On November 14, Jovenes por el DREAM Act of St. Sabina’s Parish in Belton, Missouri, – a group of students who would either benefit from the DREAM Act or people supporting it – pulled off an event that they’d been working on for three months.  Although this was our first event, we wanted to share with you – those that may be having a hard time getting started organizing in your communities – a little of what it takes to get you off the ground.  So, here it goes:

First we decided that we wanted to have an event that would bring together our community and inform them about the DREAM Act and thus was born the Encounter of Regional DREAM Act.  I can tell you that it took a lot of hard work and support to prepare for this event but not so much that it overwhelmed us.  We knew who we wanted to be our main speaker: Marie Gonzalez so we had to adjust our schedule to fits hers.  This is not to say that she was hard to work with because, if any of you know her, you’d know she’s pretty awesome.  For those of you that don’t know of/about Marie, you can find her story here.

We know not all of you have someone as well known as Marie in your communities  but don’t be discouraged, as long as you have your story and some guts to get on stage then you’ve got a main speaker.  Of course, we all worry about outing ourselves, but, just ask yourself, “If I don’t do then who will?” Anyways, I digress into what perhaps will be another post.

This event wouldn’t have been possible without the help of everybody and for that we are grateful.  Besides Marie, we had many other speakers.  Our focus centered not only on the DREAM Act but on social justice, as a whole, and how we, as a community of faith can help in the immigrant struggle.  So, keeping that in mind, we enlisted the help of fellow organizers in the KC Metro areas.  Kudos go out to JustFatih, IJAM, the KS/MO DREAM Alliance, St Sabina’s Parish and many, many others.

In order to get all the pieces to our event into place, people divided into committees where they were in charge of taking care of particular tasks. Committees ranged from welcoming committee to set up committee and so on.  Tasks tackled ranged from decorating the gym, creating the banners, developing the program, creating evaluations and registration forms, and having information for the guest and much more.  In the last week before the event most members met everyday to finish last minute tasks, such as, completing the banner which took us an entire week to paint.

Again, this is a brief (or kind of brief) run-through/recap to how we pulled off our event, obviously there was a lot of work that went into it.  In the end, our purpose of the event was to gather people and inform them about the Dream Act. We accomplished that.  We had speakers who spoke in detail about the requirements, people who would benefit, and the statistic of the Dream Act. Information presented to the audience was both in Spanish and in English and the audience had a chance to ask questions at the end of everything. Lastly, no event would be completely without and action item, so we also had attendees sign post cards to send to legislators in support of the Dream Act.

Our goal, like yours, is to have the DREAM Act happen and if all of us around the country can put on small events like this, and other events bigger than this, then we can make it happen.  Don’t let the fact that you are one person or a small group, like we are, deter you from your mission.  So, let’s make it happen: PASS THE DREAM ACT!

Regional Encounter of DREAM Act organizers and Marie Gonzalez