On Saturday, February 26th, I (T.J. posting here) made the trip down to Macon, GA so that I could attend (and film parts of) the statewide meeting of the
Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition (GPJC). We had inquired about the event at our first meeting with Tim, and he was kind enough to extend an invitation if we thought we could use some of the information and footage for our project. While I was the only one that could make it, this turned out to be fine as the meeting had a small group of people (about 10), and since this is a new camera for me I needed to practice anyway.
The AFSC of Atlanta is just one group that makes up the statewide network of the GPJC, a group that had a lot of success in building towards a large cooperative, but that has seen participation wane in recent years, especially during and after the campaign and election of Barack Obama (which many in the network were involved in heavily). Tim seems to be a driving force behind keeping the group alive, and his leadership, speaking, and teaching skills were on display at the small meeting. Discussion focused mostly on rebuilding and re-energizing the GPJC.
Here's a link to AFSC Atlanta's official blog with a post about the meeting.All this being said, its doubtful much of the footage obtained will be useful in our final project. While a focus on the GPJC and Tim Franzen as an individual activist could be interesting, for this short term work my thought is that we will be better served zeroing in as soon as possible on a detailed and personal story coming directly out of the
Atlanta AFSC, in particular the SCAP (Student Non-violent Career Alternatives) program if this remains an option the group is open too.
In the coming days we need to lay out a production schedule, communicate with Tim, and begin to develop a treatment or outline for the project. Time is unfortunately not something we have a lot of in this particular case, so we'll want to narrow in on exactly what we hope to do as soon as possible.
