E2. Front Line Community Green

A Love Letter to Black America during Black History Month

The Coalition of Communities of Color (CCC) humbly acknowledges Black History Month for all of the sacrifice and struggle Black folks in America have endured since our unceremonious rending from our native land.

We further acknowledge the innumerable contributions made by Black people to the America we now call home – gifts born out of creativity, necessity, ingenuity and brilliance. We built America.

CCC admires you for your determination during the Civil Rights movement, which afforded long overdue rights not just to people of African descent, but for all people not participating fully in America.

We're also deeply grateful to our Black-led CCC member organizations, whose visionary work and essential contributions are paving the way towards stronger, more resilient communities. We urge everyone to learn more and support their work:

• Africa House

• Imagine Black 

• KairosPDX

• Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives

• Urban League of Portland

• Self Enhancement, Inc. 

As our own Black-led organization, CCC is dedicated to relentlessly addressing the injustices around Black folks and other people of color, concentrating our focus this year on building power for BIPOC voices through our 2024 legislative agenda and the upcoming elections. 

Again, thank you, Black America, for all that you have given us.

We love you. We appreciate you. We thank you, and we will try to honor and be worthy of all that you have done for us. It is enough.

Sincerely,

Marcus C. Mundy, CCC Executive Director

Salem in Session

Oregon leaders kicked off the 2024 legislative short session earlier this month. Our member-driven process has identified key priorities to support economic opportunity, invest in childcare access, strengthen immigrant protections, and more.

>>> Read which priorities CCC members endorsed here.

ICYMI: Save the Date for May 31st

Join us for the Summer Soirée, CCC’s annual fundraiser. More details to follow. Interested in becoming a Sponsor? Download our Sponsorship Packet here or contact CCC's Development Manager Lucero Valera Brambila at Lucero@coalitioncommunitiescolor.org with any questions.

Upcoming Events

• Wednesday, Feb. 21 │ Unite Oregon’s 2024 Lobby Day. Register here.

• Saturday, Feb. 24 and Sunday, Feb, 25 │ Junction Ave: Black-owned business market with food, shopping and music, hosted by Self Enhancement, Inc. at the Center for Self Enhancement (3920 N Kerby Ave., Portland) from 10:00 AM–5:00 PM.

• Wednesday, March 6 │Urban League of Portland’s Our Voices United Legislative Day of Action. Register here.

Our ED José Bravo is a force to be reckoned with–from participating in the drafting team for the Principles of Environmental Justice to helping to organize the shut down of dangerous waste incinerators in Tijuana, Kettleman City, and East LA and so much more.

To celebrate his steadfast service to Indigenous, people of color, and low income communities for over 27 years, would you please consider making a donation to the Just Transition Alliance for his birthday?  

Content Happy Birthday, José! appears first in Just Transition Alliance.

We are pleased to announce a collection of essays titled Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement, co-edited by our dear friend Jeff Ordower and published just a few days ago by The New Press.

Shantell Bingham of Climate Justice Alliance says, “Power Lines presents critical case studies on advancing all communities towards a just transition. The book provides key insights directly from the frontlines on how we can organize our communities towards collective power, navigate tensions, and truly advance change. This book makes it more apparent the critical role that labor plays, and needs to play, in advancing a just transition.”

It features an interview with José Bravo describing the origins of the just transition movement.

Excerpt:

Just transition is not a cookie-cutter approach. It’s not one thing for everyone. But I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that if a just transition doesn’t have workers and there’s only communities at the table, then it’s not a just transition, and vice versa.  If it only has workers and the community’s not at the table, then it’s not a just transition. A just transition is literally a cradle-to-grave approach that removes the exploitation out of the whole process of production.

Content Get Your Copy of “Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement” appears first in Just Transition Alliance.

We're excited to announce that CCC’s Summer Soirée is returning on Friday, May 31st – you won't want to miss it. Join us this year for a night of community, entertainment, and wonderful surprises. Stay tuned for more details to come!

WHEN: May 31st, 2024

WHERE: Avenue event space

Become a Sponsor

If you are interested in sponsoring our annual fundraiser, we'd love to hear from you. Click the button to download our Sponsorship Packet or contact our Development Manager Lucero at lucero@coalitioncommunitiescolor.org.

