Audience: Asian Americans

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including new polls focusing on voters of color, young people, and Latinos.

Disruptive capacity is one of the five “critical capacities*” we focus on at the Lab, which we explored on our Spring Community Call*. During that call, Lab members expressed a particularly strong interest in learning and growing their understanding of disruptive capacity and its role in supporting a powerful climate movement. Read on to learn more about disruptive capacity, what we’re learning from organizations that are employing disruptive tactics, and recommendations for organizations looking to build more disruptive capacity.

Integrated, year-round community organizing is necessary to create people-powered political representation in the Midwest. Midwestern state economies have destabilized, and this has caused shifting politics, such as formerly Democratic or swing states now voting mostly for Republicans. This report dispels multiple myths about Midwestern politics, such as: some states swung irreversibly to the right; Midwest states can be won either by engaging only people of color, or by frantically chasing white Obama/Trump voters; retail politics can work in the Midwest by “treating” white voters with messages about the economy and Black voters with messages about race, while ignoring Native, Latino, AAPI, and other voters; and we can win Presidential, US Senate, or Gubernatorial races by dumping billions of dollars into paid advertisements each cycle, rather than building the human capacity to lead and govern. This report argues for intentionally, consistently organizing people into membership organizations, unions, and community institutions in order to move constituencies of people into political action and create political homes. Overall, this report argues for “state ecosystems” of democratically accountable movement groups to engage in electoral politics.

Many people communicating for social change are exploring how to tell diverse and inclusive stories that center marginalized communities while building understanding about how inequality persists. Intersectionality is an important tool to help us tell great stories that help us understand systemic issues. Five guiding principles to telling intersectional stories: Show, don’t tell; Provide historical context; Uplift the voices of marginalized people; Tell whole stories; and, Radically reimagine the world.
  

This interactive webinar covered the process of how this collaboration between environmental justice and labor forces was facilitated, how they built a shared vision around resilience, a rundown of the report’s key findings, and a guided activity for how to apply the report’s insights to participants’ local communities and organizing work.