Since 2001, people from all corners of the globe have come to the World Social Forums (WSF) to build strategies for another world. This year, the World Social Forum is coming to them.

Thousands of people and organizations will take part in a week of action, January 20–26, 2008. Local organizers are planning events in more than 70 countries. By late October, more than 2,020 organizations and individuals had committed to mobilize in January, at the same time the World Economic Forum is meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

“This time, you don't go to the World Social Forum, you bring the forum to your city, to your community—you create a World Social Forum,” says Alessandra Ceregatti from the World Social Forum office in São Paulo, Brazil.

“Creating local events using the WSF method of open space workshops and grassroots leadership can be both stimulating and challenging,” she says.

This isn't the first World Social Forum to move beyond a one-location event. To allow activists from a greater number of locations to participate, the 2006 WSF was celebrated in Venezuela, Mali, and Pakistan.

The 2008 WSF will be even more decentralized, which will help the movement expand beyond the usual suspects. Organizers are encouraged to stage events outside, in the street, where they can “enter in dialogue with the whole society—including those people who are not linked to any organization, movement, struggle,” Ceregatti says.

In the United States, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, a driving force behind the first U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, has put out a call to join the day of action under the motto “Many Struggles, One Movement.”

True to the spirit of the WSF, all events are self-organized, and the international coordinators simply provide the space for activists to step into. A website collects all event plans, allowing individuals and organizations to learn what is being planned and to connect their actions.

The site encourages cross-border collaboration around particular issues. International housing and land-rights networks are creating a joint campaign. The Human Dignity and Human Rights Caucus is another international space for collaboration.

The WSF also suggests using the events to link individual issues to other struggles. The groups active within the Belgian Social Forum have chosen this approach. Organizations will frame their different campaigns through the common lens of human rights in a city tour through Brussels.

Global radio broadcasting and public screenings of different events in places around the world will help infuse local gatherings with the same exuberance and excitement that are a trademark of the central social forums.

Lilja Otto wrote this article as part of Liberate Your Space, the Winter 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Lilja is the consulting editor on this issue of YES! Magazine. She attended the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in June, 2007.

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.

	Stilt walkers at the opening day march, with signs about what is possible and necessary. Photo by Sarah van Gelder

It was a moment organizers in the United States and in many parts of the world had been waiting for. After years in the planning, the United States joined a global movement of movements that comes together under the banner: Another world is possible.

The United States Social Forum (USSF) was led by people of color and representatives of grassroots organizations, some of whom count their members in the thousands. Instead of drawing crowds with superstar speakers and performers, the participants were the stars. Those who are accustomed to being excluded were at the center, and those who were used to being silenced were heard.

The USSF “is a milestone for the emerging planetary citizenship that is converging through the World Social Forum process,” said Cândido Grzybowski in a web posting. Grzybowski is director of the Brazilian organization IBASE and one of the founders of the World Social Forum. “It is encouraging to witness the transformation of the North American political culture itself and of its popular base, which is infused with inspiration, initiative and courage.”

	Rashad, Troy, and Roosevelt of the Urban Youth Movement, a group that relocated to Atlanta from New Orleans. Photo by Andy Davey

Between 10,000 and 12,000 people came to Atlanta to talk about war, peace, human rights, living wages, jobs, energy, climate justice, Katrina, immigrant rights, poor people's rights, and new approaches to economics.

Organizers of the USSF drew on their experiences attending the World Social Forums to prepare for Atlanta. “We saw the power that comes from opening up a space in which all the issues and all the different movements can converge,” said Genaro Rendon, co-director of the San Antonio, Texas, based Southwest Workers Union.

To get people to Atlanta, organizers from many parts of the country organized caravans of cars, vans, and buses. The People's Freedom Caravan was among the largest. Each stop of the Caravan's six-day journey from Albuquerque to Atlanta was hosted by a different local group. In Albuquerque, the attention centered on Native American sacred sites and immigrant rights. In Houston and San Antonio, it was pollution from oil refineries and an Air Force base that was harming the health of those living nearby. In New Orleans, Freedom Caravan riders helped clean up a public housing project and learned of the struggle of Katrina survivors to return home. In Jackson and Selma, it was the movement for living wages and efforts to find and prosecute those involved in the murders of civil rights workers decades ago.

