Senior Dean of Diplomacy provides a basic introduction and overview of the Department of Bioregion, Diplomats and our organizing structure. Reach out to trevor@deptofbioregion.org if you’d like to become more involved!

Transcript:

0:09

Hello friends and fellow cascadians.

0:12

My name is Trevor Owen and I’m the Dean of diplomacy for the Cascadia Department of Bioregion. We created the Department of bioregion about a year ago, to have an organization that can start organizing folks towards a more independent and interdependent Cascadia where we can fight against those things that we find oppressive towards us and unite for the things that bring us together and will create a better and more beautiful bioregion.

0:39

For about the past nine months, I’ve been working together with Brandon Letsinger and Jay Conrad to bring people together in trainings as diplomats so we can work together on projects and programs that help us build this bioregion. We’ve separated into five organized groups, a chamber of commerce, a department of education, indigenous sovereignty, legislative outreach, and public relations. And the nice thing about our structure is it allows us to focus on our strengths, and then unite around projects that collaborate around those five.

1:11

The Chamber of Commerce has been doing outreach with bioregional organizations and businesses that represent the principles of Cascadia and are united and creating a cascadian movement and community. The Department of Education creates resources that diplomats and cascades can use to educate themselves about the cascadian bioregion and then also to continue building our movement. Our indigenous sovereignty arm has been busy collecting stories from indigenous leaders and elders, and also doing outreach to tribes First Nations and indigenous peoples across the bioregion. While our legislative outreach is focusing on contacting elected officials around the bioregion to let them know that we’re Cascadia and we’re here and they’re cascadian. To help them focus on addressing cascadian issues and uniting around our cause. Public Relations arm is our outreach to the world. It controls all social media programs and also focuses on ensuring that we have strong blog posts and media within our blog that we can present to the world.

2:15

Being a diplomat for the cascadian department of bioregion means being a long term volunteer for the cascadian movement. We’re looking for folks who have skills and a desire to build this movement with us. And to be a part of the change that we want to see by regionalism is a wonderful organizing organization. I like calling it the organic organizer, because I think that organizing around watersheds and our waterways and those life giving resources that unite us is a much stronger way of organizing people than some of the erroneous and colonial boundaries that we live under now.

2:49

We have some traditions that we like to keep. We open all of our meetings with an indigenous land recognition, as we think it’s important to recognize that the traditional ways of being on our land are often the ones that are the most relevant even today. And then beyond that we organize into meetings that happen once a week. They take about two hours. And during that time that people from the different departments come together and discuss what their projects are. And then we have group projects that we all engage on.

3:13

It’s a nice way of having a social network that’s very cascadian, but also is constantly focused on creating resources, and projects, and addressing the concerns that we find are most needed within our region. As we seek to grow out of our origin place in Seattle, we’re looking for diplomats across the bioregion who want to join us. And I’d be happy to have anyone who’s interested, reach out, let us know and we’ll see if we can continue building this movement. Thank you so much for all that you’re doing for Cascadia. I know that together, we can build a more beautiful bioregion and keep our home the place that we know it always can be.

3:47

If you’d like to join us, you can learn more at the deptofbioregion.org. Or if you’d like to become a diplomat, you can email me directly at trevor@deptofbioregion.org I hope to hear from you soon. And as always, thank you for the work that you’re doing.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai