Southeast Peoples Movements Assembly Organizing Tour (plan)

Hello Ruben & Reynaldo!

We submit a picture and shout out from Atlanta! The Southeast Summer Organizing Drive has begun!

RAISING THE GROUND
Organizing the South for Solidarity & Justice
8 Organizations*
17 Organizers
8 Action Sites
10 Weeks
The Southeast Summer Organizing Drive, a new initiative of eight Southern movement building organizations, anchored by Project South, seeks to develop strategic collaborative action across many issues, state-lines, and communities. Given the history of the South and the call to action from many parts of the world, it’s time for a new generation of leadership to redefine and re-imagine our movements.

The Southern Organizing Team is an amazing group of 17 organizers have committed their summers to strengthening organizations that are instrumental to social justice work in their respective communities, cities, states, and movements. We are working together to build organizational partnerships which serve to build, grow, and strengthen a Southern movement for social justice.  Thank you for responding to the call for new energy, new ideas, and new leadership.

Over the last three days, the Organizing Team gathered in Atlanta to train together at the Organizing 2-Day Intensive. We investigated social movement history, discussed the current political moment, and practiced the elements of organizing for community power – base-building, Peoples Movement Assemblies, and community research.

Our coordinated actions will achieve our shared purposes: to dismantle the systems that create and maintain racism, oppression and exploitation while also building the social and economic democracy that advances self-determination and sovereignty on multiple fronts.

We have the history, the relationships, and the commitment to build strong social movements based in the South. We cannot merely build our organizations to sustain themselves as separate entities. We cannot achieve our ambitious visions alone. We can chart our own course to liberation.

* SONG (Regional, based in VA, SC, NC, & AL), Moving Forward Gulf Coast (LA), The Ordinary People’s Society (AL), Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (Regional), Georgia Citizens’ Coalition on Hunger (GA), Southwest Workers’ Union (TX), the Arkansas Women’s Project (AR), and Project South (GA & Regional). These organizations represent a new generation of leadership that is invested in innovative and long-term strategies for the next twenty to thirty years. We are using the People’s Movement Assembly as the primary organizing tool because we need new formats, new spaces, and more powerful, collectivized actions. 



Stephanie Guilloud, Co-Chair PMA Working Group (Project South Atlanta. GE)