David Korten is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, now in its second edition and a co-founder of YES! Magazine. He sat down with Sarah van Gelder at the US Social Forum to talk about how a new economic structure—one that shifts power from Wall Street to Main Street—can bail out both people and nature.

Sarah van Gelder interviewed David Korten for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is executive editor for YES! Magazine.

The interview was recorded by Free Speech TV. You can watch live streaming video from Free Speech TV at livestream.com.

Interested?

• Agenda for a New Economy, 2nd edition
  Be the first to read David Korten’s revised & expanded Declaration of Independence from Wall Street.  :: 3 WAYS TO GET THE BOOK  from the YES! Store: 22% discount
• A New Deal for Local Economies by Stacy Mitchell
  More local, durable economies are already taking root across the country and around the world. How can we help them along?
• Lighting the Way to a New Economy by David Korten
  How do local efforts to create community friendly economies add up to global economic transformation? David Korten's keynote address to the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).

“Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible. Like great love affairs, great campaigns provide us with an opportunity for transformation. They connect us to our deeper purpose and to the commonalities we share, even in the face of tremendous differences. They highlight our interdependence and they help us to see the potential that our relationships have to create real change in our lives and in the world around us.”

Ai-jen Poo, for Domestic Workers United.
From Organizing with Love: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign

Special Occasion

Rarely do you hear an activist comparing a great campaign to a great love affair. But that’s the exact metaphor Ai-jen Poo used to describe the fantastically successful campaign to give basic labor rights to domestic workers in New York City.

The Domestic Workers United gave a workshop about this campaign on the second day of the US Social Forum (USSF). In fact, it was back at the 2007 USSF in Atlanta where the Domestic Workers United, along with other organizations, came together and formed the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “The social forum is a special occasion for us,” says Poo.

I was at their event at the 2007 USSF and was so impressed by their tenacity and vision. So it’s amazing and inspiring to come back to the social forum three years later and hear about their victory in New York State.

“Today is an exciting day for domestic workers around the country,” said Poo.

For too long, domestic workers—nannies, house cleaners, companions for elderly—have been denied basic labor rights. Domestic workers have been explicitly excluded from U.S. labor protections. And it’s not by chance. When Congress debated legislation during the New Deal Era, Southern lawmakers sought to exempt domestic workers (and farm workers) from federal labor laws.

This discrimination, Poo points out, is rooted in racial and gender oppressions. So this new legislation means so much. “It’s about reparations,” she says. “It’s about justice.”

And it’s about recognizing that caring for people is real work that requires skills.

What’s in the new bill?

Two different versions have been passed by the two houses of the New York state government. The Senate version is more expansive and would grant guarantees such as paid holidays, sick days, overtime pay, and the right to collective bargaining. Right now, domestic workers are not even entitled to minimum wage.

During their campaign, DWU members hosted a press conference together with the sponsors of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, Assemblyman Keith Wright and Senator Diane Savino.

Photo courtesy domesticworkersunited.org.

"What the average worker takes for granted, that’s what we’ve been denied," says Patricia Francois, who worked as a nanny in New York for twelve years before losing her job a year and a half ago.

New York is just the beginning. There are campaigns under way in fourteen cities.

Claudia Reyes from Mujeres Unidas y Activas talked about the fight for labor rights in California. In 2006, AB 2536, which gave household workers the right to overtime and fined employers who failed to pay their employees, passed both houses in California. But Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

Reyes says that what happens in New York will help domestic workers in California in 2011 and 2012. It’s historic legislation. And it proves that it’s possible.

Poo says that it’s important to not let the political climate curb your vision. If it’s inspirational, people will want to participate.

One thread of discussion that came up again and again as domestic workers and organizers told their stories during the panel was the idea that labor protections had seemed impossible for them. But the campaign changed all of that.

“The experience of the campaign to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York has already provided an opening for the transformation of the relations within the domestic work industry and a vision for how we can transform all of our relations throughout our nation and beyond,” writes Poo in a paper about the campaign. “Like a great love affair, it has helped us grow.”

Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive. She writes about activism, politics, music, books, and film. She also produces Progressive Radio, a thirty-minute public affairs program hosted by Matthew Rothschild.

 Interested?

• Follow the YES! Magazine team at the US Social Forum.
• Protecting Workers, Not Corporations: We must regulate business and stand up for workers' rights.
  

Early on at the US Social Forum, I was struck by the disjuncture between the huge ambition of the assembly and the limitations of the conference’s agenda and slate of decentralized workshops. In their planning statement for the social forum, organizers declared an intention to respond to “a state of national and global emergency” by defining “a direction for what will be the great project of our generation.” Needless to say, that’s a big task for any convention.

Whenever the social forum speaks of itself as the future of the U.S. Left, vexing issues arise: Can any coherent political program emerge from an amorphous, multi-issue assembly? Can we formulate a vision of the Left without more serious participation from key progressive constituencies such as organized labor? Can the collection of radicals and community-based organizations that are present here become a political force with mainstream reach, or are they too self-marginalizing? The answers are not easy to come by, and non-starry-eyed attendees can easily grow wary in contemplating such imposing matters.

