Detroit TIME Committee Members Attend Two Events Last Week to Generate Support for Efrén

We received an e-mail from a member of the Detroit TIME Committee on Saturday, August 2, 2008, and are sharing its content with the rest of our friends as well upon Efrén's request. The following is the text from that message:

We just returned from an excellent presentation by the ACLU of Macomb County. It was by ACLU attorney Mark Fancher on the incredible degree to which school children (starting in first grade) are being criminalized in many ways.

The point of this message though is to encourage everyone to use the [Free Efrén] T-shirts as a way of getting the message out. Several of us were at the Wednesday presentation by Bill Wylie Kellermann's daughter Lydia and other amazing youth from Detroit summer.

The shirts really help to open the opportunity to tell people about Efrén and to get them to the commutation [campaign] blog. It might be good to use some of the postcards or just print out the web link on strips of paper. This afternoon also, we found that we got a lot of people interested. Carmen was able to give out around 10 postcards and the web link along with some other basic information based on the 10 talking points from the Efrén web page.

People are much more likely to follow up if there is a brief personal exchange and then they are left free to act on their own. On Friday Ruby was wearing her T-shirt at a rally to call for no war on Iran and this too was very effective. It seems that the shirts are most useful in a setting likely to have people open to hearing about injustice and how to resist it. For a lot of us though this is probably a large number of places we go.

To be most effective you've got to have some info along with you to distribute. It seems that a brief face-to-face background explanation and a request that people check out the information for themselves — and expressing belief that they too will want to sign the petition and otherwise get involved — is a good tactic. Of course, each of us will have a style and approach which works well for you.

P.S. The shirts are very comfortable in hot weather too!!

Peace,
Mike Kelly