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Tag Archive for: Strategy

What To Do? 3 Strategy Questions Matter

By Taj James   |  November 15, 2016
Reflections | 0 Comments

Right now, many of us are questioning the value of particular actions and tactics, asking whether or not they will be effective. We are missing the urgent strategic imperative of this moment.

Any action is valuable that challenges the legitimacy of the post-election claim to power.  Any action is crucial that asserts that power and authority rest in the people and supersede state authority claimed in service of domination and violence.

Don’t ask if a tactic is going to work.
Don’t ask if one tactic is sufficient to stop the imminent seizure of power and infliction of harm.

Instead ask yourself these three questions:

1) Does this act help us realize  that we have the power and that if we exercise it anything is possible?

2) Does this act undermine the false claims to legitimacy and power we are seeing, and begin to delegitimize all power that is claimed in service of hate, violence and domination?

3) Does this act reinforce our collective commitment to stand together as a people and defend with our bodies, our songs, and our presence those who are being targeted by vigilante violence and who are being targeted for state violence?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then do it!

And when you see action being taken that reinforces these three strategic principles and core values, celebrate them and lift them up.

If enough people act in ways that reflect these three principles the impossible will very quickly become the inevitable.

The people are rising up. The professional social change class must catch up with the people and affirm that they instinctively understand what time is.

It’s not time to stay on script.

It is time to accept the reality of our situation and show courage in recognizing and using the power that we have.

Be courageous.

Give thanks for starting points, entry points, that first rung on the ladder, that first step in the long journey. Celebrate all those who have the courage to not stop there, but take many steps until the journey is done.

We don’t have to know where the road leads we just need to hold hands, hold our heads high, sing loud and keep marching forward. That road will always lead to a better place if we walk it together and we walk with love.

The power lives within #AllOfUs

#BelovedCommunityRising
Celebrating the #ThreePrinciples

  • Demo

From Grievance to Governance: 8 Features of Transformative Campaigns

By Jodeen Olguín-Tayler   |  January 26, 2016
Reflections | 0 Comments

One morning last December, I found myself at the Ford Foundation watching Anna Galland, Ai-jen Poo and Heather McGhee share a stage at an event called The Future of Organizing: Contesting for Power in a Changing World. The event, co-convened by National People’s Action, was designed to highlight alignment about a shared aspiration for the progressive movement. Watching these three women, together, left me beaming.

Over the last eight years, I’ve been honored to serve as a Field or Campaign Director for MoveOn.org, the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance (NDWA), and Demos — the three organizations led by these brilliant women. The emerging alignment of these three organizations from different sectors and with very different capacities, inspired me to distill the lessons from working with them, and our allies, to lead transformative campaigns.

Transformative Campaigns are a means to create the operational alignment our progressive infrastructure needs to build a new, and specific, type of power: the power to govern based on our values. The capacities needed to govern are much different than the capacities we’ve needed to successfully elevate grievances and lead protests. In order to govern, we need political power. In order to govern with progressive and social justice values, that political power has to be independent from the two dominant political parties. That’s why a critical mass of progressive and social justice organizations is aligning around a strategic focus on building independent political power. Many of our organizations define Independent Political Power (IPP) as the scope of social change capacities that must be executed in coordination, in order to shift who governs and for what purpose.

A focus on building Independent Political Power is relatively new for many of our organizations. Infrastructure designed to make grievances is different than infrastructure designed to build the power to govern. To get somewhere different, we need to take a different path – which is why many of our organizations are experimenting with Transformative Campaigns.

Transformative Campaigns require us to do things differently. The momentum and work of these campaigns have been vehicles for organizations from the community-organizing field to expand their focus and capacities beyond protesting and mobilizing people on single issues. These organizations and their members are not content with protesting, changing laws or even transforming systems. Increasingly, they are working in complex networks and long-term partnerships to advance campaigns that change the narrative, put forward a political agenda, and elect their own members to political office.

Transformative campaigns push us to expand the lens we use to measure success. Two years ago I wrote an appeal to progressive institutions to think differently about what it means to “win.” I drew on my experience as NDWA’s Campaign Director and from work with affiliates and allies to capture some lessons from our transformative campaigns and how we measured our success. Allies’ campaigns have echoed and expanded upon these lessons:

When “winning” means having the types of power and capacities needed to govern based on our values, success is not defined solely as policy change. Success must also be measured in the increased alignment, capacities and infrastructure built in the process, together.

