Keep an Eye on Some of the Best Organizing Going On in America: 6 Activist Projects to Watch

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/keep-eye-some-best-organizing-going-america-6-activist-projects-watch


The band Desaparecidos comes out in support of Breakthrough's "I'm Here" campaign
Photo Credit: BREAKTHROUGH

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1. Documenting local resistance across the country with The Radical Resistance Tour. Two former occupiers from New York City, Amelia Dunbar and Kathleen Russell left town and spent the summer criss-crossing the country to spend time in local communities resisting corporate and political dominance. Their stops included mountain defense in West Virginia, protesting coal exports in Montana, direct action against the Keystone pipeline in Texas, pushing back against corporate takeover of housing in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Indian reservation defense against local businesses in South Dakota among others. They tried to focus on loci of activity that did not center around "straight white male" activists, they told me, because they'd been turned off by the too-often white male face of the Occupy movement.

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2. Using Art to Activate Change : "Searching for American Justice" is a performance art project conceived and acted by Kanene Holder, another Occupier who memorably played the Goldman Sachs “squid” during last year’s protests. Holder quotes Alexander Hamilton in declaring that the first duty of a nation is to justice, but her aims are more radical than Hamilton might have envisioned. Her project uses a mix of performance art and digital media to focus on injustices in housing, healthcare, the economy, law enforcement, gender rights, immigration and education. Holder specifically aims to remind viewers and participants that after the election, there is still work to be done. As Holder told me, "when we buy a car, we don’t expect to just leave it for four years--we consider it an investment that we check in on regularly and get inspected." Democracy, she noted, should be the same--and by personifying the missing figure of justice, Holder hopes to inspire voters to perform regular inspections of their republic. Holder will be performing at the Art in Odd Places Festival and appearing at the Imagining America conference.
Website: http://www.searchingforaj.com/

3. Ensuring the rights of domestic workers : Nannies, cleaners and home health aides, under the umbrella of the awesome and indefatigable Domestic Workers United, have made strides across the country, and in New York the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights was a notable step forward.

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4. Fighting for the franchise. While activists across the country fight back against the poll purge and voter ID laws, Michigan communities are trying to cast off the shackles of the state's emergency manager law. Elections in Michigan this November won’t just be about who becomes President--they will be about who controls local politics.

[HiPointDem]

1. kr

[KoKo]

2. Thanks for this post.

I keep seeing MSM carryon about "OWS" is dead or fizzled which is designed to make it seem that nothing is going on out there.

Yet, there is much going on out there in small, localized groups and with larger groups that are doing targeted actions. I almost think it's better that the MSM thinks there's nothing going on because when these small efforts combine to make the bigger change they will be caught unaware and maybe even the change will be the MSM itself from the bottom up grassroots.

[xchrom]

3. +1