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Tito Texidor III
“This fight is something we need to prepare for right now, and that's going to require us to up our game dramatically.”
Image courtesy of Makia Green
A conversation with Makia Green
Koshu Kunii
Abolition teaches us that a fight against “domestic terrorism” isn’t what we need.
Courtesy of Color Of Change
A conversation with Rashad Robinson
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There’s no getting around it. Organizing is hard. But the context you are organizing in right now? It’s a whole different thing.
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One way we can beat back white supremacist movements is by taking on the corporations that enable them to spread their ideology, recruit followers, and plan attacks.
Photo courtesy of Pouya Najmaie
When white supermacists came to Minneapolis during the uprisings last summer, local organizers formed patrols to defend their neighborhoods.
Photo courtesy of Carin Mrotz
Without a deeper understanding of antisemitism and its relationship to white supremacy more broadly, our movements for justice can easily be undermined and weakened. Our enemies have an analysis of how we were connected; we are a step behind.
Kathleen Belew talks about the surge in white terrorism during the Trump years and what antiracist organizers need to know to combat it.
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"The Republican party has been feeding disinformation and red meat to people for a very long time."
Cooper Baumgar
A Conversation with Lauren Jacobs
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The historical turning point we now face imposes a profound moral obligation for progressives to immediately pursue a working coalition with moderates.
We’ve been in an oppression crisis for generations. Organizers of color can deliver the anecdote— if the rest of us support and help sustain their power.
Images courtesy of Micah Sifry
Lessons from the Indivisible Movement
Photo by Nancy Musinguzi
Or, “You can’t turn a rattlesnake into a puppy dog"
A review of Arnie Graf’s Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing
Who we hire matters. When we take big, strategic bets on new organizers, we don’t just expand our talent pool; we decide who has a voice in the political process and who doesn’t.
Forming “one big union” is the way to meet the challenges posed by the neoliberal university.
Mass teacher strikes took the nation by surprise in 2018 and 2019. What can we learn from the teacher strikes for the future of public schools and the labor movement in the post-pandemic world?
Brooke Anderson
I’m learning that when I take up space — authentically bringing all of who I am to my organizing work — something else is possible. I’m not concealing my own power.
The Democratic Party must abandon the transactional model of organizing and create relationships that last beyond one campaign. That work should start at the township and ward level.
Trying to up your digital game during COVID? Our columnists are here to help with all your digital dilemmas.
Emiliano Bar
A review of Aya Graber’s The Feminist War on Crime
Ben Chin talks with Nelini Stamp, James Haslam, Arleen Vargas, and Kendall Mackey about how their understanding of power has changed since they started organizing and what shifted their perspective.
Ben Chin talks with Nelini Stamp, James Haslam, Arleen Vargas, and Kendall Mackey about how they're keeping bottom-up democracy strong as their organizations grow in size and power.
Ben Chin talks with Nelini Stamp, James Haslam, Arleen Vargas, and Kendall Mackey about the influx of white, upwardly-mobile activists in the movement during the Trump years.
Photo by Gabriel Benois
Digital and social media are not new to campaigns, but in the time of COVID, they are more important than ever.
A recent essay lays out a framework for assessing two leftist strategies: coalition and confrontation. The liberal-left Winning Primaries alliance shows that this is an unnecessary choice — confrontation is necessary to win and coalition is necessary to effectively govern.
Photo courtesy of the author
Even a young organization can quickly become a meaningful political player if it chooses its fights wisely.
Photo by Max Bender
Dismantling the old and building the new requires courage and determination. But if we all put it on the line, we can break through to the world in which we want to live.
Photo by Patrick Amoy
Trying to up your digital game during COVID? Our columnists are here to help with all your digital dilemmas.
Listen to the scientists. Wear a mask, practice physical distancing, and get out into the field.
Childcare providers and early childhood educators in California made history when they voted to form Child Care Providers United, a new union that will represent roughly 45,000 workers across the state. In this series, we look at how they did it.
The recent victory by 43,000 childcare providers in California is the latest in a long movement started by Black women in Chicago.
An organizer on the Child Care Providers United campaign talks about what it took to win.
An organizer on the Child Care Providers United campaign talks about what it took to win.
An organizer on the Child Care Providers United campaign talks about what it took to win.