Where the social forum thrives, in contrast, is in smaller moments, free of grand pretense. Walking the halls and seeing a seemingly endless stream of organizers, urban gardeners, filmmakers, human rights workers, energetic students, and community activists can be subtly uplifting. Occasionally, the conversations generated within this collection of people can be transcendent.

After attending the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005, I wrote of some of the small, gratifying encounters that the social forum process sometimes creates:

"Strolling through the forum space could produce rewarding surprises. A colleague, Zeynep Toufe of the Institute for Public Accuracy, told of how, 'tired, hot, severely underslept,' she stumbled into an afternoon panel on land rights and the 'untouchable castes' of India. She was unexpectedly blown away by the testimony of homelessness and dispossession offered. 'It was so uncynical that I didn’t know what to feel,' she reported. And when they burst into songs or chants, she stated, 'It was one of the most sincere, the least contrived instances I have ever encountered of people shouting slogans ... I tried to explain what a privilege it felt like to be in their presence.'

Today in Detroit, I asked many people about their experiences of the US Social Forum, and I heard of some similarly worthwhile happenings. One colleague who frequently participates in street theater spoke of attending a “creative action think tank” with other performers that was surprisingly advanced and engaging: “It was two hours full of ideas,” he told me.

Watch some of the action from the US Social Forum in Detroit:

Several people mentioned to me that they were deeply impressed by a presentation by New York’s Domestic Workers United. That group recently succeeded in passing a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State that provides a groundbreaking framework that will allow groups of employees who were previously unprotected under national labor law to organize. A wider coalition of groups working on this issue, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, was formed at the last US Social Forum (held in 2007 in Atlanta) and is now working to expand the New York victory.

A friend who traveled to the social forum with me and who works on anti-foreclosure initiatives was moved by a workshop organized by a Detroit-based group called Moratorium Now. The organization grew out of an anti-war coalition that had built a strong network of community relations. In recent years, they discovered that many of their members were dealing with foreclosure, and they decided that a collective response was warranted.

One of the members whose experience had been a catalyzing force for the group shared her story. A few years ago, she had taken out an unfavorable refinancing loan on a family home previously owned by her parents. After the crash, she lost the house. At the workshop, she spoke of the indignity she felt when police tore her mother’s possessions out of the foreclosed home. She was ashamed that she had taken the loan, even though she desperately needed the money at the time.

Workshop participants from around the country—tenants’ rights and anti-eviction activists from Miami, Toledo, and Chicago—nodded in recognition at the story. They responded by sharing strategies of resistance: How they had generated pressure by live-streaming video of people who were barricading themselves in their homes; how they had shamed Bank of America into backing off planned evictions of families and elderly residents; how legal strategists found a precedent for a moratorium on evictions in Great Depression-era jurisprudence that might be applied today.

My friend told me: “I went in thinking the demand would just be, ‘this is bad, we need to stop it.’ Instead, the groups were incredibly well researched. They had a track record of success that they could share.”

At the US Social Forum, as in everyday political life, you can find plenty of things to feel cynical about. But you can also find people in whose presence it is a privilege to be. Those who leave motivated by that all-too-uncommon experience will rarely regret the effort taken to find it.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via www.DemocracyUprising.com. This article first appeared in Dissent.

Interested?

• Follow the YES! Magazine team at the US Social Forum.
• No Foreclosures Here: With the housing crisis nationwide driving struggling families from their homes, Boston’s creative Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative shows how communities can hold their ground.

Three years ago at the first US Social Forum in Atlanta, residents of cities around the country met and found they shared a common goal: Make sure that city life stays accessible to everyone. They formed the Right to the City Alliance, a coalition uniting urban rights groups to allies in their own cities and across the country, from Los Angeles to Boston to New Orleans. The members share the belief that urban dwellers not only have the right not to be priced out of their communities, but to help shape and design them.

The New York City groups who came together, many of whose members were grappling with homelessness, life in shelters or on public assistance, and the loss of affordable housing options, were particularly energized.

"At that point, I didn't know what gentrification was," said Nova Strachan, a member of Mothers on the Move, part of the Right to the City-NYC alliance, who was living in public housing at the time. "Then they tried to privatize my building, and I found out quick."

The struggle hasn't gotten easier in the last three years. Just this month, due to budget cuts, thousands of New York families will lose their Section 8 housing vouchers, sending many of them onto the streets or into the city's overburdened shelter system. Meanwhile, housing prices (not to mention the median income numbers used to determine what's considered affordable housing) are going up.

For the people who attended Right to the City-NYC's workshop at this year's Social Forum—many of them low-income New Yorkers active with Picture the Homeless, Mothers on the Move, and other member organizations of Right to the City—gentrification isn't an abstract idea, but a direct threat to their neighborhoods and their ability to stay in them.

"How do you know when gentrification is coming?" asked Diego Quiñones, an organizer in Harlem with Community Voices Heard, one of Right to the City's member organizations. "What does it look like?"

