Posts Tagged: movement-building - (49 found)

Momentum is a training institute and movement incubator

Momentum is committed to teaching and learning the craft of popular movements fighting for justice. We give grassroots organizers the tools to build massive, decentralized social movements that aim to shift the terrain under policymakers’ feet.

We live in a time of severe inequality, racial disparity, and concentrated wealth in the United States. We need transformational change, and we believe it won’t come from within the political system. We need big movements, and we need leaders with the skills to shift public opinion and organize people at scale.

Momentum is committed to supporting these leaders with a whole new organizing model, with the tools that will win profound structural and cultural change.

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Rise Up: Board Game Designed For Activists To Practice Building Movements

Board games have a history in social justice movements. Even Monopoly was originally created to teach players about inequality and the problems capitalism can create. A new game, inspired by those roots, is designed to let players practice building a social movement.

“There are a lot of games about conquest and exploitation that people play all the time,” says Brian Van Slyke, game designer for TESA Collective, a worker cooperative that creates resources for social change. “We wanted to almost pose a counterpoint to games like Risk.”

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Swarm | Decentralised organisation

Swarm is Anyi’s program on decentralized organization which asks the question: how do we engage thousands more people in our organizations? What Anyi have learned from a diverse range of contexts and disciplines (including biology, complex systems, network theory, and open-source software) is that groups need structures that maximize members’ autonomy and unity. 

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Networked change | How progressive campaigns are won in the 21st century

What makes some of today’s most successful advocacy campaigns work, while so many others fail to make an impact?

The Networked Change Report maps out the strategies and practices that made 47 of today’s most successful advocacy campaigns work. These campaigns achieved success because of their ability to open up to the new cultural forces which favor openness and grassroots power, but also because they framed and strategically directed this power towards concrete policy outcomes. In short, these “directed network campaigns” married old power with new.

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The Sierra Club Movement Organising Manual 2016

This manual is designed to aid your work as an organiser: building campaigns that enlist grassroots power to achieve outcomes that improve the world. Our objective is to lay out key ideas and practices that, in our experience, result in campaigns that succeed. This includes fundamentals of building relationships, analyzing power, and writing campaign plans. We also dig into some detail on topics such as how to enter a community, enlisting volunteers and cultivating their leadership skills, connecting your campaign to a larger movement, and how to learn from success and failure to improve your skills and campaigns.

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Important qualities of authentic relationships across differences

Karen Pace and Dionardo Pizana write: “Our commitment to the ongoing process of developing an authentic relationship across racial and gender differences has helped us to identify important foundational qualities of our relationship. These characteristics are essential to building trusting and lasting relationships across race and gender within a society that continues to be grounded in racism, sexism and other forms of oppression.”

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A Radical Alliance of Black and Green Could Save the World

But first the two movements will have to rediscover their shared roots in a fundamental critique of an economy and a society that value things more than lives. As in the environmental world, many in the black community are seeing limits to traditional advocacy…  a number of black leaders, from grassroots organizers (such as those involved with Black Lives Matter and the Moral Mondays movement) to scholars, are calling for a rediscovery and revitalization of the civil-rights movement’s radical roots to address the deeper structural issues that America confronts.

 

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Against activism | Astra Taylor

““A pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation… Successful organizers, by contrast, are more difficult to shrug off, because they have built a base that acts strategically. The goal of any would-be world-changer should be to be part of something so organized, so formidable, and so shrewd that the powerful don’t scoff: they quake.”  Food for thought!

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Not so grassroots: How the snowflake model is transforming political campaigns

Stephen Mills writes: “Campaigning has broken out from the electoral context and evolved into a new tool for business, government and civil society actors. Campaigning is now the dominant form of collective political activity in Australia. Waves of transformative technological change continue to morph campaigning into an intensely mediated activity. Dispersed individuals and locations are linked through television, the web, social media networks and most recently big data. In this topsy-turvy form of politics, what looks to be grassroots-driven may on closer inspection be revealed as organised, coordinated and managed from the centre…”

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