	Freedom Caravan riders at the Valero plant in Houston, remembering those sickened by the plant's pollution. Photo by Sarah van Gelder

Local activists from each stop joined the Caravan; by the time it reached Atlanta, this Social Forum on wheels was 500 people strong.

From Possibility to Reality

The opening march was led by native peoples, followed by stilt walkers, giant puppets, bicyclers, and marching bands interspersed with delegations from across the country, each highlighting the issues and hopes for a better world that brought them to Atlanta.

There were nearly 900 workshops in dozens of venues, and 14 “solidarity tents” centered on Native Americans, Africa, youth, democracy, health, peace and justice, water, the solidarity economy, and other topics. There were giant plenaries, a ceremony led by an Ojibewe water-keeper to recognize the sacredness of water, a “family reunion” for formerly incarcerated people and their friends and families, a film festival, a youth encampment, a children's social forum, and concerts and parties that ran late into the night.

The genius of the social forum model is its self-organized quality. All those who register have the opportunity to propose workshops in advance of the forum and to organize activities in the solidarity tents. Participants, rather than forum organizers, determine most of the content of the forum and lead the workshops. By allowing all to have their say, and by being rigorously inclusive, many of the power struggles that divide diverse coalitions are avoided and the focus stays on building a better world.

	Indigenous leadership and culture had a strong presence Photo by Brooke Anderson

Nonetheless, conflict happens. On the last day, at the People's Movements Assembly, indigenous participants took offense when the microphone was taken from an Ecuadorian indigenous man before he was finished speaking. The People's Movements Assembly process allows participants two minutes each to make a proposal in front of the entire group. The indigenous group asked for, and received, 15 minutes to work through the issues raised by the incident with speeches and a drum circle.

“I hope the audience understood how we stand in solidarity around someone who has been wronged,” said Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “We have cultural practices around bringing back dignity, and the drum is a central part of that.”

“We're trying to build unity, but there are going to be differences,” said Cindy Wiesner, a member of the National Planning Committee. “We have to learn to navigate conflict and listen, but also stand for what we each believe in and for what's good for the whole.”

A Historic Moment

What difference did the Social Forum make? What is possible now that was not possible before? Most apparent was the inspiration people took from witnessing the strength, diversity, and youth of the crowd, and the passion people bring to making change.

	Black Workers for Justice gave a workshop on how to organize in so-called "right to work" states. Photo by Barb Howe

“People were in awe of the ways people all across the country and across the world are doing their work and trying to figure out how to build an alternative to what is,” said Wiesner.

Many went home with plans to host local social forums and to build on newly formed collaborations:

• A dozen domestic workers' groups from California to Maryland founded a national network.
• A U.S. Solidarity Economy Network formed out of a group that had organized a series of workshops.
• The recently formed Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) introduced a ten-point platform for media justice at the USSF.
• The Right to the City coalition, made up of groups working on gentrification and displacement, went public.

“The USSF did what many conferences and other types of movement and sector gatherings have tried—provide not one big tent, but a visionary meta-frame within which a variety of allied formations could set up camp,” Malkia Cyril, director of Youth Media Justice, wrote in her blog.

The USSF “ignited a prairie fire of optimism within the progressive left, the sheer size and diversity of which has not been witnessed in this country in decades,” Celeste Lacy Davis of the Funding Exchange wrote in her blog.

“The time is right,” said Jerome Scott of Project South, one of the USSF organizers. “When you look at the average American's economic situation, it is bad and getting worse. ... The American people are getting to the point where they know that fundamental change is absolutely essential.”

For some, the welcome they received at the USSF was a revelation.

“To come to a gathering where we meet non-native people who are so appreciative and thirsty for communication with us, many didn't know how to take that,” said Goldtooth.

