May 24th, 2007 - Nikki Serapio  Permalink   View & Add Comments

OurPledge.org Relaunches

In the past year we’ve gone through four major versions of our website.

OurPledge.org started as a registration page for the April 30, 2006 rally on the Golden Gate Bridge. It soon changed into a more general Darfur advocacy hub. All along the journey, AADG has tried to generate some useful resources, including e-petitions to the White House and Congress and constantly updated letter-writing templates.

Recently, we’ve been getting a number of website-related requests. A good number of you wanted some tweaking. You wanted daily, and not just weekly, Darfur news updates. You wanted a more robust description of AADG’s grassroots projects, complete with status updates. You wanted to commit to effective day-to-day action on behalf of Darfur, but wanted some context added to the recommendations of the e-petitions.

Also, a number of you wrote in with a concern that seemed vague at first, but which has since made more and more sense to me…to paraphrase, you asked AADG’s online presence to provide “greater community knowledge” for the Darfur movement. Looking at the different Darfur websites around the activist-sphere, a few of you let us know how difficult it was to find out about the actual people behind the action alerts, the actual people wielding the online bullhorns. Here, let me say: It’s not the case that you mistrust what the Save Darfur Coalition is saying, or what STAND is saying. Of course not. And it’s not the case that certain biographical details are so unavailable: you can read all about the hard-working staff and chapters of STAND, the young activists behind the Genocide Intervention Network, the committed experts behind the ENOUGH Project. The Darfur movement is really an awesome movement.

Rather, when I mention “greater community knowledge,” I mean to reference our movement’s ability to know what the activist-groups and activist-coordinators are really thinking—and just as important, what they’re really feeling.

When President Bush commits to sanctioning the government of Sudan, only to lead the Darfur movement on an outrageous game of waiting-and-seeing, doesn’t this anger the strategy- and tactic-makers of our movement? How can we know? It’s one thing for Darfur groups to issue press releases saying they’re disappointed in President Bush. It’s another thing entirely for Darfur groups to post up their hearts for the public to see, emphasizing in strong language that they’re mad as hell and that they’re not going to take it anymore.

I guarantee you that the latter mode of speaking is the more effective conversation-starter and paradigm-shifter. We activists can inspire other activists, put Congressional staffers on edge, and shake up the White House if we’ll just let our language take on a more urgent, more direct, a more pull-no-punches tone. Because the people of Darfur deserve this much: That we tell it like it is…that we call out people in power when they fail to do the right thing(s) to protect Darfur.

We hope AADG can help set this practical, urgent, and—let’s daresay it—righteous tone. And yes, besides this, we hope we can provide some useful resources to boot.

This is our new website. Take a look around. And as always, please let us know if AADG can help you with anything Darfur-related.

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