The Oregon Legislature has just convened for its short session, and we are proud to announce that the Coalition of Communities of Color (CCC) has endorsed 10 legislative priorities for the year 2024. These priorities have been determined through a member-driven process and include measures to support economic opportunity, strengthen immigrant protections, and more. We invite you to continue reading to learn more about CCC's 2024 legislative agenda or our involvement in past sessions.

• CCC’s 2024 Legislative Agenda

• Learn more about our previous work with our 2023 Legislative Session Recap, and see our member endorsement process

Carryover Priority Legislation from 2023

• Fund the Employment-Related Daycare Program

• Child Care Facilities Fund (HB 4158)

• Fund Oregon Individual Development Account Initiative (HB 4131)

• Fund Universal Legal Representation

• Economic Equity Investment Act (HB 4041)

New Priority Legislation for 2024

• Healthcare Interpreter Reform (SB 1578)

• Expanding Voters' Pamphlet Translation (SB 1533)

• Establishing Immigrant and Refugee Student Success Plan (SB 1532)

• Family Financial Protection Act (SB 1595)

• CHIPS Child Care Bill (HB 4098)

CCC-Endorsed Items for 2024 Child Care

Fund the Employment Related Daycare (ERDC) Program:

Fund the Employment Related Daycare program to address the projected shortfall in program funding and end the waitlist to better help families who are working, in school, or receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families pay their child care costs. Take action with Child Care for Oregon. 

Child Care Facilities Fund (HB 4158):

Develop and improve child care by improving access to financial assistance for licensed home-based and small center child care providers. 

CHIPS Child Care Bill (HB 4098):

The Federal CHIPS Act provides Oregon CHIP manufacturers subsidies to build the infrastructure they need to grow this sector. Leveraging existing state child care systems will ensure CHIPS applicants meet application requirements.

Economic Justice

Fund the Oregon Individual Development Accounts Initiative (HB 4131):

Provides funds to support financial security and work towards a self-determined savings goal through this matched savings program. A total of $13.8 million in matching funds was distributed in the last two years, and nearly half of those funds went to BIPOC participants. 

Economic Equity Investment Act (HB 4041):

Allocates funding to the Economic Equity Investment Program created in 2022 that provides one-time grants to culturally-responsive community-based organizations with programs that build wealth for people experiencing economic risk factors. 

Family Financial Protection Act (SB 1595):

Strengthen protection for consumers who are sued by debt collectors and have wage or bank account garnishments or liens on their home. This bill would also make it easier for consumers to fight back against debt collectors and debt buyers who try to collect from the wrong people.

Health Care

Healthcare Interpreter Reform (SB 1578):

Helps create a path toward fairer compensation for healthcare interpreters and increase access by creating a public online scheduling portal with billing and payment services for Medicaid healthcare interpreters in Oregon.

Democracy

Expanding Voters' Pamphlet Translation (SB 1533):

Increase the number of languages for the Voters’ Pamphlet from top 5 most spoken languages to top 10 statewide and increase the threshold for individual counties to include any language that has 100+ speakers to 300+.

Immigrant and Refugee Support

Establishing Immigrant and Refugee Student Success Plan (SB 1532):

Directs the Oregon Department of Education to develop an advisory committee to inform the development and implementation of a plan to support the success of immigrant and refugee students.

Fund Universal Legal Representation:

Continue funding to provide no-cost immigration legal services to Oregonians through a statewide collaborative of community based organizations, nonprofits and attorneys.

On February 5th, the Just Transition Alliance will join our comrades at the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) to celebrate the birthday of Rosa Parks with a Transit Equity Day of Action!

The COVID pandemic and recovery forever changed how communities function, work, socialize, and commute.  It also showed very clearly how public transit is critical to the lives of millions across the country.  Essential workers depend on and operate transit, small local businesses depend on transit, and historically marginalized communities depend on transit.  Transit is a key component of economic recovery and environmental sustainability, and it is a path to equity for isolated and under-invested urban, suburban, and rural communities.