The answers were forceful: More police harassment. Suddenly, you need a permit to barbecue, to use public parks, or to hold a street party; sometimes you can't get a permit at all. Neighborhood names get changed: Alphabet City becomes the East Village, Spanish Harlem turns into SpaHa. "You can't even stand in front of your property without the police coming by," said one participant. "Bike lanes!" shouted another. "We asked for bike lanes for many, many years—now suddenly we're getting some."

But there's one sign that stands out, clear evidence you're in danger of getting priced out of your neighborhood: the arrival of luxury condos, some of them built where affordable housing units used to be.

Following the financial crash, the condos got harder to sell and became especially noticeable: new buildings with enormous price tags standing empty in low-income neighborhoods. It was, said Rogers of Picture the Homeless, an "ugly image of people without homes and homes without people."

And so, when Right to the City sat down to prioritize its first projects (following a year spent in community dialogues crafting an in-depth policy platform, which calls for recognition of the rights to community decision-making power; quality, low-income housing; federal stimulus funds;  jobs; public space; environmental justice and public health), condos were key.

In the most comprehensive count of its kind, 150 residents and advocates walked the City's streets and combed its records, producing a report detailing just how many luxury condos were sitting empty in a city with record homelessness and an affordable housing crisis. 

In six low-income neighborhoods, they found 4,092 empty housing units, offered for an average price of $2 million, some of which had been on the market for years. Collectively, the buildings were $3.8 million delinquent in back taxes.

Members of Right to the City are now meeting with the City Council and other City departments about what to do with the information they've gathered. "We surprised City officials," said Quiñones. "They didn't expect us to be so organized."

How to Beat Foreclosures with a Public Land Trust
With soaring housing costs pricing residents out of their neighborhoods, the nation's first municipally funded community land trust was formed.

Right to the City is now pushing for New York City to acquire the delinquent buildings through tax foreclosure so that they can become permanent affordable housing for low-income New Yorkers (a pilot project of 400 converted units began in 2009); they're also proposing that tax breaks for condo developers be suspended. Civil disobedience in the form of condo takeovers and squatting is also under consideration, Quiñones said.

"I am nervous. I am afraid. But I'll be damned if I sit down and let them take my city just like that," said DeBoRh Dickerson, part of Picture the Homeless. "We've got a voice in this."

Right to the City is also supporting Housing Not Warehousing—a bill before the City Council, now with 28-cosponsors, which would require the City to officially replicate their count of vacant properties every year—and lobbying for "affordable housing" to be calculated according to local, neighborhood income rather than median income for the area, which is skewed by affluent residents of Manhattan and Westchester County.

"This is part of the move towards human needs and away from the profit motive," said Rogers. "It's why we need the Social Forum. It's bold, but this is the place to make bold statements."

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine's web editor.

Interested?

People Taking Charge: Homeless Build Community
In São Paulo, where slums and homelessness are common, some 400,000 housing units are unused. Hundreds of homeless families took over a vacant 22-story building, creating housing, a library, and cinema.

Watch part two of the interview:

Watch part three of the interview:

Sarah van Gelder interviewed Danny Glover for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is executive editor for YES! Magazine.

The interview was recorded by Free Speech TV. You can watch live streaming video from Free Speech TV at livestream.com.

Interested?

• 2nd US Social Forum in Detroit: Follow the YES! Magazine team at the Social Forum.
• Danny Glover: UNDP Goodwill Ambassador and actor Danny Glover talks about his lifelong activism.

The US Social Forum started on Tuesday June 22, 2010 in Detroit. The start of the event began with arrivals of caravans and a poor people's march, and an opening "We have a dream" protest march and rally. Thousands attended and marched in the sunshine with music, signs, puppets, and high spirits, calling for social justice.

People drove for days, weeks, and months to attend the forum, eager to listen to speakers, attend workshops and network with people from across the nation.

Click here to start the slideshow.

Photos by Sarah van Gelder for YES! Magazine and by Jobs with Justice.

• Follow the YES! Magazine team at the Social Forum.
• US Social Forum Kicks Off by Sarah van Gelder.
  

The first day of the US Social Forum saw the arrival in Detroit of thousands of people set on attending the forum. Some, like a percussion marching band from Greensboro, North Carolina, drove through the night. Others, like the People's Freedom Caravan of the Southwest Organizing Project, spent several days on the road, stopping along the way to join up with other groups and learn about their struggles. The March to Fulfill the Dream, organized by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, left New Orleans in early April and arrived in Detroit after what one participant told me was a life-changing trip.

The morning of the first day was devoted to stories from Detroit. These included struggles with utilities that shut off power and water to people behind in paying their bills—in some cases causing the deaths of residents unable to stay warm. But it also featured the Detroit that is in the midst of rebuilding, growing its own food security, confronting racial divides, and rethinking education and land use in a city with a population that has fallen to a fraction of its former size.

For Detroit residents participating in the US Social Forum, recent fatal utility shutoffs were a powerful symbol of injustice.

Photo by Sarah van Gelder

Then, like all social forums, there was the opening march. Thousands showed up, along with their signs, giant puppets, drums, and trombones, to chant about health care, corporate power, jobs, clean energy, utility shut-offs, and the other issues confronting people in Detroit and across the U.S.

