Despite the recent eviction of Occupy Boston protesters at Dewey Square, the spirit of the Occupy movement is still alive for many activists.
Occupy Allston-Brighton congregated in the Palestine Cultural Center for Peace in Allston on Thursday.
About 70 people attended Occupy Allston-Brighton’s first General Assembly to discuss their plans for the movement in the community.
The meeting began with a brief history of the Occupy movement before everyone broke off into several groups to discuss how they feel about the movement and problems to address in the Allston-Brighton community.
“We certainly have ideas of things were interested in doing with this neighborhood initiative, but we wanted to have this General Assembly source from the whole attendants here,” said Chris Hill, a graduate student at Northeastern University and one of the organizers of the assembly.
“Hopefully we can, by the end of the night, call out some things that we want to work on as a neighborhood initiative and start forming preliminary working groups,” he said.
Hill said the assembly was mostly going to be brainstorming.
Although there was a great turnout on short notice, the attendees were not fully representative of the diverse Allston-Brighton neighborhood, which has a large immigrant population, he said.
Hill said Occupy Allston-Brighton has no current plans to physically occupy a space in the neighborhood.
Instead, he said the movement will have an assembly, which meets regularly and has working groups to work on neighborhood-related issues for the betterments of the community.
“At least for me, a large intention of this is to build the movement over the winter—maintain energy—so that in the spring we have much more of a base behind this movement and more physical action can really take place in a more stronger, united way than it was this past fall at the encampments,” Hill said.
After the groups brainstormed, an elected representative from each group spoke before everyone. Many groups said there was a disconnect between students living in Allston-Brighton and permanent residents.
Boston University College of Arts and Sciences freshman Rea Sowan said she attended the assembly because it is important to show there are people in a small community who still support the movement, and change has to happen.
She also attended Occupy Boston, which she said was “way overdue” and one of the most beautiful things she has ever seen.
“I feel like I don’t have developed enough political views to put a label to it, but I just know that I support not the way that the government is right now,” Sowan said, “and that I really believe that the people who are behind this are going in the right direction.”
Group leaders also shared some of the problems that needed to be fixed, such as sexual harassment and trash in the streets of the neighborhood.
“It’s important to me that we keep in mind that we are not all of Allston-Brighton right now,” said Jacob, who asked to remain anonymous, in one of the brainstorming discussion groups.
Michelle, a Simmons College student who asked to keep her last name anonymous, said that she hopes Occupy Allston-Brighton will be more of what she envisioned than Occupy Boston.
She said she stopped attending Occupy Boston in mid-November because she was not happy with what she saw.
“I was just unhappy with the lack of community organizing—organizing within the community, not just within the Occupy community,” Michelle said. “And I wanted to do something with my time that was more community-based rather than large, national-based.”
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