This transcript was exported on May 07, 2021 - view latest version here. Shoshana Abrams: All right. Hello. Welcome everyone to our May FCNL Advocacy Teams National Call. My name is Shoshana Abrams. We are gathered together with 125 teams from 44 states plus D.C. It's really good to be with you all tonight. The numbers are climbing as folks join our call. I'll ask if you're just joining us to take a moment to rename yourself to add your team name after your name, that way we can see where you're all coming from. Thank you so much for taking the time tonight to be here with us live. We have a great call for you. Shoshana Abrams: So here's what we have. So on tonight's agenda we have a wonderful guest speaker for you: Kyle Bibby from Common Defense. He's the National Campaigns Manager and he's done a lot more. I'll give you his full bio later. Shoshana Abrams: We're going to do some story-sharing in the middle of the call, which is something we do a lot on our communicator calls but we don't get to do a lot of on these national calls. So be thinking about one or two sentences about something your team has done so far this year in 2020. Shoshana Abrams: And then we're going to have, of course, our policy update from Heather and Julia to give us the updates on what's happening on the Hill and when you could be most effective in your advocacy. Shoshana Abrams: And, of course, we'll have time for questions throughout. And I have a couple of announcements there at the end. We're up to 179 participants, so I think that's enough for us to get started. Shoshana Abrams: Tonight we have Theo Sitther providing tech support, so if you need anything you can message him privately and he'll try and help you out. You can also type your questions in the chat as we go, and you can use the raise hand function on Zoom to ask a question live. Shoshana Abrams: All right. So let's just get settled. We're going to settle in old school with just a couple of moments of silence. No quotes for you today, but I'm feeling the energy and I could use just a full moment of centering silence as we get started. Shoshana Abrams: (Silence) Shoshana Abrams: Wonderful, friends. If you've just joined us, we were in some silence, so that's why you didn't hear anything. Your audio probably is working just fine. Okay. So thank you so much. We're going to go ahead and get started. May 2021 National Call- Kyle Bibby, Common Defen... (Completed 05/07/21) Page 1 of 22 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on May 07, 2021 - view latest version here. Shoshana Abrams: I'd like to welcome and thank Kyle Bibby for joining us tonight. Kyle, are you still on the line? Saw you earlier. Kyle Bibby: Yes, I'm here. I'm here. Shoshana Abrams: Wonderful. Wonderful. Great. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. We're happy to have you on this call. As you heard me say, we have our 125 teams across the country who are on this call. All of them are really... And we talked about this a little bit as we started our work together, all of our teams are really focused on building relationships with their members of congress while working on one policy campaign each year. Shoshana Abrams: And they're really focused on moving them, no matter where the member's political beliefs are. So we have people trying to move the reddest of red members of Congress and the bluest of blue for our policy objectives. And as you know, we've been really focused on ending endless war and, in particular, repealing the authorizations for use of military force. Shoshana Abrams: Friends, let me introduce you to who you're going to hear from tonight. Kyle Bibby is currently Common Defense's National Campaign Manager. Common Defense has been an instrumental partner in moving Congress, both Congress, actually, and the administration, towards ending endless war. Shoshana Abrams: Kyle is a naval academy graduate and a former Marine Corps infantry officer, and a former presidential management fellow with the Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget. He worked for a year as a director for the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation, helping formerly incarcerated people transition back into society, and he's one of the co-founders of the Black Veterans Project. I think a few folks listened to a recent recording with Richard Brookshire, and they sent that around. So I think they'd also be interested in hearing about that. Shoshana Abrams: So Kyle, there are many things you could talk to us about tonight. But I want to thank you so much for all the work you've done organizing veterans around ending endless war, and also creating that home that I know you created at Common Defense for veterans. I'm hoping tonight you can tell us a little bit about Common Defense's efforts around the End The Forever War Pledge, and what the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan means for Common Defense. Shoshana Abrams: And I know you were recently interviewed as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and you raised concerns about how the story of Afghanistan was being told in the media, so I'm hoping you can talk a little bit more about that as well. So thanks again, and take it away. May 2021 National Call- Kyle Bibby, Common Defen... (Completed 05/07/21) Page 2 of 22 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on May 07, 2021 - view latest version here. Kyle Bibby: Great. Thank you for that gracious intro. I feel very welcome in this space, particularly among folks who are also organizing on an issue that we care deeply about at Common Defense. So I figured I could tell you a bit about Common Defense, then we'll go into the work we've done specifically around our campaign, our, as we call it, the End The Forever War campaign. And then talk a bit about what we think are the next steps going forward. Kyle Bibby: Certainly President Biden has made a great announcement in the sense that he wants to end the military mission in Afghanistan, but the way we see it at Common Defense, we are not done until that mission is 100% concluded, so we have to see it all the way through and support our allies in this. And we've worked quite extensively over the past few years with FCNL on this, so we're excited to round the corner and get to the finish line. Kyle Bibby: So to tell you a little bit about Common Defense. Common Defense is a progressive veterans organization. We were started back in 2016. We are not partisan in the sense that we are officially tied to any political party, but based on the issues that we follow and care for, we are generally more connected to the Democratic party and the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Kyle Bibby: We have a training organization called The Veterans Organizing Institute, where we train veterans to become community organizers. It doesn't have to be around ending the war, really any issue. In fact, it's actually a great little incubator space for sharing of ideas among former military members who are still very involved in their community via community work. And just a training space for us to also tap into when we're doing work on the Hill around the campaigns that we do now. Kyle Bibby: We have a PAC, so we also do some electoral work, as well as a [inaudible 00:07:18] which is where the majority of our lobbying work is done. Currently our campaigns are, again, the End The Forever War campaign, which I'll go into detail more in a minute, but also our... We have a campaign on demilitarizing the police as well as a campaign around voters' rights. So we've been taking on those three issues in particular, and a little bit of climate justice as well. We've been taking on those issues, particularly as the Biden administration took over. Kyle Bibby: So our tactics usually... We do a lot of social media, we do op-eds and LTEs, but our bread and butter, our big movements are usually when we bring groups of veterans down to Washington D.C., we do lobbying just like you all. And we head into... Just like Shoshana said earlier, we'll meet with Republicans, we'll meet with Democrats, we'll meet with anyone who's willing to open the door and have a productive conversation about how we can end these wars and make safer communities around the world. Kyle Bibby: May 2021 National Call- Kyle Bibby, Common Defen... (Completed 05/07/21) Page 3 of 22 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on May 07, 2021 - view latest version here. So given what's been going on in the news recently, we figured we'd give you some updates on where we see things going with the Biden administration. First of all, we want to say: don't necessarily believe all the hype that you've heard in some of the news organizations that this was some predetermined thing that President Biden always wanted to do.