Intersectional Or It's BS: Rolling Activism/Organizing/Social Movements Thread

here we go! thank u v v v much jj
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"Intersectionality is a term that was coined by American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the idea that all social ills are connected on a deeper level. Meaningful resistance demands that we identify the systems that work together to promote injustice, exploitation, and oppression." -- bell hooks

Since a lot of chatter about social change work happens whenever there are flareups around individual issues I thought it would be worthwhile to collect that chatter in one place so we could help keep other threads to their nominal topics. This birthed particularly by a great discussion about how different kinds of viewpoints are formed w/in activist circles in the Michael Brown thread. If you've never gotten into work for social change before, downthread IO beautifully laid out a place to start:

It can be as simple as, 1: Do you want to help people, reduce their suffering, fight injustice? 2: Do you have some free time? 3: If you answered "Yes" to both, you can be a volunteer!

If that means something as general as New York Cares, a giant charitable org that places people on simple projects all over the city, that's cool! It's more about the habit of volunteering, and seeing yourself as a member of many communities, with a responsibility to help those communities stay healthy.

Don't be gulled into idleness by the size of the project! Tackle something manageable, something close to home. Clean up a park, or get funding to fix a crosswalk, or help some working women get a childcare center off the ground, or support a zoning revision that allows building apartments as well as single-family homes so there are lower-cost rental options for more ppl. I dunno. What does your community need? You live there, look around or ask someone!

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Friday, December 19, 2014 4:56 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A glossary, just in case
La Lechera pointed out that this stuff can get a little jargon-y from time to time--GirlSpeak, a Chicago feminist art group, put together this awesome glossary of terms that might come up a lot ITT. If you see a word you don't know, check out here!

Recommended Resources for Dipping Your Toe Into Organizing Work

New Organizing Institute's Organizing & Leadership Toolbox--Free, short YouTube vids on how to build volunteer teams for a cause, how to motivate people to take collective action, how to build & encourage leadership within the most affected communities, etc.

Training for Change--Exercises & workshop guides for everything from anti-oppression awareness, to meeting facilitation, to Big Picture organizing strategy etc

Beautiful Trouble--an amazing book, and website, that lays out the relationships between tactics, principles, and the egghead theoretical foundations for making change happen. also case studies!

I think, from listening to ppl, that what they want is enviro justice work that is LED by a community's own residents who are directly affected--not "activists" bringing the knowledge & solutions to the table already. And that when white people join in, if they do, that they don't use their speaking privilege to overwhelm other voices just because they can--that leaders of the org have structure & power-sharing plan already in place to redistribute power, and keep doing so, to the least powerful.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Thursday, December 18, 2014 8:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

very true in my experience that eco movements are sort of subsumed by white people who view their world as post-race but have simply "escaped" black people in more radical and difficult-to-trace ways, the colonists who escaped the slaves or erased them from their local view, who then also erased and recolonized the indigenous population. lots of the western u.s. barring l.a., oakland, maybe seattle, maybe las vegas is like this imo. maybe the rural northeast too, idk. subaru states. you get righteous returning through eco-activism or mediated kony-style philanthropy (at the most extreme example admittedly). n.b. i have issues with eco-activism as it seems to be predominantly modeled by liberal whites in the west and think it's much more productively addressed (but not as popularly i think?) as native peoples' rights. xps also all of these books look very interesting and thank you as always io for the great info and posts.

