Re|Organizing School

The Re|Organizing School
Summary 2024

July 12th – July 25th 2024

Mapping (Local) Resistance in a Global City

In 2024, we gathered a total of 40 organizers from different movements and spaces, for four engagements over the course of three weeks, which included time spent in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Experiences included: full assembly gatherings, thematic workshops, resource mapping, reflection, strategic visioning, field trips, mutual aid, and celebration.  

Thematic tracks included:

○ Organizing Theory & Community Accountability

○ Politics of Refusal & The Role of Institution

○ Cooperative Communities & Solidarity Economies 

Objectives and Context

Grounded in movement history and theory, The Re|Organizing School 2024 assembled over three weeks with the goal of addressing the current political moment whilst building beyond the moment by Mapping (Local) Resistance in a Global City. 

With the intensifying militarization of public space and universities, and the accumulation of capital and power in the hands of a few, we are experiencing a new rise in authoritarianism across the globe and in our own city. There is no clearer example of this than the coordinated crackdown on pro-Palestine protests and Gaza solidarity encampments on university grounds. This is not new, of course: it follows on the massive build up of surveillance, policing, mass criminalization, incarceration, and deportation side by side with the decimation of public goods – health, food, housing, education – that has devastated Black communities and poor neighborhoods over the past four decades.  The owners of capital continue to work hand in hand with the state to protect their interests, capture territory and labor, and repress the radical proliferation of alternative lifeways. The reactions to this have been diverse but linked – land-based organizing for food sovereignty, migrant and abolitionist movements, transgender and feminist liberation movements, formations against settler colonialism, racism, gentrification.

How can we proliferate together today?
What alternatives are being built in New York and elsewhere?
How can we re/learn, re/make, re/build and re/organize?  

In The Re|Organizing School 2024 we will collectively deploy a range of strategic tools, learning exercises, praxis based methodologies, site specific action research, and assemblies to confront this moment in concrete ways and visualize and build towards alternative futures. 

The ethos of solidarity and mutual aid runs through the whole ReIOrganizing School.
It is the very means of our coming together.

Goals and Outcomes

○ Exchange insights and models of organizing, changemaking, and world-building practices across movements.

○ Map regional solidarity ecosystems guided through the lenses of resistance, strategy, and power.

○ Map the places and spaces where transformative experiments are in motion, including land-based projects, collectives, initiatives, 3rd spaces, and more. Foster transformative experiments.

○ Share intentional space and time to grow our connections and collaborative ways of being. Enacting resistance to the conditions that create the conditions/time of emergency and focusing on temporalities of emergence.

○ Create alternatives to state-based educational systems – socialize education and change orientations to education.

Values/Beliefs

Generated collectively through workshops at ROS 2024, and re/organized according to Solidarity Economy principles.

Collective care, relationships and accountability

1. We commit to care of self & community towards collective liberation.

2. We are guided by the knowledge that multiple things can be true at the same time. Things are complex & simple.

3. We value and practice redistribution and reciprocity.

4. We create counter narratives around beauty, sanity, and health.

5. We commit to mutual aid ethics.

Shared Resources and vision

1. We create intentional space for worldmapping, worldbuilding, and practical/concrete experiments.

2. We commit to holding space for collective learning, connecting local organizers and initiatives, dreaming tangible examples, shared language/vision, using institutions as a place to reimagine their role.

Liberation Culture

1. We study and respect Maroon/Indigenous knowledge and political strategy (historical & current). 

2. We study and embody Black Feminist praxis and knowledge from the Global South. 

3. We commit to solidarity. “Interdependency is both “you and I” and “we.””

4. We commit to anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and disability justice work.

5. We envision a plurality of futurisms and healing technologies.

Democracy and Process

1. We build intimacy that requires time, patience, and trust.

2. We practice hope as a discipline (Mariame Kaba).

3. Our understanding is grounded in the historical legacy of resistance that we are intending, cultivating, and preparing to pass on to future generations. The world is never done. There will be no utopia, but we should always aim for it nonetheless.

Education and Leadership Development

1. We connect our communities to resources throughout and encourage exchange of resources. 

2. We believe in intergenerational and peer based learning.

3. We create spaces to practice (building) trust, strategy, and deepen our political analysis. 

4. We provide spaces for skillbuilding for organizers.

R|OS 2024 Re/cap Video

Syllabus

ROS Glossary: 

Transformative experiments (through the following spaces and formations):

Transformative Experiments are places, spaces, collectives, initiatives, movements, and hubs of resistance and/or liberatory practice shaped and activated by stewards invested in the day-to-day labor and lessons of practicing interdependent ways of being.

