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Strategize!

strategy-iconThe section provides articles on strategy to assist you in making your campaigns more effective. They include case studies of social movements and information about the current resistance environment. Visit the Resources Page for links to organizations that provide both online and in-person training on strategy and tools for designing and evaluating your campaigns and actions.

We Are Stronger Than We Think

February 9, 2025 Maria J. Stephan, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
The Trump-Musk administration has moved rapidly, ruthlessly and often illegally to consolidate authoritarian control and empower billionaires at the expense of ordinary people. In an administrative coup guided by Project 2025, the White House has sought to dismantle the separation of powers and deny critical services, punishing working people at home and abroad. Making good on his promises of revenge and retribution, Trump has sicced the Justice Department and IRS on perceived enemies, notably those who believe in a more diverse, equitable and inclusive America.

Healthcare Workers Must Organize Collectively To Fight Trump’s Attacks

February 7, 2025 Mike Pappas, Left Voice. , , ,
We are a little over a week into the second Trump presidency, and it is clear: his administration’s policies are a direct assault on health and well-being. From freezing critical research funding and blocking access to Medicaid, to expanding ICE’s reach into hospitals and rolling back environmental protections, these attacks will cost lives. As we have discussed, trans and nonbinary people will face increased barriers to care, immigrants will be deterred from seeking medical attention, and entire communities will be left at risk of untreated illnesses and potentially preventable outbreaks.

Why Climate Defiance Is Doubling Down On Disruption

February 6, 2025 Davin Faris, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
On a brutally cold morning last December, shortly before I was arrested for the first time, a hundred of us gathered beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I came from campus in the dark with a couple of friends. As others congregated on the grass, we made awkward introductions. It was an eclectic bunch: teachers, tech workers, lawyers, tradespeople, students and full-time activists, some of whom I recognized from past demonstrations. When we reached a critical mass, Maxwell Downing, an organizer with Climate Defiance, split us up by risk level.

A Guide For Federal Employees Under Siege

February 5, 2025 Kristofer Goldsmith, On Offense. , , , , ,
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been inundated with messages from concerned federal employees. Many of you have reported disturbing developments involving Elon Musk and his inner circle—including private contractors from Musk's companies allegedly accessing sensitive Office of Personnel Management (OPM) servers and locking federal employees out of their systems. These actions raise serious legal and ethical concerns, and we must confront them strategically. I understand your fear and frustration. You’re being targeted because authoritarian leaders know that professional public servants—those of you who uphold the rule of law—are the greatest obstacle to their agenda.

Inflation Poses Unique Challenges For Worker Co-Ops

February 5, 2025 Kenzie Love, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
Inflation is top of mind for many Canadian small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) these days. A recent survey of Canadian SMEs found 90 percent of them had been impacted by inflation, and another survey of 500 Canadian accountants revealed inflation as the most significant financial threat to Canadian SMEs. With the vast majority of Canadian worker co-ops being SMEs, it’s reasonable to assume that they’re also feeling these pressures. But delving deeper into the issue suggests that while worker co-ops face some of the same challenges as conventional businesses regarding inflation, how they respond is likely to be different.

Putting Nature At The Center

February 5, 2025 Richard Heinberg, Resilience. , , ,
Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space. Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive.

The Encampment Movement Leads The Way Under Trump

February 3, 2025 Ethan Eblaghie, Mondoweiss. , , , , , , ,
On January 20, Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States. As the country reels from his inauguration and the sweeping executive orders of his first week in office, American progressives are left grappling with the implications of a new Trump Administration, and how our organizing projects might come under renewed assault by a hard right Republican trifecta that controls both houses of Congress and is well positioned to enact its legislative agenda. Many organizations are rightfully concerned about the repression and lawfare that Trump’s return to the White House threatens.