― languagelessness (mattresslessness), Thursday, December 18, 2014 8:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this isn't the thread for it, i suppose, but there's a lot to talk about RE: communities, environmental justice (EJ) issues, and who leads protests. environmental issues are very tricky because there are often multiple barriers for local people to fully understand the environmental problem in the first place, and also what their options are if they want to seek legal recourse.

on the information side, a lot of official environmental data (and the tools you can use to access them) are a complete fucking mess. i experience this pain acutely and frequently as i have to analyze data from many databases and it is a living nightmare - and i'm lucky to have direct access to the people who run the systems! even just locating where the data are supposed to be is often difficult, let alone making sense of what's in the dataset.

environmental laws and regulations are notoriously complicated. i was reading a book on the law of hazardous waste recently, and a judge was quoted as saying that he doubted that there were even 5 EPA employees who could attempt to define "hazardous waste". often a company that's clearly negatively effecting the health of a neighborhood is operating in a perfectly legal fashion. a factory that's emitting piles of thick smelly clouds of smoke on a daily basis might be untouchable if they have the proper permits, while a nearby facility that appears harmless from the outside could be illegally shipping tons of hazardous waste to an unpermitted handler that dumps it into a river.

i mention all of this because i think that the complexity of the underlying environmental issues and how they can be redressed are part of what creates tension in terms of who leads the local movement. it's often difficult for people to make much progress without at least consulting lawyers, state officials, community/ward boards, etc.

― ya'll are the ones who don't know things (Karl Malone), Thursday, December 18, 2014 9:25 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Heeeeeey.

i think that the complexity of the underlying environmental issues and how they can be redressed are part of what creates tension in terms of who leads the local movement. it's often difficult for people to make much progress without at least consulting lawyers, state officials, community/ward boards, etc.

― ya'll are the ones who don't know things (Karl Malone), Thursday, December 18, 2014 9:25 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This to me, though, indicates that one of the roles of ~organizers~ per se is developing leaders from within the most affected communities who can then become knowledge bases for their communities on these issues. That transforms the question of who leads into a conversation the affected community has with itself.

xp heeeeeeeey

oh hai, thanks for starting this.

Yeah, thanks, HOOS--I'll be following this thread with interest even if I don't often post here.

Like here in DC, one of the key things local org Empower DC has done is get leaders who live in public housing first sitting through, then leading teach-ins on the decline in public & affordable housing in the city in their own buildings. Or the People for Fairness Coalition, which started when a lefty at a soup kitchen for the homeless started asking what they wanted the city to do differently for them--now it's an entirely homeless-led homeless advocacy organization. The organizer's job is organize herself out of a job as fast as she can.

xp np yall i hope folks find it useful

Thank you for this thread

josh russell of the ruckus society posted these guidelines that came out of a solidarity workshop non-black organizers had with black lives matter leaders in the bay area, trying to figure out what solidarity with an affected community looks like an in effort to build power to change things:

https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/10857762_10100239500271429_3661199256591667393_n.jpg?oh=5e68b7cfc811f97bf99751e0d4dc1521&oe=55076F05

I really appreciate "long haul relationships" as part of that list--speaks to the idea that organizers shouldn't be parachuting into communities to offer their whiteboarded (uh) solutions and expect them to be picked up with hosannas.

Here's what may sound like a dumb question: how can people who want to support activism but are limited in how much time they can dedicate help out?

^^^same

No org is ever gonna (or should ever) turn volunteers away. I think it's totally valid to say, these are my skills/what m down for, and this is about how much time I have. See what they say they need? If they don't know how to use you, learn abt what the org does and make up a project and pitch it, see if it can be symbiotic w the org.

$$$$$

Back to the original point - I've mainly been an environmentalist in my adult life. I could leave a group or affiliation, or stop participating / donating etc., but I felt that my own community needed representation in those things.

There's a lot of pressure to lead a particular lifestyle, but I chose to do it because there might be something of value to "bring home" if I learned about organic food.

A lot of urban issues ARE environmental issues - kids not having enough green space, safety for commuters, people need clean and healthy homes and schools, healthy food. Schools can encourage poorer children to learn about nature, learn the ecosystem in hands-on ways.