After hours marching in the hot sun, people poured into Cobo’s enormous hall for a welcoming ceremony beginning with the songs and dances of the First Nations Dancers and Drummers, and continuing on with hip hop, spoken word, and brief speeches.

Wednesday, the full schedule of workshops, Peoples' Movement Assemblies, and plenaries begins, along with a children's art village, cultural events, tours of Detroit, and more street actions.

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit news organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is YES! Magazine's executive editor.

Interested? Read more Social Forum coverage.

“Detroit embodies both the problem and potential for solutions,” says Maureen Taylor, USSF staff coordinator. “We believe the Social Forum process will stimulate some hope for the people of Detroit and help the people turn this city around.” Organizers expect 15,000 to 25,000 people  to arrive from around the country for the forum. And while the attention focused on Detroit may help turn the city around, Detroit’s bottom-up style of activism may also open up new ideas and possibilities for those visiting from around the country.

Detroit is known as the place where  thousands lost jobs when the automobile industry crashed well before the 2008 Wall Street collapse. White flight, expressways built through formerly vibrant African American neighborhoods, the outsourcing of manufacturing (and the failure of the Big Three to transition to eco-friendly cars or renewable energy technologies), along with the anger and violence that resulted from hopelessness and drugs have all played a part in Detroit’s demise. Solutions from city government have mirrored the lack of vision of corporate leadership. Neither the promotion of casino gambling nor the shiny new downtown towers have helped.

But in the neighborhoods, young media makers, owners of small businesses, former Black Panthers,  and a scrappy group of activists connected with the Boggs Center are setting a different direction for their city. They aren’t looking to corporations to bring in jobs-they have seen how those big projects suck up land and tax money only to leave town for lower wages or higher tax breaks some place else. And they aren't looking to the government for solutions. Many pinned high hopes on the election of Detroit's first African-American mayor, Coleman Young, in 1973 only to find he was taking the city in the same destructive direction as his predecessors.

For this group, protests are almost passé. They recognize that there are plenty of reasons to protest a massive, pollution-spewing incinerator, police brutality, and companies that are all too ready to cut off life-sustaining water and heat when someone gets behind on bills.

But these new 21st-century activists don't believe those who hold positions of power actually have the vision or capability to turn things around, no matter how much is demanded of them. Corporate and city establishment leaders belong to a dying epoch, they say. It's of limited use to make demands of a system that is on its way down.

Instead, these Detroiters are rebuilding their own future, creating the city they want to live in, and transforming themselves at the same time.

“Mayor Bing and corporate interests ... are top-down ‘leaders’ who can't see the grassroots Detroiters who are rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our city from the ground up," says Grace Boggs, who at 95 is a leading thinker and activist in Detroit. Grace, who has been a Detroit activist  for more than 50 years, will be among the speakers at the opening session of the USSF.

The examples of this bottom-up renewal can be seen around the city and will be highlighted on the first day of the social forum. Here are just a couple that I encountered in a couple of days in Detroit.

Feeding the hunger

Myrtle Thompson Curtis and Wayne Curtis took a small, empty plot of land, brought together friends, members of a nearby church, and other volunteers, and began the Feed'om Freedom Growers. Tomatoes, greens, strawberries, and other crops grow in raised beds and in rows. They also teach classes on healthy cooking, and a book club was started by young people who work in the garden.

“I went to my old neighborhood, and I had to cry,” Curtis told a group visiting his garden as part of a tour sponsored by the Allied Media Conference. “There's nothing there. Nothing at all. They were telling me about their friends, who were my friends growing up, who are no longer with us.”

Slowly, their new block is changing. Myrtle Curtis was encouraged when neighbors down the street came out when they saw a crowd of people getting off a bus and out of a caravan of cars to visit the garden. “We don't see our neighbors much,” she said. “This area is too scary to mingle. But they came out to participate, and that's what it's all about.”

Now Wayne and Myrtle are looking to expand to an empty lot across the street from the garden, and they'd like to use an abandoned house that borders on the lot as a community center.

“It’s a question of money and control and misuse of power,” Wayne Curtis told the group. “This is a problem we need to resolve like adults,” he said. “I was homeless, and I walked past a grocery store, and I was hungry, and that didn't make any sense to me. ... How can we get this land. How can we get seeds and bees so we can make honey. How can we have an economy so that people don't go hungry.”

There are over 800 community gardens, ranging from the small and precarious, to large entities like Earth Works that are increasingly able to bring fresh foods to Detroit's food deserts and give Detroiters opportunities for meaningful work and involvement in their communities.

Security in a militarized city

Like in many U.S. cities, the standoff between police and community members all too often turns deadly. Most recently, the city has been mourning the death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones, who was killed last month in a drug raid gone wrong.

Ron Scott, a founder some decades ago of a Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party, heads up the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality. Scott believes the community must learn to resolve its own conflicts and must redefine relations with police.

“What cities like Detroit are facing is increasing militarization,” he told me. “Police agencies used to be public service agencies that were an extension of the community, not a suppression of the community.”