But for far too long, policymakers in Washington have prioritized highways and cars over public transit.  This has devastating impacts not only for the climate crisis but for municipal budgets as well.  New legislation introduced in January by Congressman Hank Johnson from the Atlanta area would change that. The bill, “Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act,” will boost high-quality transit across the country by creating a new federal grant program available to all transit agencies to increase service frequency and dependability, thereby reducing wait times, expanding hours, and adding new lines to underserved communities.

For decades, the federal government has subsidized the cost of shipping and aviation.  Today, public transit is essential to workers and businesses – it is high time for Washington to treat it as such!  While Congress has taken some limited steps forward in recent years, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, this bill would provide crucial funding that would fill budget shortfalls currently experienced by numerous transit agencies.  These agencies, valuable public resources that are often among the largest employers in their areas, are powerful drivers of economic growth, jobs, and opportunity for tens of millions of people in the US, from small rural towns to major urban centers.  Every dollar invested in transit offers a 5-to-1 return, and every $1 billion invested in public transit produces 50,000 jobs.  As we have previously stated, investment in transit infrastructure presents opportunities for huge expansions in good union jobs, reduced dependence on personal vehicles dramatically improves quality of life in many neighborhoods, and fare-free transit services can increase equity for marginalized communities while actually reducing overall costs.

We also know that the climate crisis is here now, impacting our economy and nearly every aspect of our daily lives.  Investing in public transit is a powerful way to help address the climate crisis on the scale required.  It is a crucial part of the systemic changes that we need to build a new paradigm that improves the lives of workers and the environment.  Everyone fighting for real solutions for climate justice agrees on the need for widely-available, clean, free public transit.  Ambitious investment in transit by policymakers would be a win-win, for the economy and for the climate crisis.

We encourage all of our followers and allies to organize local events on February 5th.  See the LNS website for organizing tools and register your action or view other actions on the campaign page.

O conteúdo Transit Equity Day of Action! aparece primeiro em Just Transition Alliance.

The fight to end the era of fossil fuels is ramping up, along with efforts to build towards more democratic, just, non-extractive energy sources and systems. Feminist climate justice advocates have a vital role to play – especially as policymakers seek answers to the question “what comes next?” after fossil fuels.

We need to build energy systems that are renewable, democratic and better serve the needs of communities, in the US and worldwide. We must offer repair for energy injustices that have harmed communities of color, low income communities, and communities of the Global South – as people have been denied equitable access to energy while also facing harms from the pollution, environmental degradation, and the wars and occupations of fossil fuel extraction and destructive energy sourcing. We know we must transition off of fossil fuels, and we must build our set of resources to guide and shape what comes after.

An end to fossil fuel development and use is a feminist priority, with serious implications for sexual and reproductive health and rights. From extraction to worsening climate change impacts, fossil fuel pollution is linked with infertility, fibroids and other reproductive diseases, serious illnesses in pregnancy, mental health harms and preterm birth, stillbirth and other adverse health outcomes. Communities of color and other marginalized communities that already face unjust inequities in health outcomes are hit the hardest. 

In the energy infrastructure conversation in the US, a gendered and global justice framing is often missing. This leaves us open to the danger of reproducing and entrenching the harms of our current energy systems in an energy renewable era, especially as the threats rise of new resource wars and rights violations over lithium and other elements used in green technologies. We must not miss the opportunity to strengthen and accelerate more globally just, feminist approaches to the energy transition.

We must build on the existing frameworks and expertise that have been offered by Indigenous, Black, and disability justice movements globally, interlinking those and bridging their recommendations into US policy spaces. 

As the global mobilization to end the era of fossil fuels accelerates, the Feminist Green New Deal Coalition will create space for feminist climate justice advocates to gather their core, actionable principles for just and feminist energy transitions – and to channel those recommendations into US climate policymaking.

Join us in winter 2023 and early 2024 for virtual exchange sessions to discuss and gather principles and recommendations on a just, feminist energy transition. In these sessions, we will weave together our analysis and experience responding to questions like:

• Why should feminists be committed to ending the fossil fuel era? Why is a just energy transition a feminist issue? 
• Why is an intersectional analysis of race, gender, class and global justice critical for building a more just energy system? (production & use)
• What are the core tenets of a feminist, just and equitable energy system in the US? What are we building?
• How must our transition address repair for past harms and injustices in the current energy system?

