Immigrant Rights & Migration Archives - Movement Strategy Center

Our Family, Our Future: My Global Migration Pledge

Lidia Alvarez and Frank Gargione — Thu, 18 May 2023 17:27:57 +0000

How the Right to Migrate, Climate Justice, and Global Interdependence are all Interwoven by Taj James

Originally published on August 28, 2015.

As I write this, the bodies of hundreds of people are being pulled from the water off the coast of Libya after two boats sank, drowning women, men, and children migrating in desperation from places like Syria, Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa.

The images become a horrific blur. Last week: riot police in Macedonia firing tear gas at thousands of families trying to cross the border from Greece. April: seven hundred people dying when a smuggling ship sank off the coast of Italy. Right now: officials recovering the bodies of 71 people found rotting in a refrigerator truck left on the side of a road outside Vienna. We don’t know who these 71 people were, only small heart wrenching details: three of them were children, a Syrian passport was found. What we know is that they were migrating, that they were 71 of the millions of people around the world who have been uprooted from their home countries by economic, political, and climate chaos.

Photo: Mohamed Azakir / World Bank. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The global magnitude of this chaos is staggering. The numbers for 2015 continue to swell, possibly higher than the 59.5 million people the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says were forcibly displaced in 2014. In other words, one in every 122 human beings on the planet is now either a refugee, asylum-seeker, or a person who has been internally displaced. Here in the U.S., thousands of African Americans were displaced by hurricane Katrina and the “second storm” of racism that followed in the water’s wake, with many still demanding their right of return.

All this is a shadow of the migration that is to come. In the years ahead we face huge waves of migration by economic, political, and climate refugees, at an almost unimaginable scale.

Tonight, as I write this, I ask myself who is responsible? I ask myself what can we do?

What I know is that we are all responsible.

What I know is that we all must act.

“What I know is that we are living in a time in which we will truly live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools. I know those are our only choices. I know the cries of those dying at sea warn us of what lies ahead for all of us.”

What I know is that people, in defiance of states, must embrace our global human family and provide refuge and support to those who have been pushed off of their lands due to growing economic inequality, climate drought, war and conflict.

What I know is that the President’s Trans Pacific Partnership will make this problem one hundred times worse and one thousand times harder to solve through legal means. It will create the conditions that will accelerate harm and increase human trafficking and the loss of human life.

What I know is that we must open borders, stop criminalizing migration, and migrants, and defy any state that does violence to members of our shared human family.

What I know is that we are living in a time in which we will truly live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools. I know those are our only choices. I know the cries of those dying at sea warn us of what lies ahead for all of us.

What I know is that even if all our clean power dreams were implemented today, the level of climate disaster already underway will continue to drive huge levels of human migration as people leave their lands in search of places where there is enough water to grow food so their children can eat.

What I know is that we must continue the fight for climate mitigation, but step up our work on adaptation and increasing social equity. Embracing all migrants and our global human family is a core responsibility in everything we do.

What I know is that even as we insist that our government bring an end to policies rooted in militarism, materialism, and racism — the policies that are driving this migration — we cannot wait for states to take action.

What I know is that we must insist — immediately in the upcoming Paris climate talks — that our national, state, and local governments do all they can to protect human life by reversing the impacts of climate change.

What I know is that we must pour all our hearts and souls into the movements for global democracy, global governance, and people-to-people sovereignty.

What I know is that there is no such thing as domestic policy or foreign policy in an interconnected world. We must insist that all national leaders act in the interest of our global family.

What I know is that we must find ways to be good neighbors, to defy the state and provide safe harbor to those pushed out of their homes by an economy that has benefited many of us at the expense of the rest of the world. I know we can and should insist that our government mitigate the harm of human trafficking. To end this trafficking we must end the violent inequality that drives it.

What I know is that we must pledge allegiance to our global human family. Migration is a human right.

My pledge is this:

I pledge allegiance to my global human family and to

defend the web of life that is our home.

One world. One love. One family.

Interconnected, Interdependent,

Indivisible.

I vow to defy the state or any authority

that promotes violence, hate, or

the lie of separation.

In the name of love

I pledge.

What is your pledge?