The community can take the lead in redefining the relationship. Eighty percent of the conflicts in the community are related to substance abuse and domestic violence, he said. “We can intervene by mediating disputes and also by creating independent economic entities.” For example, a group that had been in conflict with police took an abandoned lot, started a garden project, and renamed it Peace Park, he said. They use the lot to mediate disputes themselves, rather than calling in police.

“The most important thing we're doing is taking responsibility for making sure in cities like Detroit that we can reshape communities the way we want them. The people running this city and others are not blatantly evil. It's that many of them are not capable of dealing with the collapse of the economic system. What happened in the past is not gone, but it’s whimpering and dying.”

“We’re working to build something that is creative and new in the city,” he said. “This movement, unlike movements of the past, is not based on one sex, one race, one ideological frame,” Scott said. “It’s based on love and appreciation, and transformation of humanity.

Scott and others are working to create more of these peace zones and—as fellow activist, author, and former prison inmate Yusef Shakur says—to turn predators into protectors and put the neighbor back in the ‘hood.

Detroit as a Model

The attention of thousands of activists will be like a mirror, raising the awareness of Detroiters themselves of the powerful innovations that they are bringing into the world. But it may be that the social movements represented here will also find new models and strategies from these grassroots leaders.

“I can’t begin to tell you how much Detroit means symbolically worldwide and nationally,” Grace Boggs says. “Detroit was once the national and international symbol of the miracles of industrialization and then became the national and international symbol of devastation of deindustrialization. Now it is becoming the national and international symbol of a new way of living-of great transformation.”

Detroiters are creating new ways of caring for one another and caring for the Earth, she says.
The U.S. Social Forum may be like a fierce wind that picks up the seeds of these grassroots innovations and spreads them across the American landscape. “What's happening this week here in Detroit,” Grace says, “is the beginning of something new.”

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is YES! Magazine's executive editor.

Interested? More on the US Social Forum in Detroit.

My organization, The Ruckus Society, has been a part of the social forum process since the first US Social Forum (USSF) in Atlanta in 2007. Many others were moving it before we got involved. Initially we came just to help with the opening march and security. But as we got involved, we became believers. It’s a brilliant process that is challenging for U.S. organizers—we come together in open space to share and learn best practices for movement building, get inspired, connect across work and distance, and see ourselves as part of a larger force. It’s that open horizontal structure, instead of the usual series of top-down aspirational speakers, that allows the deeper relationships and movement building to happen.

Here’s my brief, heartfelt list of reasons to come to Detroit to participate in the 2010 USSF:

Come because you long for movements that bring dignity to all people, power and plenty to all communities, and make life worth living. The USSF is a self-organized, decentralized process, so the experience itself teaches us patience. The beauty of it is that everyone who comes to this gathering wants another world and is working to bring it into being. Come to share the alternatives you are trying in your community and to learn what others are doing that is working.

Come because you are interested in what happens in other countries—maybe you talk about global movements for change, or far-off wars that the United States is funding and instigating. Maybe you’re inspired by the amazing horizontal and participatory democratic processes happening in Latin America, or the greening of Cuba. Maybe you’ve donated to save the rainforests in Brazil or stop the genocide of Tibetan culture, or you’ve talked about how to resolve the conflict in occupied Palestine. The Global South began the social forum process and has invited us into it. Come to the USSF and see what it’s like to stretch our U.S. understanding of how movement building happens, to listen to each other in new ways, and to build horizontal, rather than hierarchical, community structures.

Come because Detroit is your future. When you weren’t looking, Detroit was experiencing the downfall of capitalism, and now it’s in the process of reimagining and rebuilding itself. Perhaps because the divestment of industry has been so long-lasting and complete, Detroit also has alternatives, solutions, and visions in practice for you to come bear witness to, get inspired by, emulate, partner with, and proliferate: 800 community gardens and counting; Peace Zones where community members call on mediators instead of police to resolve conflicts; intergenerational, relational, small-scale, collective organizing models; most importantly, organizing efforts that are not driven by, or dependent on, the fickle promises of politicians. I moved to Detroit last year because it is so liberating to experience an organizing culture where folks realize that the community drives the process and is accountable for its success or failure. Come to the Forum because it is in Detroit.

One thing is clearer to me every day: The more humility you bring to the Forum, the more you will get out of it. If you are used to conferences being a lot of one-way experiences—you present, or you get presented to—come prepared to pollinate, dialogue, and put your hands in the dirt on one of the many Detroit Work Projects. Come to the USSF with an open mind to learn, lessons you are excited about sharing, and the belief that the relationships you form here could liberate your community from oppression and opposition.

From me, to you—I hope to see you in Detroit in June.

Adrienne Maree Brown is national coordinator for the US Social Forum. She is on the board of Allied Media and is director of The Ruckus Society, a network that supports nonviolent community-based direct action.

Interested?

How to get to the USSF: Are you thinking about going to the U.S. Social Forum this year? Here are some tips on how to get there.

Carlos Jimenez marches with Jobs with Justice at the 2007 US Social Forum.