The Feminist Green New Deal Coalition will gather the outputs of these discussions to inform a written report, campaign, briefing – to be determined – for distribution to US policymakers and movement partners.

To indicate your interest in this exploration and/or recommendations for additional folks to reach out to who may be interested in these conversations, please share here and stay tuned for more updates.

Justicia Energética Feminista: invitación y declaración de intenciones de la Coalición del FemGND y una invitación

La lucha para terminar con la era de los combustibles fósiles está cobrando más fuerza al igual que los esfuerzos dedicados a construir fuentes de energía y sistemas no extractivos justos y más democráticos. Las personas activistas de la justicia climática feminista juegan un papel vital, principalmente ocupando el rol de desarrolladores de políticas que buscan responder a la pregunta “¿qué sigue?” luego de los combustibles fósiles.

Necesitamos construir un sistema de energía que sea renovable, democrático y supla las necesidades de las comunidades, tanto en Estados Unidos como a nivel mundial. Debemos ofrecer reparaciones por las injusticias energéticas que sufren las comunidades de color, las de bajos ingresos y las del sur global. Entre estas injusticias a las que se enfrentan, además de que se les niega el acceso igualitario a la energía, se encuentran los daños a causa de la contaminación, la degradación ambiental y las guerras y ocupaciones por la extracción de los combustibles fósiles y las fuentes destructivas de energía. Debemos transicionar y dejar atrás los combustibles fósiles y construir un conjunto propio de recursos para guiar y darle forma a lo que viene después.

Es una prioridad feminista terminar con el desarrollo y el uso de los combustibles fósiles y, a su vez, evaluar las implicancias sustanciales que éstos tienen sobre los derechos sexuales y de salud reproductiva. Desde la extracción hasta el empeoramiento de los impactos del cambio climático, la contaminación de los combustibles fósiles se vincula con la infertilidad, fibromas y enfermedades de reproducción, graves enfermedades durante el embarazo, afecciones de salud mental, nacimientos prematuros, fetos muertos y otros efectos perjudiciales para la salud. Las comunidades de color y otras comunidades marginadas que ya enfrentan desigualdades injustas relacionadas con la salud son las más afectadas.

En la conversación en relación a la infraestructura energética en EE. UU., por lo general falta un marco de justicia global y con perspectiva de género. Esto nos deja expuestas al peligro de reproducir y fortificar los daños de los sistemas energéticos actuales en una era de energía renovable, especialmente en la medida en que aumentan las amenazas sobre nuevas guerras por los recursos y violaciones de derechos por el uso de litio y otros elementos que se utilizan para las tecnologías verdes. No podemos perder la oportunidad de fortalecer y acelerar el desarrollo de enfoques más justos y feministas a nivel mundial para lograr la transición energética.

Tenemos que construir sobre los marcos y las experiencias ya existentes brindadas por movimientos globales de justicia indígena, negra, y de discapacidad. Debemos vincularlos y acercar sus recomendaciones en los espacios de desarrollo de políticas de EE. UU.

A medida que la movilización global acelera el fin de la era de los combustibles fósiles, la Coalición Feminista del Green New Deal crea un espacio para las personas activistas de la justicia climática feminista con el objetivo de unificar los principios esenciales y de acción para que las transiciones energéticas sean feministas y justas, asi como también para comunicar esas recomendaciones en los espacios de desarrollo de políticas climáticas en EE. UU.

Acompáñanos en el invierno 2023 y principios de 2024 en sesiones virtuales de intercambio para debatir y unificar principios y recomendaciones sobre una transición energética justa y feminista. Durante estas sesiones, debatiremos con el objetivo de dilucidar en conjunto nuestro análisis y experiencia en respuesta a preguntas tales como:

• ¿Por qué las personas feministas deben comprometerse a terminar con la era de combustibles fósiles? ¿Por qué es una problemática feminista una transición energética justa?
• ¿Por qué un análisis interseccional de raza, género, clase, y justicia global es fundamental para construir un sistema energético más justo? (producción y uso)
• ¿Cuál es el dogma principal de un sistema energético igualitario, justo y feminista en EE. UU.? ¿Qué estamos construyendo?
• ¿De qué manera nuestra transición debe abordar las reparaciones por los daños e injusticias en el sistema de energía actual?