Governing and building independent political power cannot, and should not, be done by one organization or institution alone. Many of the progressive organizations focused on building independent political power are increasingly connected through national networks like People’s Action and the Working Families Party, as well as the multi-network capacity and field-building initiatives like the Inclusive Democracy Project and the Partnership Fund. Building and running transformative organizing campaigns is amongst the most necessary work to operationalize strategic and functional collaboration across our sectors, networks and institutions.

As a reflection on the lessons I’ve learned from these organizations and our allies, I offer Eight Features of Transformative Campaigns to describe how campaigns can be transformational (vs. transactional) — making them essential for building the alignment we need to move from grievance to governance.

1Start with Values and Vision

Transformative Campaigns don’t start with a policy goal, a person we want to elect, or an action we want to pull off. They start with deeper purpose that is rooted in values and connected to a vision. Reaching that vision will require a long-term, multi-issue political program. Starting with values and vision must be the first step in transformative campaigning.

2Intentionally Sequence, and Plan to Implement, Structural Reforms

Structural Reforms are reforms that:

  1. Address root causes of inequality;
  2. Restructure relations of power as a means and an end;
  3. Increase participation in public life and democracy (e.g., facilitating public input, negotiation, approval, and oversight into subsequent decisions and governing structures).

In order to operationalize our vision, we need a political program made up of an intentionally sequenced agenda of structural reforms. Transformative Campaigns are not isolated one-off initiatives. They are part of an intentionally sequenced set of issue priorities, mobilization, policy change and election campaigns that are pursuing structural reforms.

Too often, we’ve left the task of implementing and administering what we win up to those already in power. Structural reforms include mechanisms for us to be involved in the implementation and administration. They create ways for us to practice governance. When we plan for this we include capacity building as one key measure of success for the campaign. (For those concerned about promoting reformism at the expense of transformation: structural reforms aren’t in tension with transformation or even revolutionary change. Structural reforms differ from reformist agendas because they don’t “fix” systems that are designed to fail, exclude or oppress us. Instead, structural reforms structurally change those systems towards inclusivity. Because they are part of a long-term agenda and are executed through transformative campaigning, they do not compromise the end goal or vision for the sake of an illusory step “forward.”)

3Engage, Constantly, in the Battle of Ideas

Invite, engage and ignite an examination of how we organize our economy, society and democracy. This means our campaigns must center, not shy away from, ideas about the role of government and the purpose of public services and regulation, markets and ownership. We must name and combat the elite’s and Right-wing’s intentional use of dog-whistle politics, patriarchy and white supremacy to advance policies that ultimately hurt all of us.

Transformative campaigns look beyond what is “winnable” in the short term and often demand the hard choice to forgo a short term “win” if it requires us to abandon the battle of ideas. We can have a “win” without a policy change if we know we’re moving the dial on how people experience, think and feel about government, race, gender, democracy, and equity. In transformative campaigns we are willing to “loose forward” — to take a short-term loss on a policy or election, rather than taking a transactional “win” that perpetuates the underlying ideas of our opposition.

For example, we don’t win voting reforms if we’ve framed them as “efficient” and “cost saving”. If we achieve a policy using neoconservative and neoliberal ideas, then we’ve failed to establish the role of government and will end up spending the next year fighting the repeal of a law we just changed. A real win requires our campaigns to unabashedly put forward the idea that government has a responsibility to facilitate participation, to create regulations that level the playing field, and to promote social good and participatory governance.

4Commit to Scale: Embrace Culture Work, Civic Engagement, Field-Building, & the Technologies and Partnerships to Achieve Them

Transformational change, at scale, requires changing behavior, beliefs and practices. Social networking and civic engagement technologies as well as partnerships with cultural institutions and high-road businesses have proven critical to achieving changes in behavior and beliefs. Several campaigns that have had large scale impact – including Caring Across Generations and Color of Change’s ALEC campaign — have succeeded because they engaged cultural institutions and pop-culture strategies. Other organizations — including Demos and many affiliates of People’s Action — have lead innovative civic engagement initiatives and developed partnerships with high-road businesses (often B-corps) to successfully change behavior and beliefs about the role of people and government in our electoral process. The #BlackLivesMatter Network demonstrated the scale of impact of social networking technologies. Transformative Campaigns are often built with a goal of expanding a field or sector, in order to increase our ability to execute at scale.

5Trust in Leaderful Networks Taking Direct Action

Harnessing the power of social movements to create change requires a relationship between inside and outside strategies. When we default into models of leadership that are singular (command and control) or leaderless, we limit our ability to coordinate complex strategies and distributed tactics.

  • The #BlackLivesMatter network popularized an understanding of leaderful networks and beautifully demonstrates the power of encouraging leaders in various roles and styles.
  • The #M4BL, #Not1More and #NoXLPipeline campaigns have demonstrated how distributed campaigning – including tactical diversity, creative and direct actions — builds leadership and scales leadership development.

Leaderful networks are necessary for supporting popular uprisings, direct actions, mobilizations and the re-birth of powerful progressive social movements that institutions don’t, and shouldn’t, be able to, control. Uprisings and social movements need to flourish in order for progressive infrastructure to have the demand, will, credibility, and accountability to govern.

6Shift Individualism to Interdependence

Individual, organizational and structural transformation happens when seemingly independent (and often limiting) individual and group interests are put into an interdependent framework that actualizes multiple interests at once. Interdependence expands the circle of stakeholders for a desired change, generating what NDWA calls “Strategic Empathy” — the ability to make connections and see each other’s full human dignity across difference.

Moving towards interdependence is part of NDWA’s practice of “Organizing with Love”, and has informed their work to win what onlookers have called “unlikely allies” in the Caring Across Generations and the We Belong Together campaigns. Elements of this type of work are visible in what MoveOn did to organize gun-owners to take on the gun lobby and support gun control. Many of their members would say that there are no unlikely allies — just human connections we haven’t yet made. Organizing from interdependence is necessary to move people, issue areas, and institutions (or entire fields) from being siloed and isolated into connected, authentic relationships.

7Create Solutions for All of Us Through an Inclusive, Specific and Targeted Approach

 There is something uniquely powerful at the intersection of experiences where those at that intersection are in a unique position to understand how the world, and how power, work. We need leadership that comes from that place of intersection. This means our leadership and our demands must be inclusive and specific. When we find solutions that are based on equity and dignity for those of us most impacted by injustice, we create benefits and equity for all of us. The movement for Black lives has elevated the fact that valuing Black lives, in particular the lives of Black cis and trans women, improves the world for everyone. Valuing Black lives benefits Latinos, (many of whom are Black), Asians, Muslims and, yes, white people.

This principle, as applied to policy design, is exemplified in an approach called Targeted Universalism (a term coined by john powell), in which solutions are designed to be universal in terms of their goals, yet targeted with respect to the populations they specifically serve. One example is how Demos crafted a policy model for “universal” or “automatic voter registration” to be sure that policy is targeted to address racialized disparities in registration rates. This approach represents a commitment to reduce injustice and inequity by focusing resources on addressing the challenges faced by peoples and communities who have been disadvantaged by structural inequalities (racism, patriarchy, class, etc.). Targeted solutions to eliminate disparities, coupled with inclusive and specific leadership, will lead to improvements for all of us.

8Move Into a “Forward Stance” and Expand the Realm of What Is Possible

Transformative campaigns put us on the offensive — not defensive — in moving towards our vision and the long-term (sequenced) agenda it will take us to get there. Transformative campaigns require us to be responsive to conditions, without being reactive. By being deliberately proactive, Transformative Campaigns are about the values and vision they move us toward, not just about moving away from something.

Taken together, these eight features illustrate how Transformative Campaigning achieves the dual purpose of advancing change in the near term while also building the capacities needed for Independent Political Power — power that we need to move from grievance to governance.

With our planet, lives and future at stake, we aren’t just trying to change what we are doing. We must change where we are going. We must create the infrastructure we need to govern ourselves, rather than make grievances about how we are governed. Let’s take a close look at the initiatives driving coordination and deep alignment across fields and sectors:

  • What do we see when we measure our alignment as our success?
  • What infrastructure expands the realm of what is possible?
  • What infrastructure do we need not just to survive or be better off, but to actually govern based on our values and vision?

Our work together has pried open a path from grievance to governance. Our potential is transforming in front of us.

Let’s take our path, together.

  • Meia Lua de Frente. Photo: Alonzo Gonzalez

Three Ways Capoeira Upped My Organizing Game

By Jeremy Lahoud   |  November 18, 2013
Reflections | 6 Comments

“Capoeira é defesa, ataque, a ginga de corpo, e a malandragem.”
“Capoeira is defense, attack, the sway of the body, and deception.”
—Traditional capoeira song

Every organizer knows that awful moment, that slow stomach-churning realization that your campaign is about to hit a dead end.

I had that moment recently in my work with a coalition of local youth organizations fighting for Restorative Justice in public schools.  Unlike harsh and ineffective “zero tolerance” policies, Restorative Justice programs create a way for those who have committed harm to dialogue with those who have been harmed, to understand what happened, agree on a remedy, and build relationships that reduce the possibility of future harm.  Deep in our bones we wanted Restorative Justice and an end to the disciplinary policies that push out large numbers of African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander students every year.

Our formula seemed strong: expose incriminating school district data in a forum that would also feature students and parents giving powerful testimony from their personal experience.  But pretty quickly we discovered that we had no leverage. None of the school board members were willing to come to the forum. The Superintendent boldly asserted that the issue of discipline reform and our campaign proposals were “dead on arrival.”

We had to make a choice: stick with the moves we knew and escalate our current strategy (e.g., march on the school district headquarters) – or bust out some brand new moves.

We went for the new moves, and won a victory that – multiplied in communities across the country – could deal a serious blow to the school-to-prison pipeline.

The funny thing is, the moves we made weren’t new at all. They were moves that any capoeirista would recognize, moves that echoed the powerful liberatory cultural practice that grew out of the struggles of enslaved Africans and African descendants in Brazil.

Moves that I’ve been learning for eight years now.

Let me start from the beginning: I’ve been a consistent student of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira since 2005, when I joined the Omulu Capoeira group in search of a sense of community after moving from Chicago to the often isolating, urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles. As the only known martial art to emerge from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere, capoeira is now a global phenomenon. Capoeira is a cultural expression of survival and resistance with deep African roots grounded in a holistic conception of body, mind, and spirit – one much less fragmented than dominant Western concepts of the three as separate elements.

As a “total body workout,” capoeira demands rigorous training and uses movements that stretch the boundaries of human physicality. The improvised game of capoeira – played in a circle known as the roda in Portuguese – demands swift thinking and a strategy akin to chess, but moving at “100 miles per hour.” The songs and rhythms that serve as the heartbeat and energy for capoeira give the art form a distinctly spiritual foundation.

So what does capoeira have to do with social justice organizing?

While eight years is a relatively short time to practice capoeira, I’m starting to glean broader life lessons from the art.

Take the key campaign moment I mentioned, when the Superintendent of Schools had basically decided to boycott our long-planned community forum.  Our gut reaction was to escalate our tactics and organize a large rally outside the school board meeting.

Instead, we took some time to develop a more nuanced response, inspired, in part, by my experience with capoeira. We knew the school district practices a “top-down / bottom-up” approach to policy and administration. The Superintendent and Board set broad policies and give individual principals and schools lots of leeway in how to implement them.  We also knew several mid-level district administrators were open to the idea of Restorative Justice and concerned with the overuse of suspensions. Over the summer, our youth leaders and adult organizers met with these administrators to begin to develop a relationship, share students’ stories, and open a dialogue about common concerns. One meeting included an ally teacher who shared very positive experiences with the Restorative Justice pilot program at her school. We reviewed the School Board’s current policy on student discipline and shared our ideas for revisions.  Our campaign leaders worked with the teachers’ union and principals to promote Restorative Justice. Supportive City Council members helped us to draft a city resolution urging the district to support alternatives to suspension.

Looking back through a capoeira lens, I can name three key ways that we shifted our approach – three shifts that lay at the heart of our 2013 campaign win.

1 Turn Reaction Into Response

When I first began practicing capoeira, I would often react to attacks with an unthinking reflex, rather than respond to them. I would often flinch and barely escape a kick flying towards my head. As I’ve progressed in my capoeira skills, I now try to be much more responsive to attacks during games in the roda.  My responses are quick but thoughtful defensive or evasive moves that set me up for counterattack.  Responding in capoeira requires an immediate synthesis of thought and physical action.

In our original campaign plans we were set to throw aggressive, straight kicks – such as the martelo or “hammer” kick – at the head of a much larger, more experienced opponent.  Of course, we could have played the game that way, but it wouldn’t have been very wise. In the roda, this approach would have left us with hurt pride or hurt bodies or both.  Instead we regrouped and figured out a response to our target’s stubbornness.

2 Make Flexible Moves

Capoeira requires a great deal of physical and mental flexibility.  The best capoeiristas have an inspiring ability to change movements in mid-course all while maintaining a beautiful “flow” to their game. They almost instinctively choose from the capoeira “toolbox” of many different physical movements to lead or respond to the flow of the game in the roda. This flexibility connects to another concept of capoeira practice and philosophy: the ability to “fake out” your opponent and make him or her react to a move that you’re not actually going to use.

Flexibility is critically important in social justice organizing, as the landscape of power and policies is constantly shifting. Organizers and leaders must exercise a flexible strategy in order to take advantage of emerging policy opportunities or changing relationships between our institutional targets, opposition, and allies.

The shift in our campaign strategy demonstrated this flexibility. Taking the time to build relationships with district folks on the “ground level” and to surface shared values was akin to a capoeira game played on the “floor” that builds a good “flow” with your opponent. These weren’t the moves of surrender, but rather evasive and defensive moves that set us up for more proactive tactics. They were similar to the capoeira-like takedown moves and sweeps that allow a smaller or less physically strong capoeirista to bring down an opponent from the floor. While we didn’t actually use the famous capoeira tesoura – the scissors move you do with your hands down and legs up — building relationships with mid-level managers, the teachers’ union, and principals played to the district’s “top-down / bottom-up” approach.

3 Analyze With Cunning

Perhaps the most important shift in strategy was our attempt to understand the self-interest and motivation of the Superintendent and the district. One of the preeminent figures in capoeira lore is the malandro, which roughly translates to “trickster” or “street hustler.”  Similar to the malandro described in Nestor Capoeira’s book, Capoeira: Roots of the Dance-Fight-Game, we capitalized on our “ability to analyze people and situations with…cunning.”

The ability to feign physical movements, to put on an attitude or expression that will draw your opponent into a set-up for an attack or takedown is a quintessential skill of high-level capoeiristas and mestres (masters). As a relative novice in the decades-long trajectory of capoeira training, this skill is the hardest for me to grasp. But it has probably influenced my thinking about social justice organizing campaign strategy more than any other.

The Brazilian-Portuguese word malandragem, best describes this skill. Malandragem doesn’t easily translate into English. In his book, Nestor Capoeira offers this explanation:

…malandragem is one of the basic tenets in the philosophy of capoeira and is similar to the cunning of the Hunter (Oxóssi)… Closer to guerrilla warfare than the way of fighting of the traditional army. Closer to the way someone who is oppressed fights than do those in power… The Malandro works through his [or her] intelligence, seduction, charm, and a deep intuitive knowledge of life and human psychology.

Using this psychological “hustle,” we knew the Superintendent and district were interested in being leaders among urban school districts, especially in the areas of accountability, closing the achievement gap, and equity. We worked with the State Assembly’s Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color to plan a policy hearing about California’s new school accountability standards. One of these standards requires districts to address discipline issues, including the disproportionate suspension of student subgroups. In order to build a bridge with the Superintendent, we invited him to be a keynote speaker at the hearing. It provided an opportunity for him to highlight the ways the district is playing a leading role in new accountability measures and improving outcomes for students in need, especially boys and young men of color.

The Superintendent accepted the invitation, which allowed us to meet with him to review the agenda and plans for the hearing. In reality, our “hustle” wasn’t mean-spirited at all. Collaborating with the Superintendent opened up new opportunities for dialogue and relationship building.  Paying attention to the Superintendent’s perspective allowed us to “see” him in a different light, an awareness that’s critical to the call-and-response of great capoeira games.

To our surprise, at the end of a recent delegation meeting, the Superintendent informed us that the district would introduce a resolution on discipline policies and practices at the School Board meeting the following week. Poised to respond to the Superintendent’s move, the coalition mobilized 200 youth, parents, and community members for an energetic and positive rally outside the School Board. More than fifty campaign members attended the Board meeting inside to support the passage of the resolution.  A slew of student and parent speakers shared their perspectives and support during public comment.

Our capoeira-inspired strategy paid off.  The Board voted to unanimously pass a resolution that “urges careful monitoring… to prevent… a disproportionate share of suspensions from occurring at a given campus or within demographic subgroups of students” and “urges schools to build upon existing efforts to provide alternatives to suspension or expulsion, using multiple strategies…” including restorative practices.  While the resolution is not everything the campaign wanted to see, it provides a strong basis for students and parents to advance alternatives to suspension and Restorative Justice on campuses across the district.