Photo by Carlos Fernandez

In 2001, 12,000 people congregated for the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. By 2005, the number was 10 times as many, as social movements, labor leaders, indigenous activists, and youth joined under the banner “Another World is Possible.” The movement spread around the world. In 2007, the United States joined in with a social forum in Atlanta led by a diverse group of leaders representing grassroots social-justice organizations. Ten thousand people attended.

Organizers expect more than 25,000 when the second United States Social Forum meets June 22–26, 2010, in Detroit. Karlos Gauna Schmieder of the Center for Media Justice says Detroit was a conscious choice: It’s a microcosm of the world economy and a center of resistance to fore­closures and joblessness.

• On the Road to Detroit: Find out how to get to the USSF.

Ashlee Green wrote this piece for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Ashlee is an editorial intern at YES!

See More Signs of a New American Identity:

Race Exhibit		Blended Nation		Loving Day, June 12		Tenant's Rights		US Social Forum		Colors Restaurant
Choosing Integration		The Hapa Project		Jen Chau, Swirl, Inc.		Teja Arboleda

Register

The USSF will take place June 22-26, 2010 at Cobo Hall and Hart Plaza in downtown Detroit, Michigan. Register online at www.ussf2010.org/register

Organize a workshop

Attend a People's Movement Assembly

In cities around  the country, local organizers and activists will be joining in People’s Movement Assemblies in preparation for the U.S. Social Forum. Assemblies are a chance for organizations to meet locally to make logistic decisions like how to get to the forum and to both reflect and act on larger world issues such as climate change and social justice.  

You can set up your own PMA at www.ussf2010.org/pma

How to Get Yourself There: In Bike Caravans, Bus Caravans, and Even on Foot …

Via Bicycle Caravan
BikeIt! is on the lookout for organizers to recruit both cyclists and biofuel-powered vehicles for an alternative transportation adventure to Detroit, Michigan. Their website provides a map of already-organized rides and applications for those willing to lead a ride of their own. Search your zip code to find the starting point nearest you. Find groups coming from San Francisco, California, New York, New York, Madison, Wisconsin, and other locations.

Here is a first list of rides, but be sure check the BikeIt Map for up-to-date information at bikeit.org

• NORTHEAST
  Albany, New York, BikeIt Caravan—Carole Furman—octagon [@] hvc.rr.com, 518/461-5168 (cell), 845/246-4668
  
  Buffalo, New York, BikeIt Caravan—Claire Stoscheck—bikeit2010 [@] gmail.com
  
  Ithaca, New York, BikeIt Caravan—Claire Stoscheck—bikeit2010 [@] gmail.com, 607/351-3831, bikeit.org/?page_id=279
  
  Binghamton, New York, BikeIt Caravan–Mari Pfingston-Bigelow—marjoypb [@] gmail.com, 516/238-5801
  
  New York, New York, BikeIt Caravan—Mark Stonehill—mark.stonehill [@] gmail.com, 516/851-6824
  
  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, BikeIt Caravan—Sergio Armani—cyclist.sergio [@] gmail.com, 484/347-6429
  
  
• MIDWEST
  Madison, Wisconsin, BikeIt Caravan—Kelty Carew—keltycarew [@] gmail.com, 608/358-2806
  
  The Grassroutes Caravan will travel 300 miles from Madison, Wisconsin, to Detroit, Michigan, by bike. www.grassroutescaravan.org
  
  Chicago, Illinois, BikeIt Caravan—Zahra Alabanza—zmala1515 [@] gmail.com, 850/445-0040, bikeit.org/?page_id=282
  
  Chicago’s BikeIt Delegation: roadtodetroit.blogspot.com/2010/01/chicagoans-are-biking-to-detroit.html
  
  
• WEST
  San Francisco, California, BikeIt Caravan–June Brashares—june [@] globalexchange.org, 415/255-7296 ext. 253

Via Bus Caravan
Bus caravans are modeled on the 2007 Freedom Caravan that brought people from Albuquerque, New Mexico, across the southwest and the deep south to the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2007. You can help organize this year's Freedom Caravan by attending a PMA in your area. Below is a first list of dates, but be sure to check the map on the USSF website for up-t0-date information.

Brownsville, Texas, PMA,  February 20, 2010.

Houston, Texas, PMA, February 27, 2010.

Detroit, Michigan, PMA, March 13, 2010.

San Francisco, California, PMA March 13, 2010. www.pma.ussf2010.org/node/12

Portland, Oregon, PMA, May 9, 2010. www.pma.ussf2010.org/node/16

Progressive Action for the Common Good is working on organizing a bus or two from Iowa. Find more info at www.blogforiowa.com.

Via Foot

The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is leading a "March to Fulfill the Dream" from New Orleans, Louisiana, to the Detroit, Michigan, forum starting on April 4, 2010, which is both Easter Sunday and the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The group, organizing a movement to end poverty, is demanding guaranteed healthcare and housing for everyone in the United States.

See the route, find out how to join, and support the march at old.economichumanrights.org/USSF2010.

Get There Early and Attend the Allied Media Conference

The Allied Media Conference, which is taking place immediately before the USSF, and has much of the same spirit, is offering a ride share board for people attending at alliedmediaconference.org/attend/getting_to_detroit.

