Influencing Wide World Organizations
I’m a mixed-heritage (Colombian and European white) USer who has been living in the United Kingdom (UK) for sixteen years. I am also a newly single mother of Catholic heritage and a member of the Catholic Worker Movement.
My ten-year-old raised-in-RC daughter was the first climate student striker in the UK (although she is home educated and was not actually striking). Her first strike outside Parliament in London in October 2018 was organized by Extinction Rebellion (XR). That was how we first got to know XR.
After that we participated in the blocking of bridges. Also, members of XR/Christian Climate Action supported my daughter when she went to several big oil companies in London to ask their chief executive officers to please have a change of heart, declare a climate emergency, and keep their fossil fuels in the ground. Her action got a lot of publicity, and she received an award for it. (She has since been a spokesperson for XR and has founded XR Kids.)
Last January I began volunteering with XR in their international network, offering trainings on the principles and values of XR. That led to my being in the DNA (the heart of XR) working group in XR UK.
I have close relationships with some of the founding members of XR and with other active members who have a lot of structural power. I am able to influence people on decolonisation and centring marginalised voices. I am not the only one doing this work (or the only RCer working in XR in the UK), but it is still isolating at the structural power level. A lot more of us could be of use.
I remember an e-mail Diane Shisk (Acting International Commonality Reference Person for the Care of the Environment) and Julian Weissglass (International Commonality Reference Person for Wide World Change) sent out a few years ago that suggested that RCers join the biggest climate change organization in their locality (or start one if there isn’t one) and go in and make it better. As RCers we have clear perspectives on many oppression issues; we have organized workshops and support groups. We’re not perfect, but we have a lot of experience in these areas and know how to listen to people’s ideas. We also know about discharge, but I am not emphasising discharge here. I think that we can leave our comfort zones (one of the principles of XR) and do the hard work of organising in the messiness of a mass liberation movement.
I want to encourage all of us (who haven’t already) to join our biggest local climate change or social change organization—Extinction Rebellion, Zero Hour, Fridays for Future, the Sunrise Movement, whatever is near us and makes sense for our particular background—and use our voices to raise the voices of people who are marginalised. If we are already in these organisations, we can go in deeper, and be brave and speak up. Our perspective is attractive.
We can go in as ourselves. We can volunteer to be in working groups and work our way in, via relationships, so we can influence strategies and tactics and trainings and language and systems and processes. While we are in there, we can suggest that people discharge more, too. They may learn to trust us on this after seeing what great perspectives we have and how much we are willing to do the work.
We can make ourselves uncomfortable and do this work now.
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders in the care of the environment
(Present Time 198, January 2020)