3rd space: what is outside the home, but also separate from work and institutional life. Quality of 3rd space that is centered around community building & connection between people in the spaces; accessible space for social cohesion, space where you can build with people, towards a shared purpose.

Collectives: Group of people sharing the work and the decision making to drive towards shared purpose or goal. 

Cooperative: Shared ownership and governance of specific resources (e.g. printing, land, grocery, housing). Business model.

Land project: Involve land stewardship in some capacity and who may be moving in the direction of or already getting into long-term community rooted stewardship models such as a community land trust or cooperative ownership. (per Dee) 

Institution: established organization that has an important role in meeting needs of and upholding social structure. Often, but not necessarily, entangled with upholding, enforcing, actualizing state power.

Pedagogical Principles

○ Collaborative stewardship: rotating facilitation and administration

○ Assembly: whole group grounding, reflection, and inquiry

○ Small Groups: collective storytelling and inquiry

○ Graphic facilitation: various modes of communication and learning

○ Relational connection practice: singing around fireside, land exploration, shared meals

○ Reflexivity: Daily practice and spiral nodes of experience-based co-learning

2024 Tracks

Organizing Theory, Community Accountability

The New School at Lang Cafe & Courtyard (New York City)

What/how/why the Re|Organizing School exists

  • “Time On The Clock of the World” workshop, working with Grace Lee Boggs re: revolution temporality and a 400 year movement timeline; participants place themselves on timeline and fill in what may be missing; discussion. 
  • Organizing theory workshop , working with Deva Woodly’s “radical Black feminist pragmatism”; introduction to the Movement Cycle, Pillars of Support, 6 Sources of Power, Spectrum of Allies. 
  • Why is community accountability needed? How can we be accountable?
  • Discussion and synthesis, with thought prompt: “we organize from the Left, we mobilize from the Middle” (Anthonine Pierre). 

Solidarity Ecosystems, Cooperative Communities

The Watershed Center (Hudson Valley)

Community building and land-based organizing for food sovereignty

  • Learning in practice through active cooperative farms and land stewards.
  • Experience: Rock Steady farm tour, conversation by founders and what’s happening in land-based economies. 
  • Grounding exercise: in who’s in the room and what work they do. 
  • “World-building” workshop –  in small groups, including visioning and mapping workshop; “what do you long for? what do you want?” (Prentis Hemphill) [2] identified what role they currently hold and where they want to go via (Deepa Iyer) “Social Change Ecosystem Map”. 
  • Community building  Catalyst/Wildseed Farm fire guardian and conversation.

Re/mapping, Solidarity Ecosystems

  • Deep dive into cooperative communities utilizing Seed Commons Community Wealth Cooperative as an example to uncover solidarity ecosystems: ways of funding our own work/visions/dreams. 
  • Regional mapping of [1] cooperatives, [2] land-based projects, [3] 3rd spaces, [4] collectives + organizations, [5] institutions. 
  • Needs and Strategies:  what do organizers need in order to embody the change they personally and politically wish to see. 
  • Catalyst/Wildseed farm tour and discussion, led by land steward with pointers on how they navigate the changes of personnel, cooperation with other farms, and changes in  personal, and political landscape. 
  • Self-selected exploration – infused honey workshop, swim, rest, etc.

Re/Emergence and Re/Assembly

The New School at Lang Cafe & Courtyard (New York City)

Where and how do we Re/imagine & Re/build the communities that we envision?


Panel

○ “Organizing: Community and the Academy” – Deva Woodly, Leslie Cagan & Anthonine Pierre in conversation

 Workshops

○ Re/Act – Digging deeper into Pillars of Support from Day 1 intro framework

○ Re/Emerge – Where and how are our learnings and solidarity intersecting and being implemented

○ Re/Vision – What are our goals, aims, and commitments to each other as we move forward

○ Re/Assemble – Reflection, critical questions to revisit + how has this experience been overall

Resources

Reading lists

Concept and Stewardship

The Re|Organizing School is conceived and stewarded by Community Fellows within The New School’s Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence. Community Fellows have been selected based on their creative, intellectual, and community organizing works and impact without consideration for academic markers of success [i.e. degrees, publications], disrupting the restrictive pathways to participating in an academic institution’s intellectual community.  The Community Fellows birthed the Re|Organizing School to re-imagine how The New School can hold space for essential movement building work through the redistribution of resources and access. 

Stewardship Team

Kei Williams
DeeArah Wright
Lee Jimenez
Abou Farman

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