Check www.ussf2010.org for updates

on caravans and other logistics for attending the conference.

But in the activist world, something very different was happening. Activists were mobilizing thousands for mass street protests. Independent media outlets were organizing to do their own reporting of events. Direct action advocates were making banners, puppets, and devices that protesters could use to lock down intersections and prevent delegates from attending the meetings. YES! executive director, Fran Korten, invited readers to come to Seattle to "greet" the WTO, and YES! ran articles explaining why.

The protests were so effective in part because there were so many independent groups doing their own planning, with loose coordination with other groups. The Teamsters and the "turtles" (the Sierra Club), Korean farmers and local farmers, students and policy wonks, churches and, yes, anarchists. 

Each day of the week had a theme of sorts. The first day, churches organized thousands to surround the stadium in the pouring rain to call for debt relief for the world's poorest countries. WTO delegates enjoyed a banquet in the warmth, while outside, drumming and poncho-clad protesters called for sharing.

More reflections on the 10th anniversary of Seattle WTO protests:
Walden Bello
Anuradha Mittal
Fran Korten
Rebecca Solnit
David Korten
David Solnit
Dispatches from the 1999 event:
YES! Magazine archive

Other days were devoted to women and development, food and agriculture, labor, and other topics. Each forum was organized by organizations from around the world and from the Seattle area who linked the issues they cared about most to the WTO and corporate globalization.

While many have discussed the direct action tactics used in Seattle, few have noted the "open source" quality of the events. The World Social Forum, which began in Brazil in 2001, adopted this powerful means of bringing divergent groups together.

One of the founders of the World Social Forum, Chico Whitaker Ferreira, told me in an interview at the European Social Forum in 2008 that the Seattle experience laid the foundation for the forum's success:

"In Seattle, we learned a very, very important thing: working by networks, not through pyramid structures, is much more efficient. The forums are always horizontal networking, because with networks, people take the responsibility.

Before 1999, nobody could imagine that so many people would go to Seattle from all over the world. It happened because of the power of horizontal networks."

The World Social Forum has a small number of principles, but within that scope, thousands of groups from the world's poorest to the world's wealthiest countries come together, hold their own conversations, make proposals and take power and responsibility for the outcomes. Coalitions are born, new understandings are reached, and millions have had the experience of being part of a global movement of civil society for a better "possible" world.

What happens when people around the world have these leaderless discussions? Can they get anything done? This has been a point of controversy in the World Social Forum movement, but one example shows what's possible. In late 2002, as the US was gearing up for war with Iraq, representatives of various peace movements gathered as part of the European Social Forum in Florence, and a discussion began about mass street demonstrations to be held around the world.

"It was not the World Social Forum that said, 'Let us go to the streets,'" Whitaker points out.

"The proposal appeared at a Social Forum in Florence. It reappeared at a forum in Brazil in 2003. Then networks, social movements, NGOs [nonprofits], and everybody worked together with one cause, one objective—and everybody was surprised. Fifty million people came out in the streets all over the world to protest the war."

No single organization or coalition could have made this happen. If such an organization existed, it would be subject to corruption and be vulnerable to counter attacks from outside and power struggles from within.

But many groupings of people—with access to structured ways to communicate and collaborate—can create a swarm that is unstoppable. That is one of the unheralded lessons of Seattle. It's a lesson we can build on as we work to stop the ravages of climate change and to build a more just and sustainable future.

Malik Rahim from Common Ground talked to Sarah van Gelder and a group from the Freedom Caravan when they visited the Common Ground center in New Orleans.  (note you may need to listen carefully as the audio quality is low, and volume is uneven)

The Common Ground vision for its neighborhood goes beyond restoring it to its previous state. Malik talks of ending the relationship of co-dependency with corporate energy sources by developing neighborhood sources of renewable energy. And he talks of restoring the wetlands that once protected lands from catastrophic flooding, and cleaning up the heavy metals in the soil by planting sunflowers and other plants that draw the poisons from the soil. This is about the restoration of a people and a place, in tandem.

For the complete Freedom Caravan story, see Sarah's blog.

Listen also to Victoria Rodriguez.

We came to get some rest. To get back in the swing.
'Cause the price was right. Looking for opportunities.
Looking for some place we might fit in.

We came to learn how to pass on what we've learned, how organizing can make a difference in community. We came, southern natives and transplanted Yankees suffering from culture shock and in the end, “We just real glad to be here!”

We are organizers all spreading the myth of our existence.
Doing it all, teaching the old, mentoring the young, protesting injustices, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, challenging the powerful, organizing for change. And we work hard for our money.

Take it back and share it—the culture of struggle.
Take it back and share it—a knowledge of those who came before.
Take it back and share it—rights god given

'Cause justice is creation centered in the symbols of god.
'Cause freedom is life, 'cause life is failure and success,
two boats on the water.

A bridge. A tree in winter.
A red crayola crayon that captures the heart throb, social commentary hidden in the common, 'cause the common can draw your attention.

Life is a traffic signal—choices every second, every minute.
Caution, stop, go, yield, turn here - -these are your rites of passage. A generation passing on survival skills.