I just wish some people would realize this and not just make it about land use conflicts far from where we urbanites live.

tried to find a thread to post this to last night but none quite fit and suddenly this thread appears

https://edgecitycollective.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/some-notes-on-the-recent-east-bay-protests/

Kate OTM

thanks for this thread, I'll probably write more later

yes, $$$, but also check to see if there are hard numbers for how much of every dollar gets "put into the field", so to speak.

i.e Red Cross has fairly high admin costs, Doctors W/o Borders does not, so your contribution does more direct good w/the latter

Agree with IO 1000%--a great first step is finding an organization in your area that's hooked up with something you really care about. Googling your city and "organize community" is actually how I got connected with a lot of organiziations in the city. Find an action to go to, and introduce yourself to the organizers after its over, get on their email lists. Once you know what's up next, you've got more opportunities to plug in.

Thanks all!

A lot of urban issues ARE environmental issues - kids not having enough green space, safety for commuters, people need clean and healthy homes and schools, healthy food. Schools can encourage poorer children to learn about nature, learn the ecosystem in hands-on ways.

I just wish some people would realize this and not just make it about land use conflicts far from where we urbanites live.

― Threat Assessment Division (I M Losted), Friday, December 19, 2014 2:03 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with this in principle 100%--but to me it's a question of how you choose to frame of the problem, and who you're trying to move to action. Sure, environmentalists may not see these as urban issues--what if instead we tried to bring sustainability issues, and making sure we FRAME them that way, to urban community organizing groups?

DC's Field to Farm Network, for ex, is a coalition that links up community gardens, kitchens for the homeless, cafeteria labor unions, and other service orgs as part of a cohesive vision to build a fairer, healthier and more sustainable city. I think *that's* how you connect and make these questions relevant no matter where people come from.

Yes, cosign all that! Plus also clean air, water, public use of park and/or waterfront space, not siting waste facilities in resource-poor neighborhoods, neighborhood resilience from natural disaster, are all urban eco issues too.

If your community has a bunch of unused post-industrial waterfront property--before it goes to developers, start to demand that the city set aside park land. Demand playgrounds. Bring in experts to do workshops/teach-ins about resilience in case of flooding, set up quick response teams for disasters, have a group that can coordinate and/or deliver disaster relief because they know what ppl there need more than the distant agencies do. Reach out to universities with ecologically oriented science departments and see if they have a class that can do a study on your air quality...just some quick ideas. Initiate partnerships with orgs that can fill in the skill sets you can't meet w/in the community.

If you have a community that's mixed middle-class (or higher) whites and economically less advantaged non-white longer term residents, get them together and guide the better resourced ppl to provide what the less resourced say they need.

In NYC, local community boards have some say in how the city budget is spent, can recommend/request funds to pursue local improvement projects. Find out what your CB is doing, and if you can help direct $$ to your community. It might mean joining a subcommittee. Do that. Give one or two nights a month to meetings, and volunteer to do legwork associated with their projects. Call your local representatives--a mere 50 phone calls can be a DELUGE to a local politicians, whereas a state-level pol wouldn't consider that a big number. Take it down to as local as you need to, in order for the capacity of members that you have to make a difference. And to win some victories that will encourage members and build on that success.

Damn, someone should fucking hire me to do this. I mean, I'm not trying to get rich here, I'm just trying to live indoors.

Plus also clean air, water, public use of park and/or waterfront space, not siting waste facilities in resource-poor neighborhoods, neighborhood resilience from natural disaster, are all urban eco issues too.

"Energy justice"! We need to be talking about equitable access to clean air imo

a mere 50 phone calls can be a DELUGE to a local politician

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here in NYC right now, Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), which is a coalition of A LOT of local level orgs, is pushing for two new reforms in 2015. One of them is an ID bill, in which police who stop you have to inform you of their name, badge number, superior officer, precinct, etc, without you even asking. (Because if you get stopped right now and you ask for that info, it can escalate the confrontation and result in the officer giving you a higher level summons for pissing them off.)

