Leadership Development and Collective Liberation

Leadership Development and Collective Liberation

Catalyst Project Reader


Struggling Forward: Organizing as a Building Block for Resistance
Dara Silverman

I have a tattoo on my back as a reminder of why I organize. It’s an image of a woman pushing a boulder up a hill. It’s also a reinterpretation of the myth of Sisyphus, who was forced to spend eternity pushing a boulder up hill. When he reached the top, it rolled down to the bottom and he had to begin pushing again.

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“But We Don’t Have Leaders”: Leadership Development and Anti-Authoritarian Organizing
Chris Crass

Leadership and leadership development can play important roles in moving forward with our commitment to equality in organizations, movements and society. Leadership development, as defined by organizer Dara Silverman, is working with others to build skills, analysis and confidence. Anti-authoritarian organizing, as it relates to this essay, is building the capacity of people and their organizations to challenge illegitimate authority – which includes capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism and the state. Anti-authoritarian organizing, like other forms of radical organizing, uses principles of solidarity, cooperation and participatory democracy to build movements for social change. Anti-authoritarian organizing over the past century has helped to advance a politics that challenges the idea that the ends justify the means.

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Discovering a Different Space of Resistance: Personal Reflections on Anti-Racist Organizing
Helen Luu

In the summer of 2000, I was involved with a coalition that worked to mobilize and organize a demonstration against the Organization of American States (OAS) when they held their meeting in Windsor, Canada. Included in the OAS’s portfolio is the detrimental implementation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). I was very enthusiastic about being involved with this protest because I was still riding the wave of excitement from the victory in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the mass convergences that followed in North America after that. I was perched rather precariously on this wave of excitement, however.

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Ground Power: An Interview with Nrinder Nindy Kaur Nann 
Nrinder Nindy Kaur Nann

NNKN: Organizing, for me, is definitely not grouping people enraged with the system and status quo into neatly structured groups. It is more about people coming together to make change happen – folks dedicated to the work, struggle and resistance involved in collective liberation, but also committed to a creative, loving and supportive process which fosters equal and active participation in actualizing the change.

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