Aloha Everyone:

I am so excited... Carlos and Miguel have been working on ways in which the NIMC can develop a prototype of the Moveon.org newsletter that can be used to [1] promote a large scale and heightened democratization of ACA and APA by enabling members at the grass roots level (and I am talking about thousands of members) the ability to petition/lobby with presidents of all APA/ACA divisions as well as key persons in executive/adminstrative positions and [2] foster revolutionary changes in the mental health professions in the process.

Please look at the recent work and form Carlos has submitted with the attached materials.

One of the things Carlos is looking into is the possibility of getting to the point where we will have the technological capacity to periodically send a form letter that all the persons who are registered with the NIMC can sign and simply press a key to have their signed letter sent to say: the CEO of APA/ACA to inquire about the sort of aggressive affirmative action plans APA or ACA has in mind to address the serious injustice of the disproportionately low number of Latinos/Latinas, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans who are members of these organizations; or how about mobilizing large numbers of persons in the expanded NIMC group to forward individual e-mails (prepared/forms) to Martin Seligman imploring him to cease from perpetuating various forms of cultural oppression and racism in the positive psychology movement;

or how about mobilizing large numbers of persons to e-mail the president of the U.S. requesting an end to the war from a mental health perspective....

I believe the potential for the mobilization, organization, education, and inspiration of large numbers of especially new, young, persons of color is endless and possibly transformative.

I am going to prepare a "vision statement" that I will send out to the large group that was organized from the July 28th meeting to further clarify some of the tremendous potential that I see the work that Carlos and Miguel are doing in terms of transforming APA/ACA and empowering persons at the grassroots level to have a more direct and on-going means of input into these professional organizations... their work along with the efforts of the other subcommittees that are working to [a] gain the support of the organizers of the Diversity Challenge/Roundtable/Nation MC Summit/ APA and ACA conventions to have a multi-year intervention that involves programs (Town Hall/Plenary

meetings) that build a movement that intentionally instutionalizes the application of the APA mc guidelines and the ACA mc/advocacy competencies and [b] persons who are looking into the re-establishment of a National Dialogue on Race... is very... very powerful...

When the newsletter that Carlos is working on is finished... there will be a convenient place where individuals can access the full NIMC webpage that Carlos created... With this in mind, I need your help in getting Carlos a picture of yourself as well as a copy of your vita so that this information can be made available on our webpage. So far, Allen, Mary, and myself are the only persons who have this material on the webpage... we need you help with this folks!!!

I can't thank Carlos and Miguel enough for the time and energy that they are voluntarily putting into building NIMC and unleashing its impact in the fields of counseling and psychology.

Peace,

Michael