Whether this bill becomes policy will depend on city council members' votes--we need 34 votes for a veto-proof supermajority. Right now there are about 30 dependable votes. Find out if your council member is one of them! You can find at http://changethenypd.org/community-safety-act the list of council members (CMs) who are signed on as co-sponsors (guaranteed YES votes). Pressure YOUR CM to join if they haven't already.

IO do you know about slottr? it's a perfect little tool to get people to sign up to make a call to an official at a specific time during the day, so you can make sure they're overwhelmed throughout the day while still making sure the max # of calls get through. you can include scripts too--here's one we used last fall to hit council members on getting paid sick days for restaurant workers: http://www.slottr.com/sheets/3280

NNOOO! I'll check it out--no one has mentioned it yet but I'm working w very very grassroots orgs.

anyone can use it! super super useful

lol I mean you're catching me here coming off many days of demonstrations plus a 3-hour workshop tonight on different methods of resistance and anti-racist organizing around the #ThisStopsToday/#BlackLivesMatter campaigns so I'm kinda fired up.

i feel you! do big things!

Some people don't fuck with politics, they think everything should be done from the grassroots upward by building parallel structures that take the place of state intervention wherever possible. Like alternate food supplies, alternate local governance, alternate educational resources. But we need ALL approaches because the state is going to continue to interfere whether communities like it or not...so hit all fronts!

Tonight, a couple of people who are school teachers tossed out the idea of having their classes write messages/letters to local electeds around police brutality issues. Can you even imagine the optics of a community-level pol getting 100 letters from 4th graders saying, "I hope my daddy lives"??? DAMN.

yeah like "we support a diversity of tactics" has become such a tiresome shorthand activist code phrase for "we'll defend property destruction" when really diversity of tactics used to/ought to mean GO ON ALL FRONTS to get shit done. we need a way to talk about that approach! i like "hit all fronts" a lot.

cool beans, all of this

in this here thread

tried to find a thread to post this to last night but none quite fit and suddenly this thread appears

https://edgecitycollective.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/some-notes-on-the-recent-east-bay-protests/

― Milton Parker, Friday, December 19, 2014 2:04 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

boy oh boy do i have feelings on this

commenter gets at my biggest problem: talking about "following the lead of the black working class" is problematic as fuck, acting like ~the black working class~ is some unified monolith with a single opinion you can fall in line behind.

i get what they're suggesting--find and cultivate radicalism in the most affected communities--and i think its otm strategically, but the language is showing the gaps in the thought imo.

in one of the other threads i talked about a friend who i thought was ~projecting radicalism~ onto people by insisting that "if only there were fewer white people here, the POC crowd would be more confrontational," which i thought was a frustrating kind of white-radical-wish-fulfillment? this essay sort of plays into that to some degree, imo, even though of course there are lots of young radical people of color being confrontational on the west coast in the last few weeks.

hey yall, i'm trying to get first post ITT edited to include links to sorta first-steps guides to activist & organizing work so folks don't necc have to jump in with the discussion up top or wherever we wind up if they're looking to get started.

would love any suggestions yall have!

Isn't the first step kind of just...volunteering?

A glossary would be helpful if you're looking to be inclusive.

I was in an environmental group once that was just a reading / study / discussion group. I've learned that it's really important to study, it may not feel like activism, but it is empowering and works against this bad idea that you have to have a pedigree to participate in something. It's a good way to network, too, and you can progress from that to having teach-ins, film screening, conference etc.

The thing with the environment, it's like being a born-again Christian with the amount of study and preparation you need. I took time from graduate studies to take an environmental ethics course in the Philosophy Department, that was fortunate for me. The enviro fights are fascinating and wearying, but those ethical conflicts are applicable to any issue.

I was also in a democracy / voting study group, where we did things like read the Patriot Act, you do it over coffee or dinner, makes the whole thing less tedious and more attractive.

Hm. I know Lechera loves glossaries but I might not be the person to write them bc I've learned everything from usage/immersion and not from books, so I could tell you what something means to me but that's it.