La Coalición Feminista del Green New Deal reunirá las contribuciones sobre estos debates para redactar un informe escrito, una campaña, un documento (a determinar) para su difusión entre las personas encargadas de desarrollar las políticas en EE. UU. y los movimientos asociados.

Para indicar su interés en esta elaboración o para recomendar la participación  de colegas que puedan tener interés de participar y deseen comunicarse, haga clic aquí para compartir y manténgase al tanto de actualizaciones.

At the Coalition of Communities of Color, we understand that the tools we use to build systems are just as important as the systems themselves. 

That’s why, we’re excited to announce the 19 community-based organizations who are joining CCC, along with our partners at the City and County, in the Modernized Anti-Racist Data Ecosystems (MADE) for Health Justice initiative.

Our Partners: APANO, Cascade AIDS Project, Coalition of Community Health Clinics, Community Energy Project, Familias en Acción, Hacienda CDC, IRCO, Latino Network, NAYA, Nesika Wilamut, Oregon Health Equity Alliance, Oregon Pacific Islander Coalition, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, Street Roots, suma, Urban League, Unite Oregon, Verde, Voz

We are thrilled to work with so many partners representing communities most impacted by climate change. A big thank you to all everyone who joined us at our kick-off earlier this fall!

In November, we had the pleasure of hosting the MADE for Health Justice team from the de Beaumont Foundation, who is coordinating and collaborating with us on this opportunity. We are grateful for their partnership and look forward to continuing to work together in the future.

Dear friend,

As always near the end of the year, there’s a strong urge to get through the remaining weeks of 2023 as quickly as we can with little time for reflection or action. This season, I invite you to slow down from the end-of-year rush and keep your attention on the ongoing events in communities, near and far. 

Below, you’ll learn important news about our changing government in Portland and an exciting new update for our health and climate initiative to create a community-driven data ecosystem. 

At the same time, we also want to take a moment to hold space for the innocent lives of Palestinians and Israelis suffering an onslaught of horrific violence, death, and destruction. At CCC, we unequivocally condemn this violence and call for an immediate end to it through a ceasefire. We urge you to join us on this call. 

We don’t take this stance as foreign policy experts, but as human beings committed to fighting against injustice, anytime, anywhere. 

We encourage you to read our full statement as well as this blog post from the Othering & Belonging Institute to learn more.

This season, I’m remembering all that we have confronted and overcome. Generations of sacrifice, hard work, courage, and resilience have brought us together. Generations more will bring us forward. But only when we act.

I am grateful to be in this work with you.

Warm Regards,

Marcus C. Mundy, Executive Director

Read our full statement on gaza Important Updates for New Portland Gov., Launching Jan 1. 2025

Last November, CCC worked to pass a historic ballot measure to transform the City of Portland’s form of government and elections. We are continuing our work to support a successful transition to a city government that serves Portlanders equitably. Key updates on the transition include:

• The City Council approved a new organizational chart that shows how the city’s services will be organized under the voter-approved charter reform. 

• As part of the recent changes, a non-elected City Administrator will be appointed to oversee the management of the city's bureaus and services. The primary focus of the Mayor and City Council will now be on developing policy and addressing broader issues.

• The new form of government also establishes six service areas, including Budget and Finance, City Operations, Community and Economic Development, Public Safety, Vibrant Communities, and Public Work

• The City of Portland has released an annual report of their work to date where you can read more in depth about the key decisions that have been made thus far, from changes to the salaries of elected officials to the newly formed City Council districts. You can find which City Council district you are a part of at PortlandMaps.org.

• Want to learn more? Sign up for updates from the City of Portland!

Kicking off MADE for Health Justice

Thank you to our partners for joining us at our October kickoff meeting!

At CCC, we understand that the tools we use to build systems are just as important as the systems themselves. 

Today, we’re excited to announce the 19 community-based organizations that are joining CCC and our partners at the City and County in the Modernized Anti-Racist Data Ecosystems (MADE) for Health Justice initiative!

