Resourcing Movement Defense

 Hey everyone, thank you for your patience. We have been so swamped that were not able to get this video from April up in a timely manner...but here it is now!

This was a brown bag presentation that our own Aaron Goggans held on April 29th. You can see the presentation slides here.  It was geared towards funders and focused on what we need to do to protect movements in this moment. It started with defining movement defense as:

"supporting social movement actors ability to successfully navigate risk while moving towards their goals."

Aaron then went on to explain what a risk is, how to measure risk and how movement actors can best respond to risks. He then went on to give a really useful breakdown of the risk we are currently experiencing. Namely how Trump represents a coalition of Christian Nationalist, Aggrieved Populists and Technofascists. 

Perhaps most crucially, Aaron broke down the three stages of an authoritarian coup that we appear to be heading towards: 

• The End Of Protected Organizing
• The End Of An Open Society
• The End Of Democracy

It's honestly a bit chilling how accurate this analysis was and continues to be. Fortunately Aaron went on to talk about how organizing needs to change at each stage. 

Lastly, Aaron offered and general strategy to defend movements: Move>Strike>Defend>Recover. It is based on understanding that we don't have the capacity now to win a ton of deceive victories to end Trumpism so we need to start thinking about a protracted struggle and war of attrition. One of the big lessons from this part what that we have to leave local movement ecologies more resources than we meet them. It will be crucial to send tons of rapid response resources to a local community and mobilize outside support. But when we do that, we need to ensure that those local communities are stronger and more sustainable than when we went in. 

WHY: With Trumpism in power in the House, Senate, Supreme Court and many local governments movements face threats they are not currently equipped to handle. Fortunately, we have learned some lessons from the last Trump administration that, with funder resources, we can turn into practical movement infrastructure that can resist the destruction of movements and erosion of our freedoms. By partnering with movements capable of holding down aspects of this strategy we hope to support funders in getting money to where it is needed quickly and strategically.

SPEAKERS: Aaron Goggans is the Dream Gardener at the WildSeed Society - where he builds movement infrastructure before people know they need it and helps them achieve things even he never imagined were possible. Aaron is writer, facilitator and organizer working within the Black Radical Tradition to support the Labor, anti-war and Black Liberation movements for almost 20 years.

WILDSEED SOCIETY

The WildSeed Society is a political, spiritual and economic community that is inviting people to build a 21st century Underground Railroad together. We are building a series of refuges from the current exploitative world to new worlds where we all get to belong and be cared for - by focusing on Spiritual Liberation, Social Transformation and Economic Revolution. We seek to experiment and prototype our way into a new way of life - in community and in right relationship with the land.

The WildSeed Society is stewarded by a collective of movement veterans, spiritual teachers, and organizational development nerds. Many of the instigators of the collective were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement before starting WildSeed. It is inspired by the vision of futurist Octavia Butler of gifted misfits finding community together before transforming the world.

If you would like to financially support this work, please consider donating here.