The thing with the environment, it's like being a born-again Christian with the amount of study and preparation you need.

see i feel this way about labor/marxist/anarchist stuff --- i got into a conversation with a friend of mine re this and it v quickly went down a theoretical rabbit hole that i was ill-equipped to handle with just a few undergraduate courses in anthro, philosophy, and lit theory

being able to explain it to others is part of the challenge imo -- esp if you want to include more people in the movement. give people tools to teach themselves. not everyone learns like you do!

i love glossaries because language is one of the first levels of exclusion
maybe you want some non-native speakers to join your movement? help them talk the talk!

I don't have a background in any of the theory and tbh I don't work with any groups that go too deep into that. All of my 3 primary affiliations are grassroots/community-led so our work is pretty much in whatever vocab people bring to it. I'm sure I do use terms I've picked up that have specialized meanings in this environment but I'm not even sure what they are.

Movement
Justice
Capacity
Coalition
Grassroots
Resistance
Tactic
Radicalism

?

yeah like it just hit me after starting the thread that like putting "intersectional" as the first word in the thread title is an immediate barrier?

and yeah i do think showing up is step one, but sometimes from the outside that can seem forbidding? cf folks asking where to start upthread

I don't know if thinking of it as "activism" is, like, the best place to start tho? It can be as simple as, 1: Do you want to help people, reduce their suffering, fight injustice? 2: Do you have some free time? 3: If you answered "Yes" to both, you can be a volunteer!

If that means something as general as New York Cares, a giant charitable org that places people on simple projects all over the city, that's cool! It's more about the habit of volunteering, and seeing yourself as a member of many communities, with a responsibility to help those communities stay healthy.

I think a lot of ppl are like, "I'm a good person" and maybe even "And I vote!" and feel like they're done, that's their total involvement in the world outside their door except as it pertains to their personal life. When I thought like that, it just made me DESPAIR over how impossibly broken the world was and any chance of ever getting it right. A real "nuke the planet" moment.

But that suits the forces in power PERFECTLY. If you feel helpless, you are helpless. Don't be gulled into idleness by the size of the project! Tackle something manageable, something close to home. Clean up a park, or get funding to fix a crosswalk, or help some working women get a childcare center off the ground, or support a zoning revision that allows building apartments as well as single-family homes so there are lower-cost rental options for more ppl. I dunno. What does your community need? You live there, look around or ask someone!

lol

in no way are those mutually exclusive

fair point

It feels good for me to see this thread again because I've spent the last 18 months getting a real education in what its taken to build popular movements--through my work, but really through undertaking a whole lot of learning and training in something called the Momentum community that's trying to train American organizers in all the most successful methods of the last century. There's a brand new popularly-aimed book, a hefty practitioner's manual by international forebears, regular trainings, and YouTube videos of the earliest dry-runs of momentum trainings.

They even started letting me train people & pilot my own civil disobedience mobilizations. That's been cool as fuck and has taught me so much. People I helped turn out & train this summer to do civil disobedience vs. Trumpcare, most of them nervous first-timers instead of the typically understood hardcore direct action ELFy types, have become extraordinarily committed people working hard to push their pols every time it matters, up to and including risking arrest again. It's been inspirational to see people step up this year. I'm really grateful for all I've been able to learn about organizing and about people.

stuff on my radar:

Seed Project leading the OurDream Coalition through decentralized action last week & DC all through the next two weeks, civil disobedience demanding Democrats fight for a clean DREAM Act in the spending bill before the EOY:
https://www.facebook.com/seedproject/videos/1753869588248478/?notif_id=1512762840751799¬if_t=live_video_explicit

Housing Works driving the Capitol Hill CD on the tax bill:
https://www.facebook.com/victoria.cook.336/videos/2223212364371275/?hc_ref=ARTmivFYcwO-qfClVfE8x4f4Pkd7I-1AUsT0-SDiO9NlxFeMxwy4j0WILadUU8p3Vl4&pnref=story

