Dear Readers,
Recently, marching with my granddaughter, Vasser, to support a movement to end reliance on fossil fuels, it occurred to me that I’ve been participating in social justice movements since my days at the University of Georgia. After all, I came of political participation age during the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement. Now, here I am at 80, still movement building!
Marching with my granddaughter Vasser Seydel, president of The Oxygen Project.
In developing Project Dandelion, a global movement for climate justice, my partners and I are thinking about what ingredients are necessary for a successful social movement in 2023. Even though the ways we organize have changed (social media, email and Zoom make it a whole lot easier to connect), the truth is that what is needed for a successful social movement to be launched, sustained and successful in outcomes is essentially the same as it was when I started my own activism.
Veteran organizer Marshall Ganz told Bill Moyers that he believes the key to movement building is storytelling. “Movements have narratives. They tell stories, because they are not just about rearranging economics and politics. They also rearrange meaning. …They're about figuring out what is good.”
Movement building is “working with people to find courage, to find solidarity, to find a sense of hopefulness, to stand up to pretty scary stuff.”
- Marshall Ganz
Yes, standing up to the ‘scary stuff’ is the first step, and when it comes to facing our global climate emergency, it’s easy to get scared and believe there’s nothing we can do. But of course, there is a lot we can do, individually and collectively, through campaigns and movements to amplify the outcomes.
As we think about the desired outcomes of a women-led climate justice movement, I’m reflecting on one of the most successful women-led, top down, bottom up social justice movements of our time… V-Day, a global movement to end gender based violence, still going strong in its 25th year.
"V-Day is here until the violence stops and all women are safe, alive and free."
- V (formerly Eve Ensler)
As I've written before, I first met V (formerly Eve Ensler) at a bombed-out theater in Sarajevo in 1998. At the time, V shared her vision to use “The Vagina Monologues” to raise funds to support the activists she was meeting around the world. Within the year, V-Day was created — as a movement, not an organization — with a bold mission: to end violence against women and girls, everywhere.
Over the past 25 years, V-Day has quite literally created a new model for creating, growing and sustaining a global movement. Activating through art, theater, and dance, this community of anti-gender-violence activists and supporters in 200 countries has raised over $120 million to fund front-line groups and leaders who are providing services for survivors; centers for healing and transformational leadership; programs for building communities in some of the most dangerous places to be a woman; and initiatives for challenging the cultural, social and political barriers that all women and female identifying people face in having their voices and stories heard and respected.
Working at the intersection of arts and activism to shatter taboos — beginning with liberating the word, vagina, and giving new meaning to the importance of dancing as an act of revolutionary change — the V-Day movement changes narratives, reaches out to the most marginalized and vulnerable, and initiates and supports survivor-led and community-led culture and change initiatives.
The driving forces going forward behind V25 are: One Billion Rising, creative resistance events happening worldwide, and two new pieces of art – VOICES, a sound play of Black women voices, which will debut in this country at TEDWomen next week (join us), and V’s new best-selling book, RECKONING – which will be the core of a V25 celebration at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Sunday, October 8th. (join us)
The V-Day movement inspires me and my Project Dandelion co-founders, Hafsat Abiola and Ronda Carnegie, to dream big in our mission to elevate women-led climate solutions to counter misinformation and legacy energy propaganda, and to change the narrative about the ‘scary stuff’ from fear to hope and from hope to action. We must work individually and together, as a global movement, to ensure that future generations can live and share — more equally and justly — the resources of this beautiful planet that is our only home.
As Ganz says, a successful social movement requires courage, solidarity and a sense of hopefulness. The story of the climate justice movement is one of possible futures. We are on the cusp of a clean energy future. We have the solutions necessary to create a more healthy, livable, and fairer world for all of us. We just need the political will to make those solutions a reality…and that will take a global movement.
I hope you will join us!
Onward!
- Pat
