Greetings from SOA Watch! The past few months have been a time of transition for the SOA Watch staff and we are excited to be back in communication and look forward to organizing our fall events together (more on that below). First, we want to thank Dévora González for sharing her passion and many talents with the SOA Watch movement over the past several years. Dev has made innumerable contributions to SOAW and to the broader struggle to dismantle border imperialism and advance human rights and dignity for all. Dévora transitioned out of the SOA Watch staff this summer and while we will miss working with her on a daily basis, we are grateful she will continue to be a part of the SOA Watch family. We celebrate Dev and wish her the best in her future endeavors. Thank you, Dev! Second, we welcome Lulu Matute, our new Organizing Coordinator. Lulu first became involved with our organization while attending UC Berkeley and with the support of the East Bay chapter, she led delegations of university students to the Border Encuentros in 2017 and 2018. Most recently, Lulu completed a month-long volunteer program with No More Deaths where she served as a desert-aid EMT providing medical care to migrants crossing the naturally treacherous and hyper-militarized Arizona borderlands. We look forward to Lulu’s contributions to our collective work to challenge US foreign policy as a primary root cause of mass migration, including both undoing border imperialism and the militarized U.S. imposition of the neoliberal extractivist model in Central America. Third, we are pleased to announce that we have completed transitioning our database and e-mail platform to a new, more modern one that will facilitate our communications with you. In the past, we have had issues with our communications ending up in spam folders and hope this new e-mail management system works better. You can help by adding info@soawatch.org to your contacts or otherwise indicating to your e-mail program that this is not spam! Also, if this e-mail landed in your promotions folder, you can help train the filters by moving it to your primary inbox. Additionally, if you would prefer to receive communications from us via a different e-mail address, please let us know by replying to this message. Finally, after much discernment and given the evolving pandemic, we have decided that this fall’s annual events will once again be virtual. While we would love to gather in person, we look forward to doing that hopefully in 2022. We will be sending out more information and schedules in the coming weeks, but for now, please mark your calendars to join us on October 23rd for our 2021 Virtual Conference, and November 21st for our Annual Vigil. In Solidarity, Brigitte, Candice, Lulu, and Pablo SOA Watch |