IfNotNow out across the US over the proposed movement of the embassy to Jerusalem:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/video/%E2%80%98which-side-are-you-on%E2%80%99-jewish-americans-protest-trump%E2%80%99s-jerusalem-move-in-new-york/vi-BBGnv4W?srcref=rss

Dreamers arrested in NOLA during an OurDream sit-in need bail help:

https://www.gofundme.com/bail-for-2-ourdream-heroes-in-nola

Man reading about all Bob Moses had done to build SNCC by 30 makes me wish I'd quit drinking years earlier

<3 hoos

OurDream coalition running a webinar tonight at 9pm EST on the state of the fight for a DREAM Act this month, what's next, and opportunities to help:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mP-LghL0Qd6qDZTilNQVzQ

hoos do you listen to chapo

once, for about 5 minutes

i legitimately couldn't tell the yelling dudes apart and was not that invested in trying

i know that reads like a snide dismissal but i just feel like there's too much actual work of importance to devote myself to for me to spend time learning to tell the chapos apart so i can have an opinion about their opinions

also real talk i was very distracted by how much one of the guys sounds like a guy i know irl who hosts a good/funny brocialist news/analysis/lolz show already so i was like "why do i need 4 more of this guy in my weekly listening life"

i've had this kinda ongoing back-and-forth with my housemate who was a DSA member several years ago, now works a government cubejob, whose primary engagement with his politics these days is through having opinions about "the discourse" and listening to chapo. a lot of times our conversations seemed like they were occurring on different planets--in july i was frantically working overtime to organize action around the health care bill and he wanted to have a languid debate with me about an internecine medium article they'd been talking about on chapo that i hadn't read.

over mint juleps

helpfully, he explained the medium article at length

lol we already have a chapo thread for this, but they've felt the need to clarify once or twice that listening to a podcast is not Doing Politics and I think/hope most listeners get that

also there are some heartening stories on the chapo subreddit of listeners joining DSA and even starting unions

that's happy news.

Women's March throwing their considerable email list behind CPD & Housing Works's last minute CD push on the tax bill: https://www.facebook.com/events/881082792061621/

multiple tax bill sit ins happening now: https://www.facebook.com/pdavisx/videos/10103570263485157/?notif_id=1513187118860950¬if_t=live_video

We reffed this above, but I just want to include links to our other recent related threads

Is the West Experiencing a Left-Wing Drift? (the international left politics activism, news, and strategy thread)

Social Activism in the Age of Trump: What To Do and What We Are Doing

oh hey nice thanks

No problem. I’ve been on this board long enough to feel compelled to link related threads together for when one of them gets revived 5-8 years down the road.

listening to a podcast is not Doing Politics and I think/hope most listeners get that

― Simon H., Tuesday, 12 December 2017 18:33 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sir, they do not.

hahah

wanted to bump this thread so the fantasists can discuss the "mass party" stuff briefly touched on in the Dem thread - I'd also love to hear more about HOOS' bid to join the DSA's Refoundation caucus

Feel like now would be a good time to take a cue from our American friends and I need to channel this all-consuming dread into some sort of action, so UK ILXors, anyone have ideas of where energies could be focused right now? The more local the better...

Donate to Arts Emergency!

Anyone gripped by a sudden, urgent, "what can I do?" - can I tell you about a (free) app called Foodbank? Once downloaded, you can select your local foodbank & see their shopping list (including what's urgently needed & what NOT to buy) regularly updated in real time.