#GlobalHumanFamily #WhatsYourPledge #MigrationIsBeautiful #MigrationIsARight #ForcedMigrationIsACrime #TheRightToStay #TheRightToMove #TheRightToReturn #ActForHumanity #ActForClimate #DefendThePeople #DefyTheState #AssertTheRightToDoWhatIsRight

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Navigating With Vision: Transitions Lab Nurtures Leaps Into the Unknown

Lidia Alvarez and Frank Gargione — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:18:09 +0000

MSC’s Transition Labs Offer a New Perspective on Transformative Movement Building by Julie Quiroz

Originally published on April 16, 2015.

“Reality is not destiny,” wrote Eduardo Galeano, the extraordinary Uruguayan writer who inspired social justice activists around the globe with his unflinching commitment to truth. Galeano, who lived through imprisonment and the threat of death squads and who died this past week, faced a violent and uncertain world with political imagination and joy.

I believe Galeano’s spirit was alive and well in the Movement Strategy Center Transitions Lab a few weeks ago.

“How do we transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of resilience and regeneration” is the question guiding MSC’s work and strategy and the one that we embraced in the lab.

I use the word “embraced” because it captures the holistic approach that the lab sought to nurture and that is emerging as a powerful force in the irrepressible communities of care within OUR Walmart, the courageous community building of Black Lives Matter, the bold cultural transformation work of Mobilize the Immigrant Vote, the paradigm-smashing leadership development of Brown Boi Project, the nurturing of Beloved Community through Move to End Violence, and so much more.

Image courtesy of Beloved Communities Network

Coming from diverse movement sectors such as economic justice, ecological justice, education justice, gender justice, more than thirty amazing leaders came together in the Transitions Lab to try on the individual and collective qualities we need for the truly profound global transitions that lie ahead. We also began to explore what navigation looks like when an unknown future reveals the dangers of siloed work and the limits of analysis and planning and process.

The three-day lab offered spacious time for movement leaders to:

Connect and reconnect with other movement leaders who see personal and collective transformation as key to deep societal and cultural transition.
Deepen shared understanding of opportunities and challenges of our present movement moment — and the “big leaps” that each of us can define and take in our work.
Explore the qualities and capacities that we and our movements need to embody in order to prepare for, build, and take leadership in this time of transition.
Experience how our physical stance shapes our mental, emotional, and strategic stance.

Reflections from the participants offer a glimpse of the lab experience:

“The lab offered spaciousness, purposeful space, and compelling questions.” – Rosa González, Facilitating Power

“I appreciated the inter-sectoral discussions about transformative transitions.” – Jacqueline Patterson, NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program

“The lab was invaluable for me, being in physical practice and exploring totally new ways of being and strategizing.” – Tomás Garduño, ALIGN New York

In the Transitions Initiative lab we were presented with the reality of our movements — the habits that limit our effectiveness and the magnitude of the challenges we face — but we were not constrained by that reality.

Instead, the lab nurtured a vision of exponential and irreversible transformation and wholeness, a new “destiny” that we ourselves can embody and bring forth.

Julie Quiroz (she/her) leads New Moon Collaborations, nurturing leaps in culture that transform systems and structures for generations to come.

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The MSC Storytelling Series: Kristen Zimmerman

Lidia Alvarez and Frank Gargione — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 01:59:10 +0000

Our Storytelling Series Features the Folks Most Associated With MSC’s History: Meet Kristen Zimmerman

In this installment we get to know activist, artist and storyteller Kristen Zimmerman — co-founder of Movement Strategy Center (MSC) and Root. Rise. Pollinate!, and illustrator of the new graphic guide Ten Thousand Beloved Communities, a project of Beloved Communities Network.

“It feels important to start to have other ways of thinking about ourselves or our responsibilities, beyond being an activist or beyond being an advocate or even an organizer,” says Kristen Zimmerman — activist, artist, storyteller, and cofounder of MSC. She continues, “it’s really about … how do you form community?”

Zimmerman “landed in the Bay Area” after a few years working in Asia. Her work in California — much like the work she was doing in Nepal — involved the power of storytelling and culture building, within the spectrum of youth organizing. It was in this work where she crossed paths with Taj James, another of MSC’s co-founders and current Board President. Their first encounter was at an event for an organization called Media Alliance — Zimmerman sensed a “potent connection,” and that the two were “going to know each other for a while.”