This new collaborative multi-year project is set to establish a health and climate data ecosystem that is built by and for our communities. We are thrilled to work with so many partners representing communities most impacted by climate change.

Our Partners: APANO, Cascade AIDS Project, Coalition of Community Health Clinics, Community Energy Project, Familias en Acció, Hacienda CDC, IRCO, Latino Network, NAYA, Nesika Wilamut, Oregon Health Equity Alliance, Oregon Pacific Islander Coalition, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, Street Roots, suma, Urban League of Portland, Unite Oregon, Verde, Voz

Learn more about MADE for Health Justice

Our Statement on the Israel/Palestine Conflict: The Violence Must End

The Coalition of Communities of Color unequivocally condemns the violence, death, and destruction that has been visited upon innocent Israelis and Palestinians.

We also acknowledge the historical power imbalance that has been responsible for perpetuating the conditions of Palestinian suffering over the past several decades.

We may not be experts on these larger forces and history, but we are all humans, all with a moral code. Our mission, while local, urges us to speak out against the oppression, injustice, and horrific violence, including the indiscriminate bombing and siege of Gazan individuals, families, and children.

To that end, we wish to share the words of our colleagues at the Othering and Belonging Institute, helmed by the eminent scholar dr. john powell:

As Palestinians suffer under collective punishment and Gaza is made increasingly unrecognizable and uninhabitable, and Jews suffer from the attacks and worry about loved ones taken as pawns in a political fight, we as a society will also be unrecognizable to future generations if we do not stand up for Palestinian and Jewish humanity and our shared, unequivocal right to belong without othering.

We urge you to read the complete statement from the Othering and Belonging Institute here, which lays out the complex but always critical issues that will begin to direct decision-makers into better next steps.

We, along with millions of others, call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and release of all hostages, and it is incumbent on our congressional delegation to hear the voices of their constituents and join this call to end the violence.

This message is shared on behalf of the Coalition of Communities of Color and does not necessarily reflect the views of all of our members.

 Calls to action:

• Read “We Belong to Each Other: A Call To End the Violence” from the Othering and Belonging Institute

• Sign on to the letter from Jewish Voices for Peace Portland calling for a ceasefire

• Contact your representatives in Congress and urge them to end the violence in Gaza now

 

 Updated November 29: CCC initially neglected to call for the release of all hostages and have updated our statement to include this demand. We deeply regret this oversight and thank the community member who drew this to our attention.

This past spring I was part of a two person delegation of GGJ members to the first ever International English Language Course on Political Training for Political Educators outside of Sao Paolo, Brazil. The 6-week course was coordinated by the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra [the MST]) at their national school for political education, Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF). I came as a representative of the Vermont Workers’ Center, and was among 60 participants from 47 organizations and 17 countries. Most organizations were members of La Via Campesina, an international organization primarily dedicated to the issues of peasant movements around the world and food sovereignty (GGJ is a member).  Organizations ranges from small farmer movements in Zimbabwe to organizations that work with adavasi (indigenous) movements in India to South African trade unionists to members of the Kurdish liberation struggle to a leftwing Mexican youth organization.

ENFF is the flagship school of the MST. Since their founding 31 years ago, the MST has been committed to political education (or formação in Portuguese). They have schools dedicated to political education in all 23 Brazilian states where they have a presence. ENFF was built 11 years with the volunteer labor of over 1,000 MST members and many other supporters of the movement. It is a gorgeous campus, populated with vibrant flowers, inspiring revolutionary murals made by each class that had passed through there, beautiful architecture, small plots of food productions, and a design that emphasized communal space (a small plaza in the middle of a cluster of dormitories, with benches and a gazebo; the courtyard where we held our daily misticas; the open verandas where we had cultural nights, celebrations, etc., on both stories of the building that held the kitchen, cafeteria, and a small store with MST products). There was also an incredible library that held thousands of books on various subjects, from the history of revolutionary struggles around the world to social theory to agroecology (mostly in Portuguese and Spanish). The MST leaders at the school described ENFF as the “patrimony of the international working class.”

