140127 Peter "Growing the campaign"

 

Date	27/1/14	Presenter	Peter Verity
Time		Secretaries
Location	Quaker Meeting House	Type of meeting	Meet-up
Attendees (add yourself if missing)	approx. 18 people present, of whom about 1/3 had not been to a meeting before

 

Table of Contents

 

Growing the Campaign 1. Review of progress 2. Competing schools of thought (about money and reform) 3. Getting the message across

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Growing the Campaign

The slides for the talk (slightly abridged) can be downloaded here > Growing the campaign_wiki.ppt

 

The talk was given by Peter Verity (me!), Coordinator of the Sheffield Group of Positive Money Supporters

There were three parts to the talk

 

1. Review of progress

I talked about progress at local, national, and international level.

Significant points -

• we plan to do many more street stalls in 2014. Extra volunteers would be helpful!
• the Sheffield contact list has grown to 150 - a big increase
• nationally, the social media sites have seen a strong surge in interest - Facebook growing at 2000 per month

 

See the slides for more details (above)

 

2. Competing schools of thought (about money and reform)

I tried to give an unbiased view, listing pros and cons of each.

You can download a text version of this part of the talk here Schools of thought about money and reform.doc

I have also put a number of website links at the end of the document, for those who want to take any of the ideas further.

 

My conclusions -

• the campaign might become more difficult as we move out of recession, however there is still a strong appetite for change as shown by the recent growth in support
• there are lots of ideas out there! None is perfect, you have to weigh up the pros and cons to decide which you think is best
• when people find out that banks create money "out of thin air", a natural reaction might be to reject fiat money. This is potentially a "threat" since the Positive Money solution is also created "out of thin air". Perhaps we need to be careful to avoid using this phrase
• our job is to get people onto the first step of the journey (to question where money comes from), then nudge them towards the Positive Money solution

 

3. Getting the message across

The last half-hour was more interactive! (thanks to Sarah for facilitating this)

A quick poll showed that

• 2 people did not understand how banks create money
• 2 people understood the argument, but can't accept it's true
• 1 person accepts how banks create money, but doesn't think that Positive Money have the answer

We then got these people to ask their questions, and for the rest to attempt to give answers!

Some of us continued the discussion in the pub