Longtime community organizers, and Rockwood alum, NTanya Lee and Steve Williams, spent the last year interviewing over 150 organizers, activists, and social change leaders across the country to find the answer.
In May, they released their findings in the report, More Than We Imagined: Activists’ Assessments on the Moment and the Way Forward as part of the Ear to the Ground project.
When participants were asked for recommendations on how to move the progressive movement forward, the most widely mentioned recommendations were:
“1. Develop a shared vision of a healthy, just and sustainable society.
2. Deepen the political development of all movement activists and leaders.
3. Craft a multi-sectored strategy for lasting social change.
4. Create new organizational forms in order to break out of issue and sector silos.
5. Integrate personal and social transformation into all aspects of movement work.
6. Advance audacious and strategic campaigns.
7. Expand ‘resiliency’ projects and the alternative ways that people are already meeting community needs for jobs, food, housing, energy-production, banking, public safety, and more.
8. Build united fronts and strategic multi-class alliances.
9. Join or build ‘political homes’— spaces in which people come together based on ideological unity with one another.
10. Better utilize new communications technology to build broad support for left ideas.”
*You can download the full report for free at eartothegroundproject.org/report.*
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Rockwood’s Art of Leadership training can make recommendation #5 a reality!