Our win was certainly helped by the “top-down” pressure of new state and federal accountability requirements to address discipline and suspensions.  And our bottom-up pressure as a youth-led campaign was key, turning reaction into response, being flexible in our moves, and practicing our own strategy of malandragem.

Now if I could just get my own capoeira skills to progress that quickly!

—

Feature photo: Meia Lua de Frente – Photo by Alonzo Gonzalez

  • Union members and climate justice activists march together in Richmond, CA. Photo:  Brooke Anderson.

What Do We Want? Synchronicity! When Do We Want It? Now!

By Taj James   |  September 28, 2013
Reflections | 1 Comment

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently unrelated, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner  —Wikipedia

Twenty years ago I was sitting at the Alex Haley farm with an amazing groups of young activists and veteran organizers from this country’s past freedom struggles.  We were learning about how the conservative movement had organized and built a web of infrastructure to turn back the victories of the movements of the 60’s and 70’s and infuse fear — and their values – into  our governing institutions from every local school board to the Supreme Court.  Theirs was a vision and strategy for a movement united across issues, with the power to “turn back the clock.”

I left that meeting clear that the only way to defeat a unified conservative movement was to build a unified progressive movement with the leadership of those most impacted and marginalized in our society at the center and at the forefront.

I left the meeting to return to my work as a regional organizer for the Black Student Leadership Network and did what everyone else did:

I went back to my job.

Like most of us, my job was not to build a progressive movement. My job was to train and organize young African American and Latino organizers working for justice in our communities. Was my job a piece of the puzzle? Yes. But it was only a piece. Who, I wondered, was helping to connect the pieces together?

This year, in the strongest way since I started asking that question, I feel I am seeing movement unity becoming a reality. In the past year I’ve seen:

  • The U.S. women’s movement organizing to defend and advance the rights of new Americans and migrants for whom this country is home.
  • The AFL-CIO moving to affiliate with civil rights, economic justice, and environmental organizations in ways that make clear there can be no workers rights without racial justice and immigrant rights – and no viable economy without balance with the natural word. If brought to life in local communities, the agenda laid out at the recent national convention would be a huge step in weaving together the strongest strands of our progressive fabric.
  • Growing synergy and collaboration between the food movement and the immigrant rights movement, with groups like the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance putting forth a bold and historic position that “the principles of food sovereignty would be served by policies that honor the humanity of all workers, including the unconditional right to migrate as enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights, the right to organize, and the right to defend and implement economic policies that allow for people to prosper and stay in their home communities, including a democratic and sovereign control of local agricultural and food markets and local agricultural policies.”

Perhaps most exciting for me personally has been the growing relationship between the climate justice movement and the new economy movement.  While there have been “blue green alliances” and talk about a “green economy” before, things feels like they’re really getting serious now.

As I’ve learned from my friends in the Climate Justice Alliance, our democracy and our ecology are totally linked: there can be no solution to the economic crisis without a solution to the environmental crisis. And neither can be solved without expanding and advancing real democracy and human rights. In fact, expanding democracy is the engine of the economic and ecological change the climate justice movement is calling for.

Exciting conversations are happening between the climate justice movement and the new economy movement trying to build living and vibrant alternatives to our tired and dysfunctional economy.

Just this past month climate justice history was made when over 60 climate and new labor groups sent an open letter to the AFL-CIO at their national convention, applauding traditional labor for taking important steps toward climate justice — and laying out steps that need to be taken to turn those steps into action that produces results for workers and the environment. Among the groups signing on to the letter were: Labor Network for Sustainability, Union of Commercial Oystermen of Texas, Southwest Workers Union, and Vermont Workers Center.

Historic convergences are happening, as well as a push to go even further.

Maybe what we’re seeing can even go beyond unity, to something like synchronicity, a big word that tries to capture convergence that’s deeper and more meaningful than we’ve ever imagined

I am not the only one feeling it or seeing it. MSC family member Billy Wimsat calls it a “super movement.” Our friends N’tanya and Steve who wrote the Ear to the Ground report documenting conversations with hundreds of activists around the country are seeing the emergence of “a movement of movements.”

Whatever we call it, I can feel the beat and the rhythm getting stronger as we shake the world and begin to remake it.

—

Feature photo: Union members and climate justice activists march together in Richmond, CA. Photo: Brooke Anderson.

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