Articles
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Ricardo Levins Morales Fighting for Retail Workers’ Rights Means Revealing the Lies of Racial Capitalism
Retail corporations tell powerful narratives about the irresistible forces of economic and technological change to obscure the impact of their focus on short-term profits — often at the expense of workers. Winning campaigns with retail workers requires changing those narratives.
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Ricardo Levins Morales “Love is Love” and Other Stories: The Role of Narrative in Winning the Freedom To Marry
To win the freedom to marry for gays and lesbians, we didn’t need new arguments. We didn’t need to find new rights. We needed to transform the hearts and minds of the public.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Putting the Nails in Neoliberalism’s Coffin
"This is going to be the decade of Reconstruction if we can organize well."
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Ricardo Levins Morales Pulling Back the Curtain to Reveal What’s Possible
Most people operate under a set of competing narratives. Our job is to bring their most progressive understanding of the world to the fore.
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Ricardo Levins Morales “The Organizing and the Narrative Were Always One”: The Campaign to Win the Affordable Care Act
Narrative is not a messaging strategy but the story driving the entire campaign.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Caregiving is Essential Work: Changing the Narrative to Make Care Work Visible and Valued
Organizers for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations talk about how we can move to a narrative of caregiving as a collective responsibility that demands collective solutions.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Just Transition: Moving from an Extractive to a Regenerative Economy
Miya Yoshitani has “shovel-ready” ideas for how the current crisis could prompt a just transition from the extractive economy to a regenerative economy.
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Ricardo Levins Morales From Exploitation to Democracy: How We Will Save the Planet
Extractive racial capitalism is destroying the planet, but a thriving democracy can save us.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Reclaiming the Public in an Uncertain Era
Narrative strategy is integral to organizing and can create a powerful role for people in public life.
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Ricardo Levins Morales “We are essential, but we are excluded”: How Organizers Are Challenging Dominant Narrative about Immigration
The global economy encourages corporations to ship raw materials and goods around the planet but punishes workers who cross borders. Here’s how immigrant organizers in Florida are fighting back.
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Ricardo Levins Morales From Commodification to Public Good: Changing Our Housing Narratives
To guarantee a home for everyone, we must stop treating housing as a commodity and see it as a public good and a human right.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Bringing Back Ideology
Two of the architects of the narrative turn in organizing talk about the changes in community organizing that they’ve helped to spark over the past thirty years. Now that organizers have embraced narrative work and begun analyzing political and economic systems, they argue, it’s time to talk about ideology.
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Lessons from the Ferguson Uprisings
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.
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Lessons from NYC’s Pipeline Battle
How a multi-racial coalition defeated big oil and gas companies to block the Williams Pipeline.
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Our Social Innovation Moment
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.
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Homeless Communities’ Land Takeovers Poke Holes in Chile’s Neoliberal “Miracle”
Sometimes a curse can be a blessing, until it becomes a curse again.
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Mapping Our Movement to Go on Offense: An Interactive Tool for Common Good Organizing
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.
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A Brief History of the UNITE HERE Local 11 Remote Unemployment Insurance Mutual Aid Network
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.
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Building Neighborhood Power
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.
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Black Workers Matter: How defunding police could create thousands of good jobs for Black communities
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.