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Celebrating John Falchi’s
Community & World Service
We would like to acknowledge that this month John Falchi is celebrating his 25th year of activism in the San Diego Community and the 75th Anniversary of his birth; please go to page 6 for more details about the celebration of John’s life and contributions.
Here John looks at his involvements, life and, of course, what’s next.
In this article I would like to go over some of the background of the calling in which I have been engaged and, also, to open a little window on the future. In December, 1985, following a workshop at UCSD conducted by Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, my life took a 180-degree turn. It was associated with a number of major life changes that were going on in my life related to my family, my work and my home.
Soon I became increasingly involved in a whole new realm of activity. In time, I became one of the key San Diego Area Coordinators for a great deal of the networking activity that was to take place across the country and around the world in 1986, the U.N. International Year of Peace. During the years to follow, this avocational work took precedence in my life over my relational and social life and my job. I, steadily, moved from a life in which I was making big bucks as a Development Management Consultant to large capital campaigns around the country, to become, without any steady income for the next eight years, a “World Server.”
This meant working pro bono to help organizational leaders reach their goals and objectives, and accomplishing some very meaningful things in my life. With changes that were taking place in the world in the late 1980s related to the demise of the old U.S.S.R., the emphasis on advocating for nuclear disarmament decreased and many who had been involved in the peace movement began working on protecting the planet from environmental destruction. In time, it became necessary to evolve a broader based organism that drew together leaders from a variety of existing peace, environmental and interfaith networks, as well as new ones that were coming into being.
Out of this meta-networking was born P.A.C.E., Plan of Action in a Changing Era, and I became this group’s facilitator. Our growing meta-network served as a bridge between the environmental and peace communities, and, within the peace community, between the antiwar and the spiritual peace organizations. They united around the concept of “Positive Well-Being for All Living things on The Planet.” In time, P.A.C.E. was to take on the responsibilities of a group which provided expertise and experience that other organizations needed and wanted in order to successfully carry out their programs. Rather than recount a narrative of our activities and involvements over the last 25 years, I will highlight a few recent activities.
One has been engaging with students from campuses all over San Diego for “The October 7th Mobilization to Defend Public Education and Public Social Services.” We met, regularly, with groups of students in order to put together activities on each campus and a city-wide mobilization march and rally. It was heartening to see students coming alive once again and working together with unions and community organizations in an activist way. This movement has been building for some time in San Diego and it has been a privilege for P.A.C.E. to continue to be one of its sponsors.
P.A.C.E. had enough time in preparation for a major meta-networking gathering on 7/01/10, to bring together seven networks of groups around the theme of “The Earth is for People, Not Corporations.” The Immigration, Election Integrity, Campaign Finance Reform, Peace & Justice, Environmental Protection, Budget Cut Protection, and Media Reform movements each had a speaker on the program, as well as a table in the 1st Unitarian Universalist Church of S.D. patio. In addition to general education, one of the key results was that people from different networks, who previously did not know each other, met there, got to know each other, and began to work together. This made all of the preparation very worth while. Activist San Diego, which had already received F.C.C. approval for an FM Radio Station, had been working on a major, $200,000 radio equipment grant from the Department of Commerce. They, then, received the 2010 regulations in which there was an increased emphasis on the financial side of the application that required an explanation of how they were going to raise the large sums of money to bring this radio station into being. P.A.C.E. was glad to bring its development management grantsmanship experience to bear on their application. We worked day and night for three days and succeeded in completing the revision of the application’s financial section, so that it got in on time. This is one more example of how P.A.C.E. members can be ready to help out in a pinch.
In looking ahead for P.A.C.E., it has been highly recommended that we change our meta-networking group into a 501 (C) (3) nonprofit organization. In this way it would be able to raise funds to do its work on a larger scale and help more community individuals and groups. P.A.C.E. is in contact with individuals with varied skills who would like to help those involved in fundamental change by providing, at a modest cost, services that might be needed in order to do their work. This would include areas such as budgeting, long range strategic planning, marketing, membership building, fund raising, and electronic data processing. By regularizing ourselves as a nonprofit organization we would be better able to enlist the support of key people in our network who can then be better connected to others in need of these services.
Another area of future growth that some organizational leaders are interested in would be to combine the collective membership of many different groups into one network, while preserving their individual group identities. The reason for this would be to get the economies of scale necessary to offer some benefits, like health insurance, to the larger membership. This could also work for sizeable purchases of key supplies, public liability insurance coverage, and a host of other things where large numbers really count. Once the major meta-networking groups begin to work together in concrete ways they would be in a much more confident position to plan successful large events together and to be able to turn out their followers, not just their leaders, for those events. There is no reason why we have to max out at rallies for under a thousand people, when other major U.S. cities are able to turn out hundreds of thousands. It is just that we have to see what we really have in common and then to act upon it.
The future of fundamental change in this town is much brighter today than it has been, particularly since young people are taking up the mantle of change alongside the old-timers in established advocacy organizations. Of course, the organizational elders in the progressive community have to be willing to share the leadership role with the next generation of up and coming leaders. It is up to us to institute the training programs that will prepare them to replace us. Of course, some of this is already underway, and P.A.C.E. is a part of it. I, for one, am glad that this is happening.