“Gatherings like this will be more frequent,” he predicted. “We're all children of Earth, and we need to start respecting the sacredness of Mother Earth and working together.”

What's Next?

The National Planning Committee has called for another U.S. Social Forum to be held in 2010 and it has endorsed the World Social Forum International Council's call for a global mobilization culminating on January 26, 2008.

There will be a Social Forum of the Americas in Guatemala in October 2008, and another World Social Forum, most likely in the Amazon region, in 2009.

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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

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.

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.
  

What is the World Social Forum? Photo by Sarah van Gelder   Social Forums have been taking place around the world since 2001, when organizers, principally from Latin America and Europe, brought together 20,000 people in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The idea was to go beyond protesting outside the World Economic Forum, where the rich and powerful set a global agenda. Instead, through a World Social Forum, ordinary people could set the agenda under the banner "Another World is Possible." The forum was inspired in part by the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, which were accompanied by participant-organized seminars and teach-ins on topics ranging from food and agriculture to women and development. Rather than have a central group plan activities, organizers set up the space in which social change groups from around the world could organize their own sessions. The next World Social Forum will take place in Nairobi, Kenya, January 20-25, 2007. See the World Social Forum web site and the U.S. Social Forum web site.

There was no hotel ballroom. The opening took place instead at the historic Hayti Community Center, built in 1891 as a church and later converted into a hall that accommodated the likes of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The organizers of the Southeast Social Forum, held in Durham, North Carolina, in June, made clear who was at the center of the gathering. Mothers and fathers, factory workers, labor organizers, farm workers, community organizers—each group was asked to rise to applause.

People who had worked hard to raise the funds and bring a delegation spoke of what they hoped to take back when they returned to Miami, Atlanta, the Gulf Coast, and Virginia.

“We are the ones we've been waiting for,” someone said. And moments later, the historic church filled with the famous Sweet Honey in the Rock song — in three-part harmony.

Organizers prepared participants for the coming days' work by reminding them that they would have many workshops and activities to choose from. But, “if you are not getting what you need out of this, you're organizers! You know what to do.” Space would be available for spontaneous sessions called by participants, along with opportunities to announce these sessions.

Every voice had been raised, and the stage was set for two days of work aimed at strengthening and connecting the progressive movements of the South and laying the foundation for the U.S. Social Forum, which will take place in Atlanta in the summer of 2007.

You are how you meet

The design of social forums is radically different from that of ordinary conferences. The organizers set up a space and time, establish the process, and define the major themes. But it is the participating organizations that provide the substance for the sessions and organize their members to attend.

Social forums are designed to build grassroots leadership. The content of the workshops “has to be things participants can put to use in their lives, and it has to come from their lives,” says Alice Lovelace, the lead staff organizer for the U.S. Social Forum. “We start by acknowledging that everyone in the room has knowledge.”

People want to know what tangible outcomes they can expect from the forums, said Michael Guerrero, coordinator of Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ). GGJ has been bringing delegations of American grassroots leaders to the World Social Forums for the last several years. “How can the social forum be a strategic point in your work?” he asks these groups. “How can we use forums to integrate the movements and to start developing a long-term vision?”

While single-issue organizations can galvanize their members to make change, in order to muster suffi cient political clout to change the direction of society, the movements need to come together.

“There is so much division in the United States,” says Guerrero. “We're too quick to burn bridges, too competitive and unwilling to recognize the contributions that everyone makes.”

“We have to figure out how to have differences and still work together,” he adds. “And we need to look at the broad scope of the progressive movement and how it all fits together.”

“We've reached a critical moment,” said Stephanie Guilloud, one of the lead organizers, and program director for Project South. “We are running out of options. Reforms are being rolled back; small gains are rolled back. We need to change tactics. This is the time for transformation on a larger scale.”

Coming, at last, to the U.S.

North America is the last region of the world to host a national or regional social forum, and few Americans have attended the World Social Forums.

When the International Council of the World Social Forum first began pressing for a U.S. or North American Social Forum, GGJ argued against it.

