Cultural Strategy
If it’s not soulful, it’s not strategic.
To make our movements irresistible and rooted in the wisdom of our ancestries, Movement Generation aims to create and defend culture that will hold us through the best and hardest times and that will move society toward a vision of ecological justice.
Our Cultural Strategy work begins with the Just Transition and ecological justice frameworks as guides. We collaborate with artists and cultural workers to reimagine dominant narratives and build cultural infrastructure that transforms culture towards economies based in deep relationships. A cultural shift is necessary towards ways of being and knowing rooted in cooperation, sacredness, care, and ecological and social well-being. And it starts with visions of the worlds we need to realign the purpose of the economy with the healing powers of the web of life. We honor the value and power of artists, cultural workers, storytellers, and creatives who hold and express the wisdom and strategies that move our souls, our communities, and our systems toward the future we need.
MG uses arts and cultural production together with grassroots organizing to popularize our frameworks and actionize our strategies. We also call on arts and cultural production to accompany us through the struggle and contradictions of transition, so that we stay on track and continue leading with vision and fierce love. By collaborating, creating, and providing analysis of the political landscape, our work aims to help make meaning of the ecological crisis and the roles that we all play in collective cultural shift.
Creative Wildfire
The Creative Wildfire (CW) project calls on the power of artists and cultural workers to uplift their role in the larger transformative cultural shift of restoring governance to the people through building regenerative solidarity economies. Currently CW is a collaborative with Art.Coop, Climate Justice Alliance, Movement Generation, and New Economy Coalition.
In 2021, with Climate Justice Alliance and New Economy Coalition, MG led a cohort of 19 artists through a process of political education to explore our Resist a Return to Normal manifesto. From that, 14 incredible creative projects came to life to popularize the manifesto and create artwork that uplifts and supports work on the ground across the country.
In June 2023 Creative Wildfire launched the second national cohort, supporting collaborations between artists and grassroots organizations. This cohort prioritized relationship building with deeper partnerships, collaborative distribution strategy, and weaving local and national campaigns. We explored how art uplifts hidden histories—stories that have been erased or buried but hold the power to transform our communities and shape new possibilities.
In 2024, we convened the artists from the 2023-2024 cohort all together for an artists retreat at Shelterwood, a BIPOC-led liberated land project in Northern California. This gathering was followed by a hybrid showcase featuring the artists’ works in Oakland, CA.
Ongoing relationship-deepening with the artists from the most recent Creative Wildfire cohort have included an animated film collaboration called Remembering Our Way Forward with artist and filmmaker Lily Xie for the Center for Cultural Power’s Climate Woke Campaign and a sustainable fashion show by Roldy Aguero Ablao and the Micronesia Climate Change Alliance in the Mariana Islands.
This work carries on the legacy of MG’s former Creative Wildfire program, held in 2014, where we hosted the first-of-its-kind cultural worker Eco-Justice retreat that brought together artists, activists, and organizers to explore the ecological crisis and community-based and cultural strategies to address it. The 4-day retreat ended with a Creative Wildfire show featuring performance and visual art from participating artists in the cohort. Since then MG has used the theme of “fire” in our Cultural Strategy work (The North Pole Season 2 and #FireSeeds social media campaign) to counter dominant narratives around fire ecology, indigenous sovereignty and mutual aid for frontline communities.
Cultural Production
MG’s Cultural Production work brings together cutting-edge artists, activists, and organizers to build a loud, proud, and beautiful cultural front for ecological justice. We experiment with diverse media platforms to uplift and inspire the people of the global majority to “tell our/their own stories”.
Over the past decade we have worked with incredible people and organizations to produce creative, iconic and influential productions such as The North Pole Show (Seasons 1 and 2) and the Did We Go Too Far? Podcast.
You can access The North Pole, our podcast, and other MG productions in our Media & Productions section.
Writings + Analysis
MG’s Writing and Analysis uplifts and energizes a grassroots movement towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture by publishing our analysis and strategy frames in print, online, and on air. The collection here includes articles, interviews, and blog posts from our first written articles and blog posts in 2006 to our most recent analysis of this time on the clock of the world.
Everything For Everyone Book Club
In Fall 2024, together with more than 100 folks, we read and discussed the speculative fiction book Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072. This book is a fascinating dream of what might happen after we win liberation. How might the traumas of uprising and resistance feel and heal in our bodies, minds, and spirits? How might we reclaim our food systems, our bodily autonomy, and ecological restoration? How might collective governance on a mass scale actually work? WTF would happen with space travel? And so many other burning questions.
For our last session, we were blessed with the presence of the book’s co-author, Eman Abdelhadi. What a beautiful, tender, and luminous conversation in the wake of the announcement of the ceasefire in Gaza. It was quite amazing to have this book club space as a way to process together these times we’re living in, what may lay ahead, and what we could build in community—both in the near term by holding community space like a book club and in the long term as we dream wild dreams and test our ideas of what’s possible.