has written for Salon, True Slant, Splitsider, and the Hairpin, and recently appeared on Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss police behavior at Occupy Wall Street. She is an after-school teacher in the Bronx, and tweets OWS events when she's not working, @mollyknefel.

Sandra grew up around the world, living and working in Panama, Cuba, South Korea, Japan, China, Africa, Australia, which allowed her to see and experience the vast inequalities around the world. This, along with her critique of the international development industry and the U.S. military led her to fully embrace the Occupy Movement.

He is a long-time participant and organizer in grassroots movements for social justice, economic equality, ecological sanity, and human rights — especially within the global justice movement and the antiwar movement. He has trained thousands of activists in campaign strategy, messaging, direct action, and other people-powered frameworks and skills. He is co-founder and director of Beyond the Choir (http://beyondthechoir.org), a strategy and training organization. On October 12, 2011, Smucker went to Occupy Wall Street, where he remains, working primarily with the press and movement building working groups.

He holds a BA in Liberal Arts from Goddard College, where he completed an oral history project entitled "Boston Area Transgender Community Leaders and the ENDA Crisis." He has written articles for Bay Windows newspaper, What's Up magazine, Sojourner Women's Forum, and "Agitate and Activate", and is also a co-author on the study and forthcoming article in the American Journal of Public Health entitled "Transgender Health in Massachusetts: Results From a Household Probability Sample of Adults."

She is the former staff writer for the Hardwick Gazette, the Barton Chronicle, is former editor of the Sunday Rutland Herald and the Times Argus. For many years, Galloway was a contributing writer for Seven Days Newspaper and a visual arts reviewer for the Times Argus. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, Vermont Life and City Pages (Minneapolis). She is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Last year, she attended the UNFCCC COP16 with SustainUS, coordinating the international youth constituency's forest working group and has delivered formal statements to the UN on robust carbon accounting in REDD+ and LULUCF. Abigail co-founded Race to Replace Vermont Yankee a statewide grassroots campaign to empower youth voters to replace Vermont's aging nuclear plant with a clean energy portfolio. She is an active member of Middlebury's umbrella environmental organization, Sunday Night Group, as well as a volunteer at the Middlebury College Organic Farm. She has been featured on over 50 media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, BBC, Democracy Now!, and Time.

She is the founder and senior leader of an Intergenerational Women's Mentoring Collective. Vacarr also served as an interviewer for Steven Spielberg's Visual History of the Shoah Project, Project Leader for the Cambodian Youth and Missing History Project and speaker for the international educational organization Facing History and Ourselves.

She subsequently switched to independent media as an editor, and now writes regularly for such progressive publications as Alternet, CommonDreams, OpEd News, openDemocracy, TruthOut, and Yes! magazine. She is a strong believer in citizen journalism and "advocacy" journalism -- that is, advocacy on behalf of the common good and nature's rights, not collusionist corporate-state interests. Stephens is the founding director of Citizen Journalism Project and cofounder of Coalition to Protect New York and FrackBusters NY, among other grass-roots activist activities. She has championed peace and democracy efforts on the international, national, state, and local levels, including as senior strategist and U.S. spokesperson for the International Campaign for Freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma and as founding director of Iraqi Refugees Assistance Connection. Recently she has been actively involved with the revolution in Madison, Wisconsin, as well as with Tar Sands Action, OWS, Occupy DC, and Occupy Binghamton. She holds an MFA from Goddard College; her play Promise/Insh'Allah will debut in fall 2012, and her book Frack Attack: Fighting Back, is forthcoming this May.

A former Goddard College faculty member, his writing has been translated into five languages and appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is a life-long activist in the peace and ecology movements, who views resistance to hierarchy and domination among people as integrally linked to the reharmonization of people and nature. Dan is currently living in Northern Vermont with his wife and two daughters where he gardens, writes, plays harmonica, and works on environmental justice issues. He is the author of his first novel, Loisaida, a coming of age story, family saga, and tale of urban politics, which explores the "principle of hope", and examines how memory and imagination inform social change.

Anyone is free to propose an idea or express an opinion as part of the General Assembly. Each proposal follows the same basic format – an individual shares what is being proposed, why it is being proposed, and, if there is enough agreement, how it can be carried out. The Assembly will express its opinion for each proposal through a series of hand gestures. If there is positive consensus for a proposal – meaning no outright opposition – then it is accepted and direct action begins. If there is not consensus, the responsible group or individual is asked to revise the proposal and submit again at the following General Assembly until a majority consensus is achieved.