Towards the Pan African Summit, 2010

The Pan African Summit steering committee held another meeting today, at the Center for Families. At our last meeting, we had expressed the desire to reach out to more African Americans and had agreed that we could use the African American churches to reach that goal.













Thanks to the initiative of Edmund Ocansey, today we were joined by two special guests. One was Dara Ceasar, a social worker in the Minneapolis public schools, seen on the right in the photo above. She offered advice on incorporating children's events and activities in the Summit.













The other guest was Reverend Ian Bethel, second from the right in the photo above. You can watch some of his sermons on YouTube, such as this one. Reverend Bethel offered to help spread the word about the Summit.













Also present was Dr. Richard Oni, seen on the left in the photo above. Dr. Oni is president of Minnesota Institute for Nigerian Development. With orgnizations such as MIND, the Africans in the greater Twin Cities area are easy to reach. Hence our view that we need to do more to reach out to the African American community.













We brought up a number of ideas regarding publicity for the Pan African Summit, such as using Facebook and Twitter, as well as African newspapers such as Mshale and the African News Journal, and KMOJ radio station.













We will continue with our outreach to the African American churches, aware that it is easy to reach Minnesota Africans through their numerous associations, whether ethnic, national, or regional.













We reviewed the issue of sponsorships and will go ahead and invite businesses and organization to advertise in our Summit booklet.