Toolkit for the Movement

by | Feb 8, 2025 | Blogs, Communities & Focus Areas, Director's Blog, Economic and Human Rights, Environmental and Food Justice, Militarism and Foreign Policy, Movement Building

Toolkit for the Movement: Guides for community defense 

Recent years have seen our community and movement partners on the frontlines wracked by COVID-19, ongoing systemic anti-Black racism, accelerating climate disasters, and growing authoritarian repression, which have all disproportionately harmed those we work alongside: those who survive at the margins and those whose existence and resistance threatens the intolerable status quo. 

Toolkit for the Movement is a collection of resources to support and protect our communities. This includes information on what to do if an agent knocks at your door, FOIA basics for activists, and more.

Separately, our Southern Regional Office and Open Records Project have created the resource “Sweet Tea with Transparency,” a series of toolkits for organizers and community members interested in obtaining public records from state government agencies or officials in four states: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Open records requests can be extremely useful tools for local and national advocacy, the media, litigation, and organizing campaigns. 

Access both the Toolkit for the Movement and Sweet Tea with Transparency on our website.

  
 

Coming together in this new presidential era 

With the passing of many monstrous executive orders, as well as the attempt to challenge several constitutional rights by the new president, it is easy to fall into despair about what the next four years will entail for us and our communities. 

We’d like to reshare some words of strength from our Executive Director Vince Warren and encourage you to hold onto your communities and rely on one another. 

In the face of this immense assault on human rights and the hard-won progress of past decades, we must resist the temptation to despair, and we must get to work. The very things that Trump will target – dissent, solidarity, and resistance – are our greatest strengths, and we must use them not only to defend our people and the planet but also to build power in pursuit of justice and liberation.

We will leverage all of our experience and resources to support the communities most endangered by the Trump presidency, in the U.S. and around the world. In order to succeed, what we and all social movements must do is both simple and enormously challenging: we must come together, as never before, starting today. Our strength lies in each other, and, fully realized, it is far more powerful than fascism.

Read the full statement on our website.

  
 

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