A combination of communications infrastructure and collective decision making processes, to enable bringing together many people to engage in focused collective actions.

Background

There are many people working on, and even more who are supportive of, social and environmental justice causes. But we tend to be siloed and divided, meaning we rarely bring together enough support for any of the causes we are working on.

Often, we are just not aware of each other’s efforts. Or, if we are, we are not sufficiently engaged in a given issue to know how we might effectively contribute some effort to it.

The Initial, rough, Idea(s)

Setup a monthly schedule where each month there is a “featured issue/cause” for which a number of actions and events will be available for folks to participate in.

Actions & events might include:

Types of Actions & Events

Selecting Feature Issues/Causes

This could be the most contentious aspect of this idea.

Considerations for selecting featured issues/causes:

• Everyone needs to feel that “their issue” (since the majority of people who engage in activism tend to do so focused on a particular cause) has a chance to “come to the fore”.
• There needs to be a broad diversity of issues covered, so it can be broadly inclusive and engage as many folks as possible.
• There can’t be too many issues covered in a year, or people might burn out or skip a lot.
• The featured issues schedule may need to be flexible to accommodate “arising issues” “of the moment” (being able to pivot focus to take advantage of opportunities that can come up). But that needs to be handled in a way that does not alienate the people whose issue may get rescheduled. Such “opportunities” might be things like a given person (such as a “world leader”) coming to town, a major event (like a G7 Summit), or a cause/movement getting national or international focus (the anti-globalization protests that started at the WTO, the “Arab Spring”, Occupy, etc.).
• Issues “of the moment” may also be time-critical (e.g., some harmful government/corporate decision is coming forward and there is only a short time to intervene to stop it).
• There are many events it could be good to align with for their associated issues and causes (Orange Shirt Day, Black History Month, International Women’s Day, May Day, Pride, etc.).

Considerations and questions for decision making process:

• A simple majoritarian vote system would not work because many issues might not get a chance to come to the fore. And for many folks, if they feel their issues are being neglected, they won’t participate.
• Some form of consensus process.