She was right: James was also working with youth organizers at Coleman Advocates for Children. He saw a common thread between his work and Zimmerman’s focus on “participatory action research with youth.” She said James understood “how the different offerings and gifts that different people might have fit together,” and quickly pulled her into a youth-led juvenile justice organization in San Francisco. That early collaboration included a study of recommended reforms with “a parallel youth-led research project” that involved interviewing young people and advocacy “around what should happen.” The project “was really powerful” and “impacted a lot of the trajectories of the young people,” many of whom “kept in touch.”

Later, while James “decided he was going to start Movement Strategy Center,” Zimmerman was compelled to document some of the local creative and “youth-led efforts,” that, in her opinion, felt like “a cultural moment.” The work was crucial. At that time, the general perception of young people was that they were largely “jaded and inactive.”

Her storytelling project needed a home, and “none of the established organizations felt right.” She met with James, and they decided her work could be a founding project of whatever it was that James was cooking up. She recalled that everyone involved was “very entrepreneurial,” with projects involving storytelling, personal wellness, alliance building and strategy, social networks, and spirituality. “It was very much just a collection of experiments.”

“We’re not therapists, we’re not trained to be healers … But we can bring healing and transformation and embodied practice to groups.”

It felt right, and lasting. At one point, Zimmerman found herself “thinking about multiple decades of change” and how it was likely she’d be with MSC for many years of partnership. That “culture shift” around sustainable organizing appealed to her — especially the focus on collaborative alliances that eliminated the ways organizers often competed with each other for resources.

Even so, organizing was exhausting. There was a realization that “we’re not therapists, we’re not trained to be healers … But we can bring healing and transformation and embodied practice to groups” by collaborating with people who are focused on individual healing and wellness. That was the aha moment — MSC would be an integration of movement work paired with the holistic, emotional support and spirituality needed to sustain the difficulties of movement work.

Enter Norma Wong: James and Zimmerman met Wong when she was working with Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice — a small organizing group focused on Asian communities in Oakland. The group was experiencing growing pains, and while Zimmerman and James consulted on movement and alliance building, Wong was helping them stay grounded and move through conflict with their vision intact. That intimate collaboration “created the beta template” for MSC.

Wong’s ongoing involvement and expertise kept “integrating the embodiment work with the strategy work.” They landed on applied zone work — “also called forward stance.” Early projects included the Move to End Violence, the Transitions Initiative, the Forward Together project (their first project that was rooted in Indigeneity), and a number of other projects and writings.

Kristen, far right, with two participants sitting on the ground by a tree, brainstorming during a transitions lab retreat.

Zimmermanm’s sense of spirituality didn’t start with Wong, though. She explained “a difficult relationship with organized religion,” but a familial “connection to land” — forests, forestry, small-scale farming, and nature in general. Years later, she recalled her mother telling her, “oh yeah, [nature is] our family’s spirituality.”

Her art rounded out that sense of spirituality. As an undergrad, Zimmerman majored in visual arts but felt “a little bit like a misfit in the art department.” Unlike many of her peers, her artwork was “always really community oriented” and “story oriented.” A lot was collaborative, involving immigrant and refugee youth as well as young people in domestic violence shelters. The work was a way to center these youths, who could feel misplaced within “their community’s trajectory,” and to help them “have a healing relationship to their story.”

Later, an itch to work abroad coincided with a friend’s return from working in education and storytelling within minority and refugee communities in Nepal and Tibet. Inspired, Zimmerman and her friend wrote letters to the Tibetan Department of Education along with the Tibetan Youth Congress and the Tibetan Women’s Congress, two activist groups. In essence, the letters said, “hey, we have this idea. Is it of use to you?”

That sense of community often seemed so lost in the United States: “it takes so much more energy and feels you have to hold the community together rather than the community holding you.”

That idea became “an intercultural project, doing work both with youth here and youth there, and specifically young people who were navigating questions around identity, belonging, and their own place in a longer arc of their community.” They “collaborated for three years in different spots” with community organizing groups, recent political refugees, elders who had left Tibet, and teachers who were facilitating opportunities for young people to ask questions, develop stories, and interview one another while creating “magazines and exhibits and advocacy efforts.”

