Resistance Everywhere
In a moment like this, when more and more people are wanting to engage politically, many long-time organizers and activists are struggling to bring all the newly activated people into meaningful action.
To meet this need, PowerLabs is offering more free trainings and tools to support organizers.
Building Local Groups for the Long Haul
Join this webinar to learn how to create healthy and strong local groups. You’ll learn:
- how to combine mass meetings with working meetings to build groups that can mobilize thousands of people
- scalable volunteer-led support structures to help groups flourish
- how to create mass meeting agendas that welcome new people into the organization while keeping existing members motivated for the long haul
Tuesday, February 28th
4:00 p.m Eastern / 1:00 p.m. Pacific / 9:00 p.m. GMT
How To Run Mass Movement Calls
Join this webinar to learn how to run mass calls that bring thousands of new people into your organization and inspire them to plug into roles, lead their own actions, and to donate. You’ll learn how to:
- create a call agenda and script that’s proven to move people to action
- how to use small groups to create bonds across geography and increase people’s commitment to the campaign
- how to run the tech for a mass call using MaestroConference
Thursday, March 9th
3:00 p.m. Eastern / Noon Pacific / 8:00 p.m. GMT
Sign up even if you can’t make the live webinars. We’ll send you the recording and materials afterwards.
We’re also excited that Dara Silverman has joined the PowerLabs team. Dara brings a range of organizing and movement experience, most recently from her work in New Hampshire with Movement 2016 and as the Founding Director of Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ).
Onward,
Randall and Dara
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People-powered campaigning
A new report examines innovative volunteer engagement work by 35 organizations empowering people to make decisions and act on behalf of the organization. The report — Beyond the First Click — shares insights, patterns and best practices that can be put into practice at many organizations.
Beyond the First Click: How Today’s Volunteers Build Power for Movements and NGOs
A project of Capulet, Change.org and the Mobilisation Lab at Greenpeace
Connected and interdependent
Hundreds of thousands of people are trying to figure out what it means to join a movement. If we demonstrate that to be a part of a movement, you must believe that people cannot change, that transformation is not possible, that it’s more important to be right than to be connected and interdependent, we will not win.
Our cynicism will not build a movement. Collaboration will.
Alicia Garza, Special Projects Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Co-Founder Black Lives Matter [5 min read]
The Long Haul
Nonviolent resistance does not happen overnight or automatically. It requires an informed and prepared public, keen to the strategy and dynamics of its political power. Although nonviolent campaigns often begin with a committed and experienced core, successful ones enlarge the diversity of participants, maintain nonviolent discipline and expand the types of nonviolent actions they use.
It may only take 3.5% of the population to topple a dictator — with civil resistance
Erica Chenoweth, author “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” [6 min read]
Build skills. Build relationships. Build the resistance.
Momentum is hosting their first ever digital skillshare on April 8th-9th near New York City. The event is a space for people across issue areas and movements to learn from each other and conspire together.
Navigating treacherous terrain, seeking a way forward
It’s never a good idea to enter willingly into a frame your opponent has constructed to entrap you. The term “identity politics” is part of a whole vocabulary including “thought police,” “politically correct,” and “liberal elites”, whose main intention is to undermine the legitimacy of liberal and left politics. Uncritically adopting the “identity politics” language of the right is the equivalent of dropping our guard and waltzing on to their terrain. Master’s tools, master’s house, anyone? We need to recognise a toxic frame when we see one and refuse to be a party to its proliferation.
Liberals, don’t fall into the right’s ‘identity politics’ trap
Linda Burnham, National Research Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance [7 minute read]
All is not lost
We are living in populist times, and theirs is a right-wing populism that scapegoats immigrants, Muslims, women, and people of color, blaming them for the failures of the establishment, and seeking to secure a new political authority to codify such bigotry in policy.
Beyond Rogue One: What Science Fiction Can Tell Us About Resisting Trump and Supporting Social Movements
Farhad Ebrahimi, Founder of the Chorus Foundation [11 min read]
From solidarity strikes to slowdowns and sit-ins
Though such workplace protest doesn’t occur often in America, the country does have a long tradition of such actions fueling social movements. After the black-owned Chicago Defender was banned from mail distribution in several Southern states, black members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union smuggled the newspapers through work over the railways. Initially shut out from the country’s largest labor federation, the AFL, the predominantly black union became a powerhouse of civil rights organizing. Within 15 years, the union’s pioneering leader, A. Philip Randolph, had bargained a nationwide contract and persuaded FDR to sign the executive order that banned racial discrimination in defense industries.
Where’s the best place to resist Trump? At work
Moshe Marvit and Leo Gertner, Washington Post [5 min read]
Around the office: I’ll be attending frank next week, presenting on distributed organizing at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in March, supporting the Jewish Resistance at AIPAC with IfNotNow in March and helping to organize the Momentum Digital Skillshare in April. If you want to meet up, give me a holler at my first name @ powerlabs.io
Dara will be at the Strozzi Institute teacher training in Petaluma next week and at the Jewish Resistance actions with IfNotNow in March. If you want to meet up, email her at her first name @ powerlabs.io
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