“There was not enough awareness early on,” says Guerrero. “We felt that there was a lot of work to do to raise awareness in communities of color and grassroots groups, so it would be representative.”

The Southeast Social Forum was a test to see if a U.S. forum was possible. Organizing for the regional forum began early this year out of the Atlanta offices of Project South, on a tight timeline, with little money. Organizers wanted to build the Durham event from the grassroots up, with strong participation by youth and workingclass people, and a majority of people of color. And they were hoping to have at least 500 people attend from throughout the south.

They invited organizations with grassroots memberships to rent buses, hold fundraisers, do whatever was necessary to bring the people who seldom go to conferences.

To prepare the young people, Project South held four weekends of “Building a Movement” (BAM) workshops, culminating in the social forum.

To get a strong representation of Latinos, the mainly African-American organizers hired an outreach organizer with money raised at a special fundraiser. Simultaneous translation was available throughout the forum.

Organizers wanted the forum to be a place to address the tensions between African Americans and Latinos that had grown in the wake of the massive immigrant rights demonstrations. And they wanted to fully involve those who are organizing in the devastated areas along the Gulf Coast.

“We knew the risk,” says Guilloud. “And we knew we were succeeding when the registrations began coming in,” she said. “We'd get phone calls from people saying, ‘I'm bringing 18 people on a bus. We're bringing moms and kids.'”

People came from across the South—rural Georgia, Atlanta, Miami, and the Gulf Coast. “We had people from immigrant groups, people working on fair wages, the environment, housing, civic justice, labor rights for service employees, and people from progressive churches,” says Lovelace. “We had farmworkers, domestic workers, low-income people of all kinds.”

Showing up, fully human

The spirit of the forum was felt not only in the content of the sessions, but in the ways that participants' emotional and spiritual needs were addressed.

For those tired from the travel, burned out, or in recovery from Katrina—for anyone who wanted a respite—there was a Healing Sanctuary. Inside was an altar to any who participants wanted remembered, a quiet space for meditation, prayer, or rest, and a room where massage and various forms of body work were offered and gratefully accepted.

Elsewhere, a dorm lounge was transformed into kids' space with tents, hiphop dance, a vision quilt, and a map where children could show where they had come from.

“People often see these sorts of things as fluff,” Guilloud said. “But this is quite necessary. We need to stop compartmentalizing ourselves and integrate our whole selves into our work.”

U.S. Social Forum—2007

The day after the forum, organizers met to take a breath, and to celebrate, before plunging into preparations for the U.S. Social Forum. They had exceeded their goals on all counts. Nearly 600 people had come, nearly a third of whom were youth, and 80 percent people of color.

“We are making history together,” said one of the organizers. “If we can do this in a few months with few resources, imagine what we can do in a year!”

“What we saw is that people are ready to engage and confront the edges that have kept us apart,” said Guilloud. “We're building a movement that is democratic,” said Guerrero. “Building from the bottom up is slower and harder, but it will pay off.”

The U.S. Social Forum is starting with grassroots groups, communities of color, and indigenous groups. “These are the groups with the least resources, usually the last to be brought into a process,” Guerrero said. “If we didn't start here, these would be the hardest groups to integrate later.”

Other groups from the peace movement, the global justice movement, the progressive political movements, and so on will be invited, too, to a process that is open to all.

“It will change this country. I know it will,” said Lovelace. “This is part of a long-term process to work together and to envision what transforming this country and this world means.”

Sarah van Gelder is Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.

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.

The occasion was the fourth World Social Forum (WSF). Held in Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay), it was the first WSF to be held outside of Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Imagine a setting like a giant state fair—only instead of pigs, pies, and amusement rides—the tents and halls hold seminars and workshops on pressing issues, the stages are alive with dancers, poetry, and plays, and the streets noisy with drumming, chanting groups of indigenous peoples and Dalits (the Indian “untouchable” caste). Now imagine this huge event with no advertisements for SUV's, designer clothes, or fast food—instead the signs call for campaigns to stop the privatization of water, make Tibet a zone of peace, and promote fair trade, not free trade.