The work was a formative experience — “making meaning and helping people find belonging, helping [herself] find belonging,” and learning “how people heal and repair relationships with intergenerational trauma.” Zimmerman “was lucky enough to live in really wonderful communities,” sharing meals, building relationships, and creating art. She had a “visceral sense” of being a guest in a foreign country and in a family’s home, while also “being held by community.” These communities were strong enough to not only support the folks who had always been there, but to hold newcomers. Paired with her exposure to the sense of community in Tibetan Buddhism, she felt inspired “to figure out how to repair and create community in a similar way” at home. That sense of community often seemed so lost in the United States: “it takes so much more energy and feels you have to hold the community together rather than the community holding you.”

“The pollination part feels evocative, it feels more poetic, and it also feels like, yeah, there’s a connector part and a life giving part and that feels really important.”

Later, a series of life experiences — the birth of her son, who has Down syndrome, the traumatic loss of her sister when her son was four, and the loss of her mother shortly thereafter — inspired a number of questions: “how do you actually repair human relationships to each other? How do you form functional communities that are really rooted in place? How do you attend to spirit as part of the center of systemic and cultural transformation?”

It all inspired the here and now: in 2018, alongside Shawna Wakefield and Rufaro Gwarada, Zimmerman founded Root. Rise. Pollinate!, an MSN partner. The project supports a transnational community of individual and collective feminist changemakers with learning and networking opportunities as well as regenerative mind-body-spirit practices. The idea of “pollination” is central: collective changemaking “is really about pollinating new ways of being in a new worldview.”

She cited a Transitions Initiative-era question: how do “we jump or leap from cultures rooted in violence and separation, extraction, domination, all of that, to cultures and ways of being and seeing the world that are really rooted in our connection and mutuality and care?” The answer is in forming community and connecting to other communities. It’s “a different way of thinking and being” and “the pollination part feels evocative, it feels more poetic, and it also feels like, yeah, there’s a connector part and a life giving part and that feels really important.”

Illustration by Kristen Zimmerman

Now, she is bringing that sense of community and collaboration to a forthcoming graphic novel. In collaboration with Movement Strategy Network (MSN) partner Beloved Communities Network, this graphic guide to building world-transforming communities features writings by 25 leaders, a foreward by adrienne maree brown, and illustrations by Zimmerman. Ten Thousand Beloved Communities is about deepening relationships to people and places through a lens of indigeneity. The book defines the story and lineage of Beloved Community, and features stories of Beloved Community in action along with practices to help readers integrate Beloved Community and the wisdom of the Transitions Initiatives into their daily lives.

MSC’s Transitions Initiative, and the affiliated Labs, are mentioned frequently. Some featured culture nights and, chuckling, Zimmerman told us “you could talk to everybody about their culture night moment.” Normally she might’ve gone “up and painted a painting” but “it’s not the same as performing.” One night she mustered up the courage to sing the Bill Withers classic “Lovely Day.” She said: “It’s a testimony to the community side of the work that I could do that … That people joined in … It was the most beautiful thing and I wasn’t doing it alone, which was awesome.”

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It’s Time For a Vision That is More Humane

Lidia Alvarez and Frank Gargione — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:28:42 +0000

Movement Strategy Center Stands with Cuba, Haiti, and All Victims of Imperialism

“The Brothers in pain tinted with blood on the island of Cuba” by @alejandro_sin_barreras.

On July 11th, for the first time in 62 years, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in Havana and other cities, calling for freedom, vaccines, and food. Since then, two dominating views have made headlines: one calling for US intervention and the other supporting the Cuban government and an end to the American trade embargo that continues to cause pain and suffering to the Cuban people.

The Cuban government-regime has shown solidarity with freedom fighters like Assata Shakur. At the same time, however, the powers that perpetuate violence and deprivation among their own and the media frames anyone exercising their rights to resist as chaotic and violent. Remember, it is Assata who said that “part of being revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane.”

We condemn all state-sanctioned violence against protesters in Cuba and everywhere. That includes reports of the Cuban government shutting down access to the internet. We support on the ground movement leaders like @holagemeny who is working to replenish cellular minutes and data; the Friends of Caritas Cuba who have been working to feed Cubans in need for 20 years; and @cubanospalante, is working with organizers on the ground to deliver resources directly to Cubans.

Haiti, just a few hundred miles from Cuba, is reeling from the recent assassination of their President Jovenel Moise. The crisis has led to the calls for an American or international intervention that can infringe on Haitian sovereignty while echoing centuries of disastrous imperial intervention in the country. Many Haitians are fearful of the sort of military intervention that upends everyday life at home; and those seeking asylum in the United States are being deported or detained.

