EQCA ALAMEDA COUNTY CHAPTER NEWS & UPDATES

Equality California Alameda County Chapter News & Updates

Dear AC Chapter Members,

Our next chapter meeting (described in detail below) will be on Saturday, October
8th at 11am at Innersport Chiropractic in Berkeley (1250 Addison Street - cross
street is Bonar). If you need a map or directions, please check out their website
at http://www.innersport.com/office.html. We hope you can come and help us plan for
our chapter's direction over the next six months in our fight for equal rights.

On October 9th, the Alameda County EQCA chapter will be participating in the
National Coming Out Day March & Rally Event from 1-4pm. We will be marching in the
rally, as well as tabling at this event. We encourage you to join us. The event's
schedule is 1pm assemble at the corner of Grand Ave and MacArthur, 2pm march, and
3pm rally in front of City Hall at 14th Street at Broadway. More information on
this event can be found at http://www.eastbayvoice.org/pride/oio2005.html. If
interested, contact us at Alameda.chapter [at] eqca.org.

We also wanted to announce that our e-mail and website accounts have changed. We
are finally at the point where we are merging the two websites for Equality
California and the Marriage Equality Project together! What this means for you is
more timely access to all the information and legislative updates to the various
issues that we are working on! You will no longer have to look in two different
spots to get all the story! Hooray!!!

With these changes we have now simplified access to our chapter webpage. Click on
http://www.eqca.org/ and then click on the chapter link on the home page. You will
find the same familiar map of the state where you will click on Alameda County and
be taken to our page. It's that easy! In addition, we now have a new email address
for the chapter. You can email us at Alameda.chapter [at] eqca.org. Everything else
is the same as always!

We hope to see you get involved and participate in the various upcoming events and
at our next meeting. As always you will receive an email or two from us reminding
you about upcoming events. Feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns.

Warmly,
Robin Barnett and Pamela Brown, EQCA Alameda County Chapter Leaders

OCTOBER MEETING AND CHAPTER PLANS

At our October meeting, we want to discuss our chapter's projects for the next six
months with the goal of educating Alameda County residents on the importance of
marriage equality and how the June 2006 initiatives would harm gay and lesbian
families. These projects include:

Speaker Series Project: Identifying a set of organizations (e.g., LGBT, religious,
political, etc) where EQCA volunteers will speak on the importance of marriage
equality and the upcoming ballot initiatives.

Local Legislative Project: Building on previous efforts to get the Alameda County
Board of Supervisors and Berkeley and Oakland City Councils to approve marriage
equality resolutions, we will identify other local city councils to approach for
their support on similar resolutions.

Local Media Project: Focusing on media outlets in Alameda County (e.g., KTVU,
Oakland Tribune, Tri Valley Herald, etc.), we will work with reporters that have
covered marriage equality issues in the past, meet with editorial boards on marriage
equality issues, and/or develop a core group of interested writers to participate in
future letter to the editor writing drives.

Canvass Voter ID Project: Building on a successful effort to walk door-to-door and
speak directly with registered voters in Berkeley, we will identify other favorable
neighborhoods in Alameda County to visit with this canvass project.

Visibility Project: Identifying locations and/or community events for tabling
efforts where we can get out in the community to talk with and identify individuals
who would be willing to support future EQCA projects.

_________________________________________________________

Equality California

Founded in 1998, Equality California is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots-based,
statewide advocacy organization whose mission is to ensure the dignity, safety,
equality and civil rights of all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)
Californians. Equality California is one of the largest and fastest growing
statewide LGBT organizations in the country. For more information, please visit
http://www.eqca.org.