Pam Franks talks with Keith Kelleher about organizing the first childcare providers union in Illinois
The lead organizer on the Cori Bush campaign talks about how the campaign coped with COVID, what they did to challenge voter suppression, and what Bush’s victory means for progressive politics in Missouri and beyond.
Jake Grumbach on the effects of unions on white racial politics
Image courtesy of Barbara Helmick
Long considered a long-shot local issue, DC statehood is now a winnable campaign. Barbara Helmick tells the story of how changing the narrative allowed organizers to build the coalition they need to win.
Clay Banks
Bernie volunteers in Rhode Island are turning their presidential campaign operation into a statewide leftist organization. In the process, they’re learning to connect their socialist principles to the demand to Defund the Police.
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a project born out of a partnership between the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is taking the lessons learned from the Bernie 2020 campaign into workplace organizing.
Library of Congress
An excerpt from The Lie That Binds, a new political history of how the radical right used abortion to gain power and hijak the Republican Party.
Two veterans of the Ferguson uprisings talk about the promises and challenges of Ferguson, what it takes to sustain momentum in the streets, and what organizers today can learn from Ferguson.
How a multi-racial coalition defeated big oil and gas companies to block the Williams Pipeline.
Ray Brescia on what organizers can learn from past social movements about how to effectively harness new technologies to grow the movement and make lasting change.
Sometimes a curse can be a blessing, until it becomes a curse again.
The Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) network is undertaking a new project to support activists nationwide. We are collecting and mapping as many union contract expirations as we can across the U.S. to create a powerful tool for our collective work.
UCLA Law students partnered with UNITE HERE Local 11 to establish and run a mutual aid network with over 200 volunteers providing unemployment insurance assistance to thousands of union members. Here’s how they did it and what lessons they learned.
L.A. City Council candidate Nithya Raman and her co-campaign manager, Meghan Choi, talk about using community organizing tactics not just to win an election but to build “resilient neighborhoods” and a people-powered government.
Divesting from police departments and investing in public goods like transit would improve the air quality in Black neighborhoods while creating thousands of new jobs for Black workers.
Jae Hyun Shim on the conversations we need to have about safety, justice, and community if we want to live in a world free from the police.
“I will be damned if they don't happen in my lifetime”
Assembly candidate and tenants' rights attorney Adam Bojak on his fight against austerity politics, how COVID is reshaping his campaign, what he’s doing to prepare for an “avalanche of evictions.”
Emily Gallagher and her campaign manager, Andrew Epstein, talk about their NYS Assembly race and how they’ve pivoted during COVID.
Fatima Iqbal-Zubair and her campaign managers talk about their California State Assembly race, the campaign’s turn to mutual aid work during COVID, and how they’re building a sustainable grassroots movement
Cat Brooks from the Anti Police-Terror Project talks about organizing during the uprisings, what needs to be done to defund the police, and her vision for a national defund movement.
Jabari Brisport and Fainan Lakha talk about their campaign, the DSA’s electoral strategy, and why we need socialists in office.
Organizers from the Minneapolis abolitionist collective MPD150 talk about changing the narrative to create the world we want to see.
Tascha Van Auken talks about how she’s building a people-powered campaign during COVID-19
Phara Soufrrant Forrest talks about how her campaign strategies have shifted during a tumultuous spring — and how she’s using her campaign to build a more just New York.
Brian Rosenwald talked with us about the Right’s success at monopolizing talk radio — and the possibilities for the Left to use new media to expand our reach
Ganesh Sitaraman talks about the demise of neoliberalism and the urgency of fighting for — and winning — a more democratic political and economic order.
Moving through a long-term crisis calls us to vision the future, process tough emotions, and address immediate emergencies in the present moment, often all in the same day or hour. This tool is intended to help community-based organizations map questions for their teams to navigate these difficult and complex times.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a public health and economic crisis. America’s worst-in-the-world outbreak reflects a crisis of democracy.
In my TED talk, I tell stories that challenge the zero-sum paradigm of racial competition. I share for the first time how it felt to watch Lehman Brothers collapse from a crisis my colleagues and I had spent nearly a decade trying to prevent. What began with discriminatory loans to Black homeowners (three times as likely to be charged inflated mortgage rates despite good credit) eventually...
This piece was written for community organizations partnering with Community Change and aimed at helping groups manage the organizing challenges of the current moment.
Moving through a long-term crisis calls us to vision the future, process tough emotions, and address immediate emergencies in the present moment, often all in the same day or hour. This tool was co-created to help community-based organizations map the questions that help them navigate these difficult and complex times.
