Michael Silberman at Yes! magazine writes—5 Ways New Movement Leaders Are Effecting Change.The Parkland students and others are reinventing models for people-powered activism that adapts to today’s rapid pace of change.:
Since 17 of their classmates were gunned down in February, Fuentes and other survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, have turned their trauma into a mass movement against gun violence. They organized a national march without any infrastructure—and in record time. And this summer, they toured the country for a campaign to mobilize the youth vote in the upcoming midterm elections.
But perhaps most significantly, these young people have debunked the assumption that this issue could never be wrested from the hands of powerful and well-funded gun rights forces.
Among the doubtful were older activists and professional campaigners who’d been in the organizing trenches for years—and with the scars to prove it. While thrilled about the new movement’s success, they also had a feeling that something had changed. Is this thedawnof anew kind of organizing and campaigning.
In short, yes. And the March for Our Lives movement is only one example. From the Movement for Black Lives and 350.org to the Women’s March and the tea party, a new wave of people-powered action is flipping the script and in some ways confounding traditional organizations that have been unable to convert into nimble social movements.
What all have in common is what authors Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms are calling “new power”—new models that are organic and grow directly from the people rather than being directed or managed by formal organizations that control what gets done and by whom. [...]
“No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?” ~~Shirley Chisholm,Unbought And Unbossed, 1970
On this date at Daily Kos in 2008—Wall Street, Main Street, Why No Mention of Side Streets and Alleys?
In the past few weeks, both from Republicans and Democrats, we’ve heard a great deal about the travails of Wall Street and the mythical Main Street in the acute economic crisis that has everyone who hasn’t already been downsized or foreclosed sitting on pins and needles. But far less—next to nothing, in fact—has been said about what’s going on elsewhere in America, in side streets and alleys where chronic structural economic problems dating back three decades continue to take a toll.
Today, about 20 percent of America’s children—13.5 percent of all Americans—live in what is a very flawed federal measure of poverty whose parameters haven’t been changed in more than four decades.
Some 28 million Americans now receive some amount of help from the Food Stamp program, known since the beginning of this month as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Soup kitchens everywhere are in tough straits. That’s because food prices have increased at a time when the numbers of people in need have risen and the people who donate, hampered by economic difficulties of their own, are contributing less.
At the other end of the scale, crunched state budgets mean reduced aid to higher education at a time when still-rising tuition costs are making it ever more difficult for people at the lower ends of the economic scale to do what every politician, social reformer and statistic says is a way out of those lower ends: more schooling.
Ontoday’sKagro in the Morningshow:Some#GunFAIL& other gun stories to catch up on. Next: the courts. A revealing look at the law & economics seminars for judges. There’s historical precedent for attacking SCOTUS as political, and it starts with the Gop. Gingrich blurts out the Kavanaugh plan.
