Portland (Eastside)

The Power of Articulation: Turning Values into Political Messages
Using Value-Laden Language to Communicate about Health Reform 

A special one day workshop for leaders in health reform.

For too long, health reform leaders have been bogged down in policy-speak. That is, they have focused on policy minutae and failed to speak a language that connects with everyday Americans. This approach fails in the public arena, because the reality is that many Americans don’t have the interest or time to sift through the endless array of issues, personalities, and competing agendas in today’s political culture. As a result, individuals look for ways to simplify their intake and evaluation of information. One way that has become increasingly commonplace among citizens is to rely upon “cues” — that is, credible people or information that can be confidently used to guide decisions. The most politically potent cues, often, are core values and beliefs that unite Americans and inspire them.  

The bottom line is this: Progressives must become effective — much more effective — in identifying and communicating their core values in ways that are moral and culturally resonant. We call this articulation: the use of language in purposeful, everyday ways to create clear connections between guiding principles and social priorities. To do this is hard work — far harder than one might suspect. The approach we utilize is highly interactive and hands-on: Our goal is to help you identify and pursue your goals by clarifying and working through key ideas, issues, strategies, and concerns. We strive to merge our scholarly expertise with concrete, realistic, and applied understandings of contemporary politics and media.  

Proposed Workshop Agenda:

The Archimedes Movement is proud to sponsor a 6-hour workshop to help activists craft a purposeful language to communicate about the issues that are important to us.

The workshop will include elements of these steps:

• identifying central, over-arching principles that unite groups,
• creating powerful, engaging language that link these principles with your messaging,
• learning how the media serves as an “echo chamber” for political messages, and
• connecting these principles, language, and political messages into action plans.

David Domke, is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He worked as a journalist for several newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the Orange County Registerand Atlanta Journal-Constitution, before earning a Ph.D. in 1996. His research and teaching focus on how political leaders strategically craft their public communications and how news media and the public respond to these messages. His most recent book is The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America, published in 2008 by Oxford University Press. In the last few years he has spoken about politics and news with academic, political, media, and public audiences around the country. In 2002 he received the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s highest honor for teaching.  In 2006 he was named the Washington state Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. And in spring 2008 he was selected as the favorite professor of the UW graduating class. 

Crispin Thurlow, also a professor in the Department of Communication, has an academic background in psychology and critical linguistics, and his work examines the ways that people use language and other forms of communication to negotiate their differences. Specifically, he is committed to understanding how relations of power and conceptions of privilege and inequality are sustained in everyday human interaction. His latest book is Talking Adolescence: Perspectives on Communication in the Teenage Years (Peter Lang, 2005). In 2007, he received the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award.

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To find out more please email Matt Webber at matt@wecandobetter.org.

Price: $16/$17 - Part of event proceeds will support The HeART of Healing project of the Archimedes Movement, a grassroots effort to spark positive health reform in Oregon and beyond. 

Halloween in a real mortuary? Vagabond Opera presents a night of haunting music, ritual, art and the sincere honoring of those passed in their second annual Halloween bash. Whether you want to dance, party, pray, or channel your ancestors, this night is for you. The night will feature belly dance, a stunning interactive altar installation dedicated to honoring the dead, an apothecary and museum of weird objects, a divination table and an ancient fire ritual in honor of Baba Yaga, the Slavic Witch! Come dressed as an ancestor or someone dead. Bring a photo or object for the alter and get ready to have some serious dead fun!

The premise of the HeART of Healing’s month-long engagement is to create a forum in which we will bring key members of the health and art community together to discuss how art and medicine are connected, and, more importantly, how we can incorporate these functionally innovative approaches for the next phases of health care development.

Simply put, the HeART of Healing project is designed as an informative, working model for the future of how art can help medicine. The HeART of Healing project has the potential to reshape health policy in Oregon so that the artistic community becomes an active element in discussions surrounding subsequent health-oriented infrastructures.

From the Portland Business Alliance:

September’s Forum breakfast will feature a doctor, a state legislator, a former governor and a healthcare expert. No, it is not a panel discussion, but a conversation with Former Governor John Kitzhaber.  Moderated by longtime political advisor and author, Kerry Tymchuk, the conversation will touch on current hot topics such as healthcare, private sector job creation, the region’s economy and other current issues impacting business. 

Registration will close at 3:00 September 15th, 2009 for this event.

» Registration

Sorry for the late notice. Our friends at Oregon Action are hosting an evening forum on federal health reform and asked us to post this event. Please attend and bring a friend! 

Here's the agenda: 

6:30        Welcome, Overview:  Gary Cobb

6:40        Jo Ann Bowman, Oregon Action

7:00        Betsy Dillner, HCAN

7:20        Liz Baxter, Archimedes Movement

7:40        Question and Answer Session

8:15        Next Steps: Betsy Dillner

8:25        Acknowledgments: Jo Beall and Gary Cobb

8:30        End 

Please join us for one of two sessions to be held Tuesday, August 4th, in SE Portland.

We'll spend time brainstorming what information is really important to have on our website, what tools should be there. We'll look at these needs from your point of view, and from the point of view of the first-time visitor.

These sessions are key to creating a new Archimedes Movement website, and therefore, key to our mission.

Session Details

There will be one session at 3:30 p.m. and one at 6:30 p.m. Space is limited. To reserve your space, please email Rick Ray (rick@wecandobetter.org) and let him know which session you will attend. Snacks provided. For the first session, parking is available for free in the building. For the second session, please park on the street – the garage closes at 6 p.m. There should be plenty of parking nearby after 6 p.m. 

Background Info

We're planning a major makeover of our website. Already, work is underway to fix many of the nagging technical issues that some of you have experienced. That's phase one, and we hope to roll that out it the next few weeks.

In phase two, we plan to change the layout of the website. The goal is to make things easier to find. We plan to have an overall home page that has a national focus, and, for the first time, offer each active state a home page of its own.

Here's where you come in. We want to make sure that our new site offers you what you are looking for when you visit us.

Donna Cohen, information architect (think web-librarian plus closet-organizer), will be facilitating these sessions, donating her professional services. She will be taking the information gained in the sessions and organizing it into a draft plan for the structure of the new site.

If you cannot attend

If you cannot attend one of these two sessions, please consider giving your input via our very short (one-page) survey online.

Let us know what you would like to see – or be able to do – on the site and give us some feedback on our current site.

» Website visitor survey

Thanks for your involvement and support. 

Hosted by SAFE: United for a Healthy Oregon, you're invited to a reception to celebrate Oregon's big step forward on health reform with the passage of HB 2009 and HB 2116. IF you have questions you can call Chris Coughlin at 503-312-8178.

Wear your WCDB t-shirt if you have one; if you don't have one let us know and Erick will get one to you for the next event!