Skip to content

community building

A SWANA Space To Exist

October 6, 2024 Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel, In These Times. , , , , ,
In August 2022, I received an Instagram message that radically changed my life: ​“Hey cutie, I’m gonna try to organize a queer SWANA comedy night in October [and] wanted to see if you would be interested in this since you are hilarious.” We met organizing jail support for a comrade who was arrested protesting a Zionist speaker, and I soon found myself in a group chat with dozens of others in Chicago’s Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) diaspora. (SWANA is a decolonial term for what’s often called the Middle East and North Africa region, or MENA.) In this bustling WhatsApp group of personalities I would come to know, I was met with warmth. I shared my amateur cooking photos and was invited for dinners.

Making Community

April 14, 2024 Thomas Grzybowski, Resilience. , ,
If we consider that we as a people could soon face a climate-related collapse of our economic infrastructure, how might we avert this outcome? Or, failing that, be able to continue on while maintaining a civil society? It can be seen that the root of the crisis lies in our behavior, our individual and social behavior – which is a cultural problem. Yet, because each of us lives our lives embedded in our culture, we live and think within the domain we have inherited. If our current ways of thinking are much the basis for our crisis, we must make every effort to think again, and differently.

Global Tapestry Of Alternatives: Weaving Transformative Connections

February 15, 2024 Ashish Kothari and Shrishtee Bajpai, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , , ,
Proactive responses to the multiple crises the world faces—ecological, socio-cultural, political, economic, spiritual—are widespread and diverse. They range from movements of resistance to the dominant ecologically destructive and socially inequitable model of “development” that has been imposed across the world, to people’s initiatives at constructing or sustaining ways of life that meet human needs and aspirations without despoiling the earth and exacerbating inequalities. They are emerging from Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities, from urban neighborhoods, from both the Global South and Global North, from both marginalized sections and the privileged elite.1

Focus On What’s Strong, Not What’s Wrong

April 13, 2023 Eric Ortiz, SW Connector , , ,
Everyone has a gift. That gift is a talent or passion. But not everyone gets to use their gift, talent or passion. Sometimes, people are not invited to share their gifts. We see this a lot. There is a problem. It could be big or small. Some people or groups are labeled as the source of the problem. They are called a nuisance, incorrigible, incurable or worse. They get cast aside, then forgotten. And the problem never gets solved. That doesn't mean the problem no longer exists. It just means "it's not our problem anymore." We may choose not to see it, but it's still a problem. This way of thinking is how we get unsolved problems and why we have the same longstanding issues that don't change.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.