Who is organizing ows

Founders included Max Berger, an Occupy alum and later member of Justice Democrats; Kate Werning, who came out of immigrant rights organizing and the Wisconsin Uprising; Mimi Hitzemann and Guido Girgenti, student organizers who had also been involved in Occupy; and Belinda Rodriguez, who came out of the climate justice movement. Most of the early trainings and curriculum development process were led by two other founders Carlos Saavedra — who was grounded by his experiences organizing undocumented immigrants through United We Dream — and Paul Engler, who created the L.

Both Saavedra and Engler came primarily from what they would call the world of structure-based organizing. This is the work of building long-standing organizations deeply rooted in pre-existing structures like churches and workplaces, and developing local leaders who are capable of leading their community members to demand concrete concessions from those with direct decision-making abilities, like elected officials and workplace bosses.

The last part is crucial because it relies on using the long-term threats of actions like election challenges and strikes to force targeted decision makers to do something they would otherwise not. Structure-based organizing contrasts heavily with what happened in Occupy, often called mass protest organizing.

Mass protest organizing focuses on dramatic actions that get large amounts of people out on the streets and use sheer numbers to force immediate political change. This form of organizing relies more on the sheer power of disruption of business as usual to succeed in the moment, a form of power that is hard to maintain in the long term without strong structures and relationships to keep people committed to the fight.

Momentum was created to address the issues of Occupy and improve upon the model. While the organization has crafted its own training program, it sees itself more as a curator of concepts from past and present than a chief inventor presenting fully novel ideas. Members of the community experiment with the curriculum and create organizations by implementing its concepts. Within the Momentum community exist different ideologies, priorities and ideas of how victory can be accomplished.

The organization serves as a container that can hold these debates and generate new best practices from the lessons provided by leaders actively practicing theories of change.

The idea has been to create a virtuous cycle of movement theory and practice. Organizers from movements like Occupy and the Obama-era undocumented immigrant youth, or Dreamer, movement came together at Momentum trainings and agreed upon shared language.

This shared language allowed them to debate, analyze and come together to form new organizations. Leaders from the Dreamer movement would experiment with focusing on a specific demographic and build Movimiento Cosecha to organize undocumented workers across the country.

A group of organizers from the Divestment Student Network, a campus-based environmental justice organization, joined together to form Sunrise Movement, which took the disruptive actions of the mass protest tradition and combined them with a clear, stable electoral engagement strategy to popularize their solution to the climate crisis, the Green New Deal. IfNotNow, an organization focused on ending American Jewish support for the occupation of Palestine, reformulated its strategy as a part of the community.

Dissenters, a new antiwar organization created by young people of color, including anti-sweatshop labor activist Byul Yoon, received support from Momentum throughout their early development. This project involved collaboration between Cosecha and IfNotNow and received support from Momentum staff as it considered next steps.

The cycle continues as leaders from organizations like Sunrise come back to Momentum to lead trainings and attend skillshare events. These skillshares primarily involve presentations from organizers that summarize lessons from their experiences, like findings from an experiment in communal housing leaders in apartments across the country.

They also involve open discussions and panels in which ideas like electoral engagements can be discussed and debated. Here leaders can receive a crash course on the results of different campaigns and projects and take the knowledge back into their own organizing. Momentum has taken information from these skillshares and used them to update the curriculum, which is then passed on to a new generation of participants. Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support.

Become a sustaining monthly donor today! Feedback from those think tanks and complimentary one-on-one interviews are used to develop comprehensive reports — many of which will be released this year for the public. It is this process of training, practice and reflection that makes Momentum so effective. While many see Occupy as a failure or victory for the left, Momentum understands it as a lesson that needs to be dissected and understood.

Much like Occupy, none of the currently existing movements are perfect, but they will provide lessons for the next iteration of organizers who seek to take the mantle and push the limits of the politically possible. Momentum gives organizers a home to do that, a shelter and home base that carries the legacy of Occupy and the many generations of movement practitioners that came before it. He is also a lead trainer with Momentum, a mass movement training community and a member of Philly Socialists.

Your email address will not be published. Please keep comments constructive and relevant to the post. Digressions, personal attacks, hateful language and unsubstantiated claims will be removed — as will comments tied to false email addresses, impersonations and copyright-protected material. Before writing about World War I dissenters and other seekers of justice, Adam Hochschild honed his storytelling skills as a rabble-rousing antiwar GI. The public banking movement is creating an opening wedge for the transfer of our financial system from private to public control.

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To donate by check, cryptocurrency or other method, see our Ways to Give page. Momentum leaders at a skillshare training sharing insights from the field and creating unique trainings to capture the latest research, tactics, and strategies. Momentum co-founder Carlos Saavedra speaking at a training in Milwaukee in On September 17 th , protestors set up a base camp of tents and sleeping bags at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. The movement started quietly, but quickly gained attention after police disrupted protest marches in Union Square and on the Brooklyn Bridge.

As videos of police arresting and using pepper-spray against peaceful protesters circulated on YouTube, the mainstream media began to pay closer attention. As awareness spread, protestors started Occupy movements in other cities across America. The removal of the protestors effectively ended the public phase of Occupy Wall Street. The OWS movement began as a reaction to the effects of the financial recession in America.

The US housing markets experienced a violent crash in late In response, newly-elected President Obama authorized the US government to bail-out the banks using billions of taxpayer dollars. The financial institutions that survived began to foreclose on struggling homeowners while continuing to reward their executives with million-dollar bonuses and lavish incentives.

This stark contrast exposed the growing income gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country Castells, The OWS protestors pointed to this inequality and advocated for a more just system. The roots of the OWS movement can be traced to other significant nonviolent protest movements in America and across the globe. The anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the s used principles of nonviolence to persuade mass audiences that their causes were just.

They understood that riots, looting, and destruction of property would undermine their moral position. While some OWS protestors wanted to engage in violent acts to garner attention to the cause, others pointed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement as an example of the effectiveness of nonviolent protest.

They believed the same tactics — large scale occupation of public spaces and creative use of technology and social media — could be used to unite protestors around the perceived injustices of the US financial system Jensen and Bang, Although the OWS movement had deep roots in earlier nonviolent protests, it was the first opportunity for many in the Millennial generation to address their own unique social, political, and economic concerns. Many had voted for Obama and were inspired by his vision for hope and change in America, but the climate in America three years later was not what they had expected.

Millennials brought their generational values with them to the protest: a commitment to social justice, democratic decision-making processes, a resistance to formal organizational hierarchies and an insistence on openness and dialogue between people of different classes, genders, races and sexual orientations.

Though critics argue that the OWS movement did not accomplish any concrete political goals, the participants argue they were only seeking to establish a public conversation around the issue of economic injustice Castells, By drawing attention to the deepening income inequality in America, protestors considered OWS a success.

Web sites and social media were the perfect vehicles for the OWS message because the internet was a radically democratic form of communication; anyone could post their ideas and suggest activities to further their cause. The use of technology — particularly social media — to organize protests and communicate goals, objectives and activities is a new form of social movement that constitutes a break from the protest movements of the past. In fact, such differences tend to be regarded as a resource for, rather than a barrier to, doing things in common" Jensen and Bang, , p.

The OWS movement provides a template for modern social protests in its use of technology to unite people in common causes despite traditional cultural differences. The OWS movement is also an excellent example of a new form of voluntary association, distinct from the more formalized associations of the recent past.