The school was coordinated and “staffed” by a brigade of 40 MST members who took 4 month shifts to help run the logistics and programming of the school. Like all groupings in the MST, they had a name and slogan: “Apolônio de Carvalho,” named after an important Brazilian socialist. To facilitate the functioning of the school, all students were expected to do “militant work,” volunteer labor to support the day-to-day needs of the school community. I was on the coffee team that set up and cleaned up for the multiple coffee breaks through the “school day.” Other militant work ranged from the production team that helped produce and harvest the food grown on campus; a childcare team; a cultural team that helped plan the “cultural nights,” helped with the programming for the campus radio station; collective laundry; cleaning up after meals. Militant work is a central part of the pedagogy of the MST, partly around wanting to put intellectual labor alongside other forms of labor and also as part of creating new social relations, where labor is about meeting collective needs and is not performed because of coercion.

We had classes 6 days per week. Every day began with a 10-20 minute long “mistica,” planned by each of us in our small groups (“nucleos do base” [NB’s]) and by other NB. Mistica both describes a particular activity and a broader concept. The activity is usually a short “performance” that tells a particular story about a particular struggle, while projecting a vision of the future. I put “performance” in quotes because the MST is emphatic that it is not “theater,” but rather an expression of reality as we experience it. Mistica incorporates symbols, music, art, movement, “acting,” participation by “spectators.” One of the misticas my NB planned conveyed the intersection of patriarchy, dispossession, and capitalism. One of the ones that Daryl (the other GGJ representative) and his group prepared conveyed the patterns of state violence around the world and their link to imperialism.

Many MST movement elders attribute mistica as the primary reason they’re still in the movement. It’s spiritual and intellectual sustenance, and stretches minds and hearts in preparation for the activity of the day, Mistica also described the overall “spirit” or “expression” of a group of people, the outward expression of collective revolutionary spirit.

An MST member riding with me and another classmate to the airport at the end of the program commented that our class seemed to have a very beautiful mistica. There were songs that were our songs (some people brought from their movements, others that were brand new and composed spontaneously); chants that were ours; countless manifestations of a profound camaraderie formed through intense, emotional learning together, sharing and hearing each other’s stories, working together, traveling together during the intensive “field week,” celebrating together during various cultural nights and late night festivities.

The coursework itself was incredible. The MST sees left theory as a living body of theory, and draws heavily from the Marxist Leninist tradition. Some of the more interesting courses were on the history and development of imperialism, the reproduction of capital in agriculture, a great session on gender, political organization, and popular education. There was quite a lot of healthy debate on organizational form, the role of the state, the legacy of colonialism and the persistence of racism, the dynamics between the old hegemonic imperial nations and the newly industrializing “BRICS” countries that increasingly play out imperial relations on a more regional level.

I learned an incredible amount about social movements in Brazil and around the world. From the MST, we learned about their incredible dynamic relationship between organizational form, strategy, and tactics. Their process of land takeovers entailed setting up an incredibly cooperative mini-society of several hundred families, a “movement baptism” that created the conditions for embodying radical new forms of human relations. The MST doesn’t actually legally exist in Brazil, and many of the movements represented there were very suspicious of the growth of World Bank and foundation-funded Non-Governmental Organizations and Non Profit Organization (seeing with incredibly clarity the ways in which they coopt movements and movement leaders).

One of the profound lessons for me was on the meaning of true internationalism and solidarity. The MST is in a very challenging moment in Brazil’s political and economic history: the ruling Workers Party has betrayed many of its original principles to the whims of international finance capital; the right wing is mobilizing larger crowds than have been seen in decades. Yet, instead of turning inwards, they continue to launch programs like this training, have helped started countless other movements around the Brazil, and remain committed to the development of an international revolutionary social force. In fact, I believe that’s exactly what see as necessary in this context, rather than turning inwards.

It’s hard to some up any one main takeaway from that 6 weeks. I’m incredibly inspired to be personally connected 60 people fighting in inspiration liberation struggles around the world. I’m inspired by the deep and broad commitment to political education and leadership development. I’m deeply moved by the way in which the MST both fights for total social transformation while building the new social right now. And I’m so impressed with the many examples of the ways in which strategy flows from a profound and sharp assessment of the objective and subjective conditions during this phase of advanced capitalism.