What if, instead of military force, the United States supports sustainable development in Haiti — whether among the business community or among farmers?

We at Movement Strategy Center urge our leaders here and abroad to lead with the needs and consent of the governed — in Cuba and in Haiti and elsewhere. We urge President Biden to lift the economic blockade in Cuba immediately. We also urge President Biden to put an immediate end to Title 42, a continuation of a Trump policy that adds suffering and insult to asylum seekers at our borders.

We stand in full solidarity with Cuban people and Haitian People; and those involved in recent uprisings in Venezuela and Colombia. These struggles — for fair representation, for ancestral land, for basic human rights and equality, for an end to imperialistic policies — echo the works of the extended MSC family here at home: Black Lives Matter, the rights of women and immigrants, equality for BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ communities, and sovereignty for Indigenous people and their land. It is time for a vision that is more humane.

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Condemning Violence and Colonialism and Standing With Palestinians

Lidia Alvarez and Frank Gargione — Fri, 14 May 2021 20:02:26 +0000

Movement Strategy Center’s Thoughts on Israel and Palestine

Follow @thecitizenraja on Instagram.

This week, Muslims around the world are celebrating the end of Ramadan and the holiday of Eid-ul-Fitr. In Palestine, however, days meant for families and communities coming together in joy and prayer have been marked by brutal violence and oppression. As we view the images of families being evicted from their homes and brown-skinned people being viciously attacked by officers, we at Movement Strategy Center are struck by the parallels to the struggles of low-income, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA communities here in the United States.

As we fight for the preservation of indigenous sovereignty for Native communities here in the US, how can we turn a blind eye to the occupation and illegal settlements in Palestinian territories?

As we speak out against police brutality and militarism here in the US, how can we remain silent when armed officers storm into a mosque full of worshippers using teargas and stun grenades?

As we seek to transform our world towards racial equity and economic justice for all, how can we ignore the system of apartheid that the Israeli government has established against the Palestinians?

We can’t.

As an organization whose goal is to support movements working to dismantle unjust systems of inequality and oppression, we must add our voices to those condemning the persecution and killing of innocent civilians, including children. We welcome and echo the many statements in support of the Palestinian people from community leaders and elected officials. Unfortunately, the lack of empathy for the Palestinian people has become so normal that many withheld any condemnation of the Israeli government’s violence until rockets had been fired from the other side.

We are well aware from the police brutality we see here at home that the monopoly on violence belongs to the powerful, and that the right to self-defense is not afforded to people with brown and black skin. We must also not forget that it is American tax money being used to supply the weapons and training behind this violence.

The lethal hold used to kill George Floyd is also used by Israeli officers on Palestinians.

Just as we call for the de-escalation and an end to violence in policing here in the United States, we call for the de-escalation and an end to violence from the Israeli government.

For our brothers and sisters spending their Eid holiday mourning their family members under an endless barrage of bombing and brutality, we send our deepest condolences and radical love.

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Supporting Our AAPI Friends and Neighbors

Lidia Alvarez and Frank Gargione — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 19:53:31 +0000

Movement Strategy Center Stands With the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Community

Movement Strategy Center (MSC) recognizes that the world we live in is dominated by white supremacy and Anti-Blackness, and we have spent our first 20 years incubating a diverse coalition of BIPOC- and women-led activist organizations as they tackle systemic racial and environmental inequities from the ground up.

Our staff, board, and movement leaders are devastated by the tragic murder of eight victims in Atlanta, Georgia last week. This crime, committed by a white male, claimed the lives of eight individuals — six of whom were Asian women. We stand with the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities in solidarity, now and always — as violence against our AAPI neighbors and friends has escalated over the last year in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic and the incendiary remarks of the former United States president.

On the same day as this brutal shooting, Stop AAPI Hate — an organization formed just last year to prevent Coronavirus-related discrimination — released a report stating that nearly 3,800 hate crimes had been reported against AAPI individuals (mostly women) in the last year alone. We call on our elected officials and philanthropy at large to stop overlooking AAPI populations and organizations. In the meantime, here are some actions you can take to help fight violence against AAPI communities; and here are three pieces that highlight the voices of and issues facing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders right now.

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