Look up—look beyond, you possess the power to change life
by changing your mind. The key is in the door and it's on your side.

First light—it is the children who must contemplate the future
living through the sorrow.

Throw in your pennies, wiggle back and forth,
go through the process, and justice will let you in.

Pass It On!
Justice is something elemental like water and fire, air and earth.

Pass It On!
Teach them to fish

Pass It On!
'Cause life is a post card, the original process.

Pass It On
Pass It On
Pass It On

Imagine a world where everyone has what they need, where people make the decisions that matter and where government truly is for and by the people. Now, imagine we are working, talking, debating and planning to bring that world into being.

This is the World Social Forum (WSF) process, an open space where tens of thousands gather together to imagine and then work to realize that “other” world. Over the years, the World Social Forum has helped to advance fundamental regime change throughout the world. In places like Venezuela, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, grassroots movements have forged political environments that offer more than a choice between the lesser of two “evils.” They are crafting societies that demand authentic participation and voice.

The Forum's slogan is “Another World Is Possible.” I believe that. And I believe that in order for us to achieve that other world, we must bring the Social Forum movement home to help build another United States.

A Journey Starting in Seattle

This June 27th, thousands of like-minded people will meet for a week in Atlanta for the first national U.S. social forum. It is ironic that it has taken more than six years for the U.S. to host a national social forum because the World Social Forum process was birthed in an action that took place in the United States.

A movement was launched at the World Trade Organization conclave in 1999 in Seattle. Forget what the media showed you, release that frame and see it from another perspective. Paul Hawkens, a leading environmental businessman and author, in a January 2000 speech about the world trade organization and the events in Seattle wrote:

Already, the world's top 200 companies have twice the assets of 80 percent of the world's people. Global corporations represent a new empire whether they admit it or not. With massive amounts of capital at their disposal, any of which can be used to influence politicians and the public as and when deemed necessary, all democratic institutions are diminished and at risk. Corporate free market policies subvert culture, democracy, and community, a true tyranny.

The American Revolution occurred because of crown-chartered corporate abuse, a "remote tyranny" in Thomas Jefferson's words. To see Seattle as a singular event, as did most of the media, is to look at the battles of Concord and Lexington as meaningless skirmishes.

From the streets of Seattle and every struggle that proceeded from that day in November, a vision was born; the idea that maybe, just maybe another world other than the one being planned by the eight richest nations, a world that encompassed all the peoples of the world, was possible.

Bringing the Vision Home

The U.S. Social Forum (USSF) presents a unique opportunity to develop relationships, collaborative campaigns, and a greater sense of hope that indeed another U.S. is possible. The forum process places us in step with the global movement for justice, helps us connect our work in more strategic and inspired ways. Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.” This is the next important step in our struggle and this is the very heart of the forum process.

To date over 300 organizations are working to make the USSF a reality. What holds us together is the belief that we live in an interdependent world community and must hold each other accountable.

The WSF committee delegated Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ) to coordinate a U.S. Social Forum that would represent those most adversely affected by the ravages of globalization and neoliberal policies. GGJ is an alliance that grew out of people of color-led grassroots groups who participated in the first WSF. These grassroots leaders created a U.S. Social Forum Planning Committee. Atlanta was selected as the host city because of its location in the U.S. South.

I wanted to be a part of this process because I believe:

• in creating sustainable communities
• there must be an end to the worldwide AIDS epidemic and its devastation of Africa and India.
• that we must stand together in our support of nuclear disarmament and an end to nuclear proliferation
• that we must work to reform the juvenile justice system and put an end to the private prison industrial complex that profits from finding ways to make criminals of our youth
• that we should support indigenous land rights, as we oppose Artic drilling, environmental racism and Global Warming
• that we must support a just minimum wage because a job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it struggling to pay for necessities
• that everyone should have food, affordable housing, extensive and affordable public transportation systems, education and quality health care
• that we are a nation of immigrants and must stand in support for Immigrant Justice
• that we must join thousands of organizations and congregations across this nation and around the world that are working for the end of war; those committed to take nonviolent action to end the U.S. war in Iraq, who call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops and occupation in Iraq.
• and that we must not be silent in the face of man made misery and destruction like what is taking place in Darfur.

Here in the U.S., we have our own man made devastation. One year after Katrina, the failure of the levees and “homeland” policy have been exposed. And these man made failures have contributed to the devastation of the Gulf Coast and the scattering of hundreds of thousands of persons from New Orleans across this nation.

Katrina is a wake up call that we must embrace our mutual interdependence and take responsibility for one another's well being. The reality is we are each linked to the fate of all persons in this nation, whether the storms and floods directly affected us or not. This awareness of our interdependence will be at the core of the USSF as the forum will feature updates on conditions in the Gulf Coast and the policies affecting the region and its residents.

It is time for us to connect—all of us who are committed to justice, love, equality, creativity, and sustainability. We must work collectively to ensure deep and lasting social change and for the protection of the planet.

Alice Lovelace is the national lead staff organizer of the United States Social Forum. First published by In Motion Magazine, November 22, 2006.