"This assumption can sometimes lead activists to become walking, talking encyclopedias of doom. However, as organizers, our job is to help move people into action, and no fact is so shocking or profound that its utterance will spontaneously spark a movement." 20
"When a fact or set of facts prompts people to change course, it's usually because someone or something has interrupted the narrative they knew and told a story that feels more true - one worth making changes over." 21
"Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling. If their role in your story feels like 'doom appreciator,' most people will recoil, retreat to their own smaller story, and keep the focus there." 23
"Capitalism requires an ever-broadening disposable class of people in order to maintain itself, which in turn requires us to believe that there are people whose fates are not linked to our own: people who must be abandoned or eliminated." 32
"In order to invest in a new vision, and a new way of living, we have to believe in each other and our capacity to create something better. Our belief in human potential must outweigh our fear of human failure. Our imagination must be courageous." 34
"Amid a landscape of catastrophe and extraction draped in bright plastic product displays and endless streams of escapism, most people are simply being herded along. They do as they are told and try to replicate the same set of relations that defined life before. As things deteriorate, they keep trying. They do not know what else to do. Nothing in their experience or imagination has prepared them to conceptualize the realities of capitalism, their real relationship to it, or any fathomable escape." 45
"An organizer can also ask, 'What would make this more interesting and appealing to you? What would make this more interesting for the people that you know? Are there other people that you know that want to get involved?' We build better relationships, Dixon said, 'when we build projects where people honestly have a stake in the project, not because we told them they have to, but because we've asked them what they need and we are responsive to the needs of multiple people." 49
"The creative power of the oppressed ill always exceed that of the oppressor, because it is the oppressed who must exercise creativity to navigate and survive a world that is set against them. It is the oppressed who create art and poetry and revolutionary ideas to cultivate hope in bleak places, so that people might galvanize and make change." 78
"... we have to break free from the shackles of individualism and commit to building a culture of care, in which everyone's well-being and survival are significant." 78
"We urge organizers to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from - the stories, wisdom, hope, and imaginings of organizers who came before us." 85
"Work that can only occur within corporate confines can be eliminated according to corporate whims. We need to strategize around alternative modes of digital outreach and use in-person outreach methods, such as canvassing, flyering, in-person mutual aid and other community events." 92
"When we believe in each other, we are more likely to take risks and to invest ourselves in possibility, even when our own hopes are not fully formed. In this way, our relationships and the work of relationship building can change our sense of what's possible." 97
"It is important to understand the distinction between activists, organizers, and political hobbyists. Hobbyists often have very strict political standards around respectability or radicalism, to which few activists ever seem to rise. If you organize anything political, you are likely to attract the criticism of hobbyists, since for some people, critique is a pastime." 98
"Grief work, healing work, and conflict resolution have always been important to our movements, but in this age of catastrophe they are more crucial than ever. A strong organizing community is more than a labor force for social justice. It is an ecosystem of care, learning, relationship building, and action." 103
"Sometimes becoming 'aware' of 'bearing witness' is simply an act of consumption. Given the sheer amount of media available to any person with an internet connection, we have no shortage of 'witness' to atrocity... The goal is to pull people into an active formation and build something. To do that, we have to draw people into conversations about the harms that have been done to our communities, how we can help one another, and how we can thwart the forces that are harming us. Through that work, the generation o new vision born in collectivity becomes possible." 105
"Conditions that the state characterizes as 'peaceful' are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of health care, and many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating... when they refer to 'peaceful protest,' they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state... It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice." 111
"The violence of the state in response to protest is rarely scrutinized to the degree that protesters are scrutinized. The idea that if you are defiant in the face of authority you should expect to incur its wrath is firmly entrenched in our culture." 111
"Because, under capitalism, 'peace' is the maintenance of violence on the state's terms. Organized efforts to disrupt those harms will always be characterized, by any necessary stretch of the imagination, as violent." 115
"As Kayali told us, the Israeli government's definition of violence 'contorts itself to repress any and all forms of our resistance.'" 125
"The maintenance of global capitalism necessitates mass death, just as the maintenance of capitalism in the United States requires the violence of the carceral system. If these systems function without interruption, you will be told you are experiencing 'peace.' After all, police are often cast as 'peace officers,' and soldiers are called 'peacekeepers.'" 128
"People who are understandably impatient for large-scale changes often want to believe that there's a shortcut: that one group, movement, or demographic is the truth and the way and that merely cheering on that contingent will spur a revolution. This places undue pressure on whatever group or demographic is being fetishized as a savior troupe." 136
"... organizers need to develop a vision of who they want to be in relation to their community, their movement, and other people, instead of focusing on self-elevation. What role will they play in the context of the larger group? What are their skills and knowledge base? What will they not do? These are questions that must be answered together with others in the struggle." 137
"May also suggested that rotating the role of 'spokespersons' among members of the group is a way to avoid placing one organizer on a permanent pedestal." 138
"Grief, after all, is a manifestation of love, and our capacity to grieve is in some ways proportional to our capacity to care. Grief is painful, but when we process our grief in community, we are less likely to slip into despair." 151
"Organizing makes it possible to grieve in ways that make a different future visible." 159
"Active hope is a practice... First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we'd like things to move in or the values we'd like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction." 176
"Acts of rebellious grief can take many shapes, but all are a rejection of mass death and an insistence on the humanity of those who have passed." 178
"... to create movements, rather than clubhouses, we need to engage with people with whom we do not fully identify and may even dislike... We will, at times, have to constructively critique people's behavior or simply allow them room to grow. There will be other times, of course, when we have to draw hard lines, but if we cannot organize beyond the bounds of our comfort zones, we will never build movements large enough to combat the forces that would destroy us." 182
"As we struggle to balance our lives with what the work demands of us, we must ask ourselves whether the manner in which we organize reflects the world we want to build." 200
"I am the person I am today because of the people who chose to build relationships with me along the way... I feel deeply for people who are still out there, going it alone, believing they are supposed to make it as individuals and blaming themselves when they falter. We were not meant to survive that way, and it's no surprise when we cannot in a world that is set against us in so many ways." 222
"So how can you - how will you - lessen suffering where you are?" 229
"Radical imagination is essential to organizing and also important to me because the horizon that I am working toward is a world I have never seen: a world without policing, imprisonment, or surveillance." 231
"Even if the end times are upon us, we should still plant trees." 232
"While many of us have our own self-care rituals, few have collective-care and conflict resolution skills. Frankly, it is often easier to be dangerous to the state systems that we confront than it is to be tender with each other." 235
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