Imagine such a space with no Coca Cola or Pepsi. (Activists and villagers in several areas of India claim Coke's bottling plants are drying up village wells and polluting rivers, and have launched campaigns that call Coke “unthinkable, undrinkable.”) Then imagine a space filled with raucous protests, vigorous debates, and exuberant celebrations where there are few if any security searches and the police are friendly and helpful. Imagine people of all races and classes, hot, tired, squeezed together in noisy, crowded streets, greeting each other with warmth and respect. Imagine all of that and you have imagined the fourth WSF, a space that not only declares another world is possible—it creates that world.

Not surprisingly, the current U.S. administration was a common target of protest. Participants universally condemned the U.S. military intervention in Iraq and the takeover of Iraq's economy and resources. Noted author and activist Arundhati Roy, called on participants to focus on “two major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq,” track down their offices worldwide, and shut them down. Despite the anger directed toward U.S. policies, I felt no hostility toward me as an American; everyone I met expressed gratitude for allies working within the “belly of the beast.”

Over the six days of the Forum, momentum built for a global protest march on March 20th—the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Participants clearly had in mind the success of the February 15, 2003, marches, which were called for at the November 2002 European Social Forum. That call was magnified at the third WSF in January 2003, generating the largest protest march in the history of the world, and earning global civil society the moniker of the world's “second superpower.”

The first WSF, in January 2001, was conceived as a counter to the corporate-led globalization agenda of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland. But four years later, I heard no mention of Davos. The WSF has come into its own as a place where civil society can advance alternatives to the “neoliberal” agenda and strengthen the networks and movements to make those alternatives real.

The WSF is on a rapid-growth trajectory. The 80,000 participants from 132 countries at Mumbai dwarfed the 20,000 participants at the first WSF. At Mumbai, the 120-page tabloid-sized program tantalized participants with choices of over 1,200 events, up from 420 at the first WSF. What enables this vast offering is that the WSF itself puts on only a few of the events. For the rest, it provides an “open space” in which participants create their own workshops and cultural offerings, making them vibrant reflections of the hopes and concerns of people around the world.

Not only have the global gatherings grown, but over the last 18 months, regional social forums have burgeoned in Africa, Europe, as well as Asia and Latin America. This year, a Social Forum of the Americas is planned in Quito, Ecuador, in late July. And in early October, a Northwest Social Forum—which we at YES! are assisting—will be held in Seattle.

The end of the decade of massive UN-sponsored global meetings explains in part the growth of the WSF. The UN decade, which started so spectacularly with the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and went on to include the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, came to an end with the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban. The UN is not currently planning any more of the huge world summits. But the self-conscious identity that global civil society gained through those conferences is stronger than ever and is now finding expression in a space created not by a top-down global bureaucracy but by civil society itself.

Moving from Porto Alegre to India this year gave the Forum an even clearer position as civil society's premier global gathering. And with Dalits and adivasis (India's indigenous peoples), women's groups, gays and lesbians, and refugees declaring their right to live in dignity, human rights have joined the issues of corporate-led globalization and militarism as central to the WSF agenda.

In January 2005, the Forum will return to Porto Alegre. For 2006, the location is undecided, with many pushing for Africa. Others are asking that the Forum be held every other year to make more space for regional forums.

The growth of the World Social Forum and the flowering of regional forums has naturally brought controversy, even within the activist community. For some, the WSF's commitment to nonviolence makes it too tame; others feel the Forum's insistence on being a space and a process, but not in itself a source of common positions saps its potential for advancing collective agendas.

The controversy and the growing academic literature about the Forums are additional indications that these gatherings have taken center stage as the place where global civil society meets—to protest a disastrously unfair world order and to develop a more empowering vision. The Forums have become a living, breathing manifestation of an emerging planetary consciousness and the indomitable human capacity to imagine that—yes, another world is possible.

Fran Korten is publisher of YES! Magazine.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.