This week, I’ve been thinking about a couple of things I observed at a recent community meeting. So…the other week I went to a community meeting. I don’t want to say too much about who called it or what it was about or anything like that. I will say it was put together by an …
As a federal election looms here in Canada, I have been thinking lately about how voting for liberals – small ‘l’ or large – is never going to save us. Mainstream political life in lots of countries in the 21st century takes the shape of an electoral choice between the hard right or the far …
I’ve been thinking, this past week, about the distinctly chaotic, disorienting feel that the world has when Donald Trump is sitting on the throne in the United States. In saying this, I’m not claiming he has some sort of monopoly on awfulness – to give just one example, clearly that is not the case given …
This week, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about a book I read – Art Works: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World Together by Ken Grossinger (New York: The New Press, 2023). It is a short, richly researched book about – as the title suggests – the integration of arts and music …
We live in a culture that tells us to face the world’s problems on our own—but any chance we have of making transformative change can only come from organizing collectively. This past year, governments around the world responded to sustained popular pressure—Portugal announced a radical plan to tackle the housing crisis; Chile signalled that it …
A mixture of movement memoir and grounded theorizing about some key areas of reflection and debate in movements. The author is one of the three Black women who initially coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. She was already an experienced organizer at that point, having cut her teeth doing neighbourhood and city-wide organizing in the Bay Area …
A book by a life-long activist and retired scholar thinking through the many varieties of a kind of moment familiar to anyone invested in questions of justice and liberation: When we know we could speak, we should speak, perhaps at least part of us wants to speak, and yet we remain silent. This might be …
Peter Gibbs is a co-director of the social movement capacity-building organization Organize BC. Scott Neigh talks with him about Organize BC’s use of training, coaching, and community-building to build the skills of organizers working for social and environmental justice in western Canada. Depending on the details of a given collective struggle, and on the community …
Just finished talking to Peter from Organize BC about the training, coaching, and community building they do to help build the capacity of progressive organizations and movements in western Canada. Listen for it on Talking Radical Radio in a couple of weeks! Originally posted to Scott’s page on Facebook.
John Clarke was an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) from its founding in 1990 until his retirement in late January 2019. Though he intends to remain a very active member of the group, this still marks a significant transition for one of Ontario’s most visible militant grassroots organizations. Scott Neigh interviews Clarke …