Amongst strip malls and suburban sprawls, the Modern Time Collective of Long Island sponsored their third Alternative Conference this Monday.  An impressive roster of speakers spent the afternoon at the \"Ethical Institute\", along with approximately 100 anarchists, community folk, Radical Cheerleaders, and ad random, in a spirit of collective knowledge and dialogue.  

The forums took a variety of specific focuses, but was unified in intent—the exploration of anarchist visions for community mobilization.  Long Island Alliance’s Rob Lepley initiated the afternoon, and set the day’s tone, with \"Community Organizing from the Bottom up: using the Popular Education Model\".  Based on his experiences with liberation theology, used to empower others organizing their own communities, Lepley looks to inspire: \"every human being is capable of looking critically at their world, to perceive their own social reality, and deal critically with it.\"  Through this process of empowerment, coded by the key concepts of see, reflect, and judge, people can usurp power back from the authorities that concentrate it.

Audience members shared their own experiences of societal oppression, establishing common ground, sharing solutions, and advocating actions.  Group member Shirley Liramont directly witnessed this educational process on the ground, growing up in Paraguay during its liberation struggle.  \"The constant rallies over the decades, without any one leader, led to the independence of my country.\"  As Lopley confirmed, \"it takes the willingness to turn off the TV, to sit around and say what are experiences and problems are, to create something really powerful.\"

Explorations of the power of popular education continued in \"Community based welfare systems\".  Eric Laursen critiqued the Social Welfare systems currently operating before unfurling visions for more inclusive systems.  \"Our social security system depends on that state, our current focus on retirement culture ships old people to Florida, while anarchism only valorizes the worker.  All of these systems serve to exclude those that are not able to work, creating hierarchies between useful and useless people.\"  

Laursen outlined an alternate vision.  \"Occupations need to be designed around people need, instead of what capitalists need.  It’s time to develop meaningful jobs available to everyone in a community, to rethink tasks and abolish the notion of retirement as a movement into a rest home.\"  Instead, Laursen looked to communities like the Lower East Side’s garden projects, that harness the basics—food, shelter, clothing—think locally, and compensate work creatively, rather than just monetarily.

In keeping with creative communities, the New York Independent Media center addressed its active alternatives to the mainstream media.  Spawned during Seattle’s direction actions, the serge of international independent media start-ups cover issues the New York Times don’t fit to print.  Seeking to include people who have been left out of the mainstream media, inviting them to tell their own stories, and providing quality, clear information to people, IMC’s are in the process of \"building new networks of people, a seed still crystallizing\", as spoken by New York IMC member Mahava.  

As participants in other IMC actions spoke to their experiences, popular participation and empowerment were again flushed out.  One stated: \"The Philadelphia action news published stories about stuffed elephants being sold rather than the Kensingston Welfare Rights march…this is not just bad editorial process, but bad journalism.\"  The IMC seeks to fill this gap, \"to talk about personally meaningful issues, not just weather reports, and to use media and technology as community building tools.\"
Putting an overall structure to community, Amy Goodman, from Vermont’s \"Institute for Social Ecology\", led an \"intensive\" workshop on \"Building Directly Democratic Communities.\"  Where \"politics has been concentrated in top-down structures, direct democracy is an alternative to the American political system, a system that turns people off.  We need to envision what our communities can be, where we can expand our freedoms of both how we live, but also who we could become.\" 

Goodman outlined strategies to begin \"a good society, one created on ethics, mutual aid, and interdependence, not just individual.  We need to redefine the \"citizen, to validate idea, not just someone who votes occasionally.\"  The process of this creation is long: it takes face to face interactions, consensus decision making, trust.  Again echoing Stanley’s popular education process, she stated \"we are all capable of these politics, not just well-paid professionals.  Politics needs to bet part of our lives.\"  

Goodman presented a new channel for the activist energy of late. The Alternative Conference, presenting a variety of models for thought and action, put into action many of the philosophies and practices advocated by its speakers.  Goodman envisioned town hall meetings to start the revolutionary process, and while those attending the Alternate Conference were a select group, the dialogue generated was a step in the direct democracy direction.