Veteran political strategist Mike Podhorzer brings his analytical rigor to COVID-19 and raises important questions about the political implications.
Sudip Bhattacharya digs into real-world organizing and left political theory to examine the politics of race, class and coalition building.
This guide is adapted from messaging developed with the Million Voters Project, a coalition of organizing networks in California. It draws upon previous messaging guidance from Nicole Carty and Anthony Torres.
The coronavirus threatens the world’s economic life. Social distancing measures, essential to fight the epidemic, are sharply reducing demand in sectors such as transportation, restaurants, hotels, and entertainment.
Un organizador veterano nos ayuda a considerar las preguntas que surgen con respecto a organizar mientras la crisis del coronavirus sigue creciendo cada dia.
A veteran organizer helps us to think through organizing questions as the coronavirus crisis grows by the day.
The new book by Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay has just come out, and it makes a few things really clear.
We inaugurate the From the Archives series with a classic from Cesar Chavez.
The climate crisis and the fight for a Green New Deal has opened up a new conversation about energy democracy. Three DSA organizers from different states examine the growing movement for public power in comparison and context.
There’s no excuse for recycling tired phrases about “the middle class,” or simply pointing out how Trump is bad, without injecting our own values and vision into the conversation. We know that ignoring race should qualify as political malpractice. Let’s at least make new mistakes. López and his fellow researchers have given us everything we need to get started.
A Review of “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture,” by Megan Francis Ming, and Poll Power, by Evan Faulkenbury
Examining different experiences (organizing, mobilization, and otherwise), Vinay Krishnan writes about ableism and the fight for Medicare for All.
The idea, says Color of Change's chief of campaigns Arisha Hatch, is to center Black joy and to build face-to-face teams, which now number in the thousands, of people meeting and acting locally (and having fun together).
A research report on capacity building in 501(c)(4) organizations and the role of leadership.
The history of taxation in the United States is anything but linear. It’s a story of dramatic reversals, of sudden ideological and political changes, of groundbreaking innovations and radical U-turns.
It has been ten years since the community group ACORN was destroyed. At its height, The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now was the largest community organization in the United States with chapters in over 100 cities.
In this excerpt from the book Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis, authors K. Sabeel Rahman and Hollie Russon Gilman discuss restoring American democracy and rescuing it from crisis.
How many times have you just about gotten to the beginning of a Congressional recess, realized you want to run an in-district legislative campaign to influence them when they’re home from Washington, but didn’t do it because you weren’t sure where to begin?
Anne Nelson's Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right tells a holistic story of the toxic cocktail of extremist political operatives and a right-wing evangelical base. This is the coalition that is winning our day. It is perhaps the greatest threat to our freedoms and to a progressive future and deserves our full attention.
My years as a labor organizer have been challenging, joyous, and sometimes devastating, like all organizing. Here are my "top 10" lessons.
I felt like, if you’re organizing from a place of anger, that is not sustainable at all. I’m trying to figure out different ways to go back to organizing from a place of love.
What I bore witness to was not merely an announcement about a congressional process. It was seeing people’s faith in our democracy and our world shift.
I'd like to welcome you to The Forge. Let us tell you about our vision, our plan, and how to get involved.
"I fight for my family and my neighborhood." Tyla Pond, mother of four, answered her door in Franklin, Indiana to an organizer from Hoosier Action.
We need to base build. We’re going to have to have mass obstruction of the economic system. We’re going to have to have mass obstruction of the information system.
Given the obstacles to organizing and the inability of contemporary unions to increase or even maintain their membership, understanding the history of organizing seems more important than ever.
I’ve said that the reason that we lost is that we didn’t have the votes and that we ran out of power, but we also lost because we have electeds who are cowards. It’s not their fault, it’s ours, but our the Democrats could not even hold their entire caucus.
A book review of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist.
The Forge spoke to Hahrie Han, co-founder of the new Center on Democracy and Organizing and professor at Johns Hopkins University.
One year ago this week, after a shameful process, the Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh.
What we didn’t know when we started was that this fight would become a sort of reckoning about sexual violence and how power flows along gender lines in our society.
Community organizing is not merely a process that is good for its own sake. Unless the organization wins concrete, measurable benefits for those who participate, it will not last long.
It’s been a year since the Senate confirmed Judge Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court.
Review of On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, by Naomi Klein
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