It is official…the Social Justice Road Trip 2024 began on Thursday, October 17, 2024 starting out at Colorado State University – Pueblo! I got a little later start than planned due to some recent logistics and reporting, however, I am still on track as planned. I have not figured out an exact route yet other than major cities and universities as I make my way back to Cayuga County, NY.
I do not have any connection to Colorado State University – Pueblo other than I am going to keep highlighting all of the cool things that I have been checking out while in Pueblo, CO. Like the other universities I plan on visiting, the trip to CSU-Pueblo was a drive around the campus and a quick photo opportunity! I plan to keep track of the number of states, major cities, and college and university campuses that I drive through as part of the Social Justice Road Trip 2024.
The banners and signs I had made look good and I will be making adjustments along the way. I also ordered some double-sided business cards with QR codes to the Report Abuse Cayuga website as well as to my Substack newsletter – There is A Method To The Madness. I did a test run of some coffee mugs too and will be getting T-shirts made up once I get back to Ithaca, NY…en route to Auburn, NY. So far I have been impressed with how nice all of the items have turned out with the logos!
This morning as I was writing this article, I thought that maybe for the benefit of young professionals and community activists, I could start outlining more formally the steps I have taken over the last two years to reach the Cayuga County Crescendo that is coming. As I have stated in other articles, I generally follow management systems thinking using a Deming Model approach of Plan, Do, Check, Act.
The closest thing that I have to a written plan on community activism can be found on a website I put together for landowners in New York State and the rest of the country when natural gas exploration was in a boom phase in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York (the Southern Tier). I was essentially documenting the process that was being used for the landowner group I was part of at the time. While getting better leasing terms was certainly a part of getting a landowner group together, the real reason for my involvement was due to the fact our landowner group was going to have more stringent environmental protections written into our lease, than what the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC) had at the time of this gas exploration boom.
The process used for the Tioga County Landowners Group was then documented in a website designed to assist other landowners, and really other community activists for whatever cause, with ideas they might be able to use for organizing a community coalition around their own specific social issues. The website that provides this outline and ideas is the New York Gas Lease. On this website, I also included downloadable Word documents that could be used as templates. I also laid out specific steps and actions to take in building a community coalition. While the gas leasing boom in the Southern Tier went away with New York’s “fracking ban”, I left the websites up as a historical archive of that time period, and more importantly, I left them up for future young professionals and community activists to use as a template for the future.
Regardless of your opinion on natural gas exploration, “fracking” or any of those sensitive topics, at the time I developed those websites, there was a general lack of information and a whole lot of misinformation - on BOTH sides - about gas exploration. Due to the influx of gas companies, landmen, and corrupt politicians, landowners, and farmers in particular, found themselves in a hurricane of information. I attempted to try to at least provide a balanced approach, while encouraging the formation of landowners groups mainly to give them more bargaining power up against the very big and very wealthy gas companies.
It has been about 16 years since those websites were first posted and there have been substantial changes in communication, marketing, and other tools that can be effectively utilized for community activism and social justice activities and events. Given the Netflix nightmare that I continue to be subjected to by corrupt Cayuga County government employees and unethical legal professionals, I may either write an article outlining the steps I have taken and my process I have taken as the march continues forward. Perhaps I’ll just add a section to the Report Abuse Cayuga website to and leave that website up for as a historical archive as well.
For those who may not have figured out what my process is, I call this process…
There Is A Method To The Madness.
Stay tuned for more to come….
