Movement Building
Movement Generation’s Movement Building programs nurture, strengthen, and build the movement ecosystem of organizations and alliances that are achieving a Just Transition to local, living, loving economies. We commit to growing and building powerful, thriving movement vehicles that implement visionary and oppositional strategies locally and nationally.
Climate Justice Alliance
Formed in 2013 to create a new center of gravity in the climate movement, Climate Justice Alliance is a growing member alliance of 82 urban and rural frontline communities and organizations. Through the Alliance’s translocal organizing strategy and mobilizing capacity, CJA members:
- Inspire and organize bold action by communities on the frontlines of climate change to challenge the extractive economy that is harming people and ecosystems;
- Build resilient, regenerative and equitable economies rooted in place-based webs of social and ecological relationships;
- Expose false promises posed as ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis, so that precious resources are not allocated to programs that exacerbate social or economic inequality or cause further ecological disruption;
- Confront governments and industry to act boldly on climate change.
CJA is composed of locally, tribally, and regionally-based racial and economic justice organizations of Indigenous Peoples, Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and poor white communities who share legacies of racial and economic oppression and social justice organizing.
Members have won significant victories against polluting and extractive industries, preventing new carbon emissions from reaching our atmosphere. Members are building local alternatives that center traditional ecological and cultural knowledge and create pathways for a regenerative future. Learn more at CJA’s website.
Translocal Organizing
MG’s work is deeply invested in supporting the build-out of regional Just Transition ‘hubs’. We approach this work through the strategic lens of Translocal Organizing: autonomous and place-based organizing that is tied together across communities with a unifying vision, shared strategies and common frames. Through Translocal Organizing, we seek to build to scale not by creating larger and larger organizations with greater and greater concentrated power but by aggregating to scale by uniting across places.
In recent years, this work has led us to support, coordinate, and partner with regional forces like the Oregon Just Transition Alliance, Native Movement, the Crossroads Collective in Buffalo, Reclaim Our Power in the SF Bay Area, and Front and Centered in Washington state, to name a few.
Through this connective tissue work, we do not seek to build “super structures” that direct local organizing, but rather build living webs of relationship through which information, interventions and innovations can be shared. Our hope and goal: that an aligned set of strategies emerge, across localities. These strategies are our evolving set of maps and pathways, which we forge together, to move us toward bringing Ecological Justice to life in all of our communities.
Right to Resources
Putting capital to work for people and planet is essential to support communities in asserting their rights to access the resources required to create dignified and ecologically sustainable livelihood. MG engages in this work through organizing funders and philanthropy, creating wealth transfer vehicles, and developing movement infrastructure to redistribute wealth and liberate capital towards regenerative economies.
Reinvest in Our Power is an example of movement infrastructure that engages in creating strategies to redistribute wealth and resources towards Just Transition community-based projects. Coordinated through Climate Justice Alliance and member groups like MG, RiOP seeks to move capital in a way that:
- Shifts economic control to the people
- Democratizes the workplace
- Advances ecological restoration
- Drives racial justice and social equity
- Relocalizes most product & consumption
- Retains and restores culture and tradition
Land is Life
Revolution is always based on land
– Malcolm X
Without our land we are not a people
– Huenchullán (Mapuche Indigenous Activist)
Movements for land justice, reparations, Indigenous sovereignty and rematriation have greatly shaped MG’s politics, programs and relationships over the years. Knowing that the wealth of our extractive economy was built through the violent theft and enclosure of land and labor – Stolen Land and Stolen People – our pathways toward land justice starts with repairing our relationships (reparations) to these legacies. Following the leadership of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Indigenous Environmental Network and other Indigenous comrades, we are committed to growing into right relationship on Indigenous lands with Indigenous peoples. As an organization based in the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone people, we are in an evolving process of supporting the rematriation of Ohlone land. We also continue to learn lessons from The Black Land and Liberation Initiative (BLLI). From 2015-2018, MG collaborated with our comrades in The BlackOUT Collective to create a long-term movement strategy and concrete interventions towards Black Liberation, Reparations and Land Reform. BLLI was an 18 month rigorous vision, strategy and training program for Black organizers from around the country anchored by Black leadership. It led to a Juneteenth 2017 direct action campaign under the frame, “40 Acres, 40 Cities, One Day”.