Resist a return to normal, build a just transition now!

This is a 5-part series aimed at sparking radical imagination by sharing stories of grassroots power and struggles for community self-determination. This series intends to be an educational tool to those who want to build a new world, but don’t know where to start 🛠🌱

As our communities struggle to survive this pandemic — amidst a governance and economic system that has failed us — how will we reclaim our power, and create a world where our needs are met and no one is disposable?

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Community-Controlled Health Care

Housing as a Human Right

Just Transition and Climate Justice

Regenerative Finance

Land Back & Indigenous Sovereignty

COVID-19 has made it clearer than ever that the current health care infrastructure is racist, classist, ableist, and criminally inadequate. Frontline communities have a longstanding history of resisting this system by building community-controlled alternatives in its place. Alternatives where frontline, BIPOC communities receive the quality care they need. Alternatives where disabled, chronically ill, and immuno-compromised folks are not disposable, but whose lives are centered and held sacred.

How can we build community-controlled health infrastructure that is safe, free and accessible to all?

In many of our communities, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the preexisting crises of eviction, displacement, and gentrification created by the for-profit housing system. In the past few years, we’ve seen communities across the country using direct action to remove land and housing from the speculative market and build long-term community control.

How do we resist speculative market forces and build a world where housing is truly a human right?

Frontline communities and workers are impacted first and worst by the interlinked crises of climate change and the extractive economy. A dig, burn, and dump economy based on extracting natural and human resources faster than we can regenerate will eventually come to an end — either through collapse or through our intentional re-organization. Transition is inevitable. Justice is not.

How can we resist false climate solutions and ensure a just transition that restores our communities and the web of life?

Financial systems in our current economy are based on extracting value from land and people in order to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few — fueling economic, political and ecological crises globally. Transforming finance is crucial to transforming our economy. In recent years, divestment movements have encouraged a whole wave of communities to move public resources out of Wall Street banks, fossil fuel companies, war and prison profiteers, and other extractive industries.

Once we divest from extractive institutions: Where do we move our money? How can we use finance as a tool to restore wealth to the communities it’s been extracted from and grow our collective resources?

The U.S. was built on stolen land by stolen lives and labor. Returning land and sovereignty to Indigenous peoples is a requisite to building economies rooted in a just relationship with each other and the earth.

We acknowledge that struggles for collective determination and sovereignty over Indigenous lands are as diverse as the hundreds of Indigenous nations across Turtle Island.  Within this context, how do we resist extraction and desecration of sacred sites while permanently returning land and sovereignty to Indigenous peoples?

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