Betrayed By Green Capitalism, We Can Build A Livable Future

February 3, 2025 Peter Gelderloos, In These Times. , , ,
In one way of measuring it, the mainstream framework to address the climate crisis has been a huge success. Promoting green energy, electric vehicles, conservation zones, carbon credits, carbon capture, and other new technologies has made billions of dollars for companies like Tesla, Google, NextEra Energy, British Petroleum, Saudi Aramco, Tongwei Solar, McKinsey & Company, and BlackRock. Governments have gained power through increased interventions in economic planning, and authoritarian regimes from China and India to Canada and the U.S. now have a new justification to carry out land theft against Indigenous and rural populations.

Panama: Self-Determination And National Popular Unity

February 2, 2025 Abdiel Rodríguez Reyes, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , ,
The peoples have the right to decide their own collective destiny as established by the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which was not gratuitous but a product of the struggle of the peripheral countries for their decolonization. Amid this reality, the United States never gave up extending the Monroe Doctrine to the present day. Making the situation worse, imperial irredentism becomes explicit with President Donald Trump. The Panamanian people’s distrust of the political elite at this juncture is being reproduced in the collective imagination in a marked disinterest in Trump’s imperial irredentism.

Future Natures: On Seeing Commons Through Popular Genres

February 1, 2025 David Bollier. , , ,
In academic research about the commons, few scholars are as venturesome in their creative approaches than the scholars and researchers associated with the Centre for Future Natures, at the University of Sussex in England. Led by anthropologist and research fellow Amber Huff, Future Natures explores “ecologies of crisis, commons, and enclosures," but its chief output isn’t monographs and books. It’s an exuberant array of creative works in popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, videos, and podcasts. 

REI Workers Look To Shake Up Co-Op’s Board

February 1, 2025 Nate Wolf, Non Profit News. , , ,
Since March 2022, over 600 workers have voted to unionize at 11 REI stores. The campaign is growing, with workers in Greensboro, NC, voting to become the eleventh union store just last week. Workers at these stores are affiliated with either the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) or the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). To date, management recalcitrance has stymied workers’ efforts to win a first contract, so the REI Union is trying a new tactic: Running candidates for the board of the 24-million-member outdoor equipment retailer, the nation’s largest cooperative.

Trump Attempts To Freeze Federal Spending

January 29, 2025 Lana Cohen, Union of Concerned Scientists. , , , ,
Last night, at the behest of President Donald Trump, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a sweeping freeze on the flow of congressionally approved federal funding. The decision has had a deeply harmful and chaotic effect already and is an unlawful overreach of executive power that ignores Congress’ constitutionally mandated control of federal spending and undermines the checks and balances that have, for hundreds of years, maintained democracy in the United States. Several states have already legally challenged the guidance.

The Right Of Return Is Still The Issue

January 28, 2025 Salman Abu Sitta, Mondoweiss. , , , , ,
The war waged against the Palestinian people is the longest and most sustained in recent history. For over a hundred years, since the Balfour Declaration, a war of death and destruction has been waged against the Palestinian people in Palestine and wherever they reside, raining death and destruction on them. The myth of Palestine as “a land without a people” in the 19th century has been converted into a Zionist plan of action to make it so; a ruined land with its people dead or expelled. Since the creation of the Zionist colonial project of establishing Israel on the ruins of Palestine in 1948, I witnessed, indeed endured in my lifetime, three historical stations worthy of contemplation.

Abolish Rent, Yes, For Real

January 28, 2025 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
The largest tenant union in the country is responding quickly and passionately to the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. The LA Tenants Union is demanding not just enforcement of existing California protections against price gouging of rental homes, but a moratorium on evictions and a rent freeze, all while tenants are coming together with heroic levels of mutual aid. But these steps will only mitigate a perpetual struggle, as union co-founders Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis write in their new book “Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.” “Why do tenants wake up every month and have to pay rent?” they ask.

Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part VI

January 27, 2025 Danny Shaw, Popular Resistance. , , , , ,
Professor Chenshaw: if our ideological and class enemies so consistently elevate you, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, what does that say about your work? Why do they pay you to examine every atomized niche of poverty in the United States but to ignore the biggest financial famine? You are fascinated by the pathologies but are too good to descend to talk to the pathologized. Every portrait you paint of poverty in America focuses on “black trans women” and other subsets to the detriment of us all. The only way black trans women can rise up is if we all rise up.
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