Our Analysis
We are living in times of interlocking political, economic, and ecological upheaval.
Decades of neoliberal policy have encoded the legacies of enslavement and genocide into the institutions of U.S. civil society. Movements that have long fought and resisted oppression are in a state of fracture, and struggle to work in coalition. Today’s social movements need greater connection to local, regional, national, and global movement history in order to dispel a sense of isolation, alienation, and competition.
We must prepare our movements to shape the change that is coming.
Traditional “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” work has often been used to support performative, superficial shifts while maintaining the status quo. Effective organizational transformation requires reckoning with and challenging entrenched power structures--both internal and external to an organization--and a willingness to examine and remake cultures, behaviors, and governance away from the nonprofit industrial complex and towards solidarity economies.
Our movement organizations need deep democratization that reckons with power structures.
We must boldly embrace the challenges and opportunities that are already here to work in concert with one another rather than at cross-purposes. We must intervene on the practices of horizontal violence that tear us down and tear us apart from one another and disrupt territorialism, exclusion, and hierarchy of worthiness within our movements. We must collectively learn the practice of principled struggle so that we are able to “build the new world in the shell of the old.”