— Uncanny Ally (@UnheimlichManvr) December 13, 2019

that is both very good advice and also endlessly depressing

it's also an app owned by a Tory MP

i just downloaded it and my local foodbank isn't on there, the one it lists as closest to me doesn't have any information, and when you go to the donate tab it leads to a justgiving page for an organisation called either 'the philadelphia network' or 'network church sheffield' with no further info so yeah while the sentiment is otm the specifics seem... sketchy at best

that's a shame, didn't check it out properly sorry

yikes

AND... I've been updated that this app charges foodbanks to register (!) so not every foodbank will be represented! Please do try to find out what your local foodbank needs (website, phone, donation points), give cash, or support in any way you can. Point is: HELP THEM

— Uncanny Ally (@UnheimlichManvr) December 13, 2019

super-yikes, who the fuck would think do do this? oh yeah, tories

really sorry to bring grim news, but some foodbanks probably aren't registered because they have to pay £360 to do so. to a company owned by the newly elected MP for penistone and stocksbridge. pic.twitter.com/50I9SpcAa5

— Natalie Ashton | vote labour 🌹 vote for hope (@Natalan) December 13, 2019

a tory mp making an app to profiteer from foodbanks is 2019 in a nutshell.

was going to make a joke about workhouses and treadmills here, but don't want to put any more ideas out there.

Yeah, I already donate to my local food bank. Was hoping to find something that goes beyond donating, and possibly something that could at least inconvience the fuckers who got in power now, but that's a pipe dream I know.

Arts Emergency is a good shout Suzy, thanks.

People at the labour campaigners group have been passing this document around: http://docs.google.com/document/d/1OpA5yIHch7V7zD2yTNUJdhlWjL5c0ZkgouNuFvbjUIE/edit?fbclid=IwAR1RazvWFV796QPLFXhOD9EHZku3uq7bKdaJjNib78u1RMUuXOYgfLvMzbs

Also answering my own question, SOAS Detainee Support is a group that visits people being held in detention. I highly recommend joining, especially if you have a second language, or donating.

While my household donates about $800/year to our local food bank, I do not in any way consider that to be effective political activism. It's just trying to keep people alive and less hungry. Good in itself, but politically inert. Not what this thread should be about.

But, speaking of food banks, the Trump administration is changing the requirements for food stamps to drop more than half a million people off the rolls in about a month. Food banks will be more pressed than ever to cope with this new problem.

bump

Def see what Aimless is saying. Re: food banks, what if they are collectively organised by Labour/grassroot movements?

A food bank organized and run by a politically-oriented group might have a secondary effect as a point of disseminating information to those with an interest, but imo no matter what organization runs it, the food bank function should be run as apolitically as possible, or else you start to replicate the Salvation Army model of having to sing hymns and listen to sermons in exchange for your bed and meal. People in need should not be asked to accept anything other than assistance in filling that need.

Lol I know it's just an affiliation. This has been bandied about on twitter by a couple of ppl that are more active than me.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/labour-is-changing-the-way-politics-works

This was a good thread:

RT: Feeling miserable? Google your local social centre/dementia cafe/renters union/cop watchers/revolutionary union/whatever else you're interested in and get stuck in. Be prepared for people to be welcoming but reserved; be prepared for it to be hard and boring.

— Femme Fatigue (@CharlotteBHC) December 12, 2019

This looks good sadly I work five days:

if anyone in London is free on fridays and wants to do something which will make a material difference to people who are having to deal with the dwp please come and volunteer for us. This will be needed more than ever now https://t.co/B8eNmhjWes

— Rosa (@marxroadrunner) December 12, 2019

There is no time for hopelessness. Here are some ideas for what we can do – now – to fight back against the attacks we know are coming. https://t.co/Pc6Bg2CfHG

— libcom dot org (@libcomorg) December 13, 2019

Bree Newsome keeps talking about the need for civil society to start considering a mass response to a potential Trump refusal to vacate. I'm as worried about that as I am a capital strike if Bernie takes it or an assassination attempt by the fascists. I think it's right that no matter what happens in November basically any outcome means things get tougher for movements. Gonna be a hell of a year.

Ain’t that the truth