Are you planning a protest or event in Ottawa?
We in Punch Up are, at root, nerds – we love to work on process, preparation, and infrastructure. We are committed to helping others in Ottawa think about all these things as one piece of what makes movements supportive, flexible, and strong. Some time ago we started work on a collection of resources for planning protest actions and political events in our city. We call it the “Ottawa Organizing Guide.” It includes a bunch of resources that we think might be helpful.
The first resource is an Accessibility Checklist, which includes things to think about in terms of childcare, translation and language access, physical access, washrooms, transportation, the physical and social set-up of the room and situation, and suggestions for further reading. Often people don’t start thinking about access until quite late in their planning process, or they don’t know how to communicate about what will be there. This checklist is meant to support you in centering accessibility more.
Second, we’ve put together a Calendar of Annual Events that usually happen every year in Ottawa – everything from festivals to memorials, including rad things as well as stuff from ordinary society. We find that having this list around helps us plan activities so that they don’t conflict with events that likely other groups are going to be doing something around.
There’s also an Event Planning Timeline, which counts back from the date you’re planning to hold your event or manifestation to two and a half months before that date, and then forward to after the event. We find that breaking planning down like this helps with the difficulty we can sometimes have in translating big events into small, time-tethered tasks.
Finally, there’s a very cool map of spaces and places, including protest targets, community centres, outdoor spaces, and so on. They’re all coded with different layers on a map so that you can see sites in various categories.
This is a living collection of resources and we have a bunch more “modules” we’re planning to put together – most notably a set of resources on movement legal support. Please email us at punchup@riseup.net if you have something you’d like to see included!