Original publication date: May 2024
For this month’s newsletter issue, we are sharing highlights from April’s Power is a Social Determinant of Health webinar with Rising Majority. In this session, Loan Tran (National Director) described RM’s 2050 vision, shared strategy, and upcoming Movement Congress. Loan also raised three important lessons learned from building a “movement of movements” that struck us as important no matter where your seat is at the table.
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Background
Last month, we gathered to hear from Rising Majority (RM) in our Power is a Social Determinant of Health webinar series.
Rising Majority is a multiracial network of state-based and national organizations serving communities across the United States. It is committed to a wide range of issue areas —among them, Black and trans liberation, reproductive and climate justice, food and land justice, and abolition. Their collective commitment is to amplify their power and inspire progressive formations to work together towards greater unity, a clearer vision, and shared strategy.
In their Power session, Loan Tran (National Director) shared more about RM’s vision of the world they would like to live in by the year 2050 and the 10-year strategy that they believe will advance this vision. The strategy emerged in a participatory process that took place over the last three years and will continue with Rising Majority’s Movement Congress this June.
PC: Rising Majority
We are facing an increasing number of problems concerning the environment, economy, and democracy, all of them worsening at once. RM’s response is a 2050 vision that is at once a hopeful antidote and a shared blueprint for building the multiracial, working class, community power necessary to forge fundamental change. It addresses a variety of key questions, including how resources are shared, how we govern, and how we treat each other and the planet.
PC: Rising Majority
Their 2050 vision calls for collective and unified action in five areas, toward:
- A Regenerative Economy
- Climate Justice
- Radical Democracy: enabling communities to have the relationships, resources, and infrastructure to make decisions that impact their daily lives
- Abolition
- Global Community Beyond Borders
- Creation of a New Culture
You can read through their entire 2050 vision on their website.
In addition to presenting on the 2050 vision and shared strategy work, Loan shared lessons learned from the early work of building a “movement of movements”. Below, we share three tenets that stood out to us. They reflect what we often hear from our advocacy, organizing, and civic engagement grant partners.
When laying out RM’s expansive 2050 vision, Loan was explicit that movement organizations shouldn’t underestimate the power of their opponents; and, at the same time, they cannot underestimate their own ability to build durable, dynamic, and responsive power to achieve their dreams.
When explaining RM’s power analysis, Loan reminded us all that building power is not just about winning a single policy or campaign, as Hahrie Han has written about, but instead it’s about “creating vehicles through which long-term, large-scale change can be developed, won, and sustained”.
While “power” can be defined in many ways, at the Rx Foundation we often refer to the definition used by the Lead Local Collaborative:
“Community power is the ability of communities most impacted by structural inequity to develop, sustain and grow an organized base of people who act together through democratic structures to set agendas, shift public discourse, influence who makes decisions and cultivate ongoing relationships of mutual accountability with decision-makers that change systems and advance health equity.”
For RM, taking a power-building approach is vital and central to how they work together to achieve their vision.
Rising Majority is a collective of over 33 movement organizations, many of which represent thousands of individual members or hundreds of partner organizations. Speaking about how RM found coherence to create a shared vision and strategy, Loan emphasized that alignment does not equal absolute agreement. Building a general consensus is necessary to continue the work, but it does not mean everyone agrees with every tactic or strategy proposed or taken. Nuance is often required, and trusted relationships help organizations and the people within them negotiate differences as they arise.
On the call, Loan reminded those in attendance that cultivating a spirit of appreciation and recognition that we’re all seeking to make a contribution is almost always a fundamental truth we can rely on when navigating conflict or giving each other difficult feedback. The human desire to make a contribution, be seen, valued, and appreciated, serves as a universal foundation by which we can build a trusted relationship with each other. These transformative relationships are the backbone of the work we do together.
Lastly, Loan left us with a final reminder that vision can also be a tool. Vision can be leveraged to find commonality or understanding in moments of conflict or difference. Vision can also be a reservoir for inspiration that we can source from; or a North Star or guiding point in tenuous or uncertain moments.
RM has an expansive vision for the future. But RM also views the 2050 vision as an incomplete, imperfect, and absolutely necessary shared North Star for a collective. Two weaknesses of movements, Loan shared, is that they often function without a shared vision or strategy.
With that in mind, the 2050 vision is not an assertion or prescription for RM or its partners. It’s more of an invitation, a starting point and springboard for innovation. In the case of the 2050 vision, it’s a guide for building power, distinct from a campaign strategy. It can be used to raise guiding questions for the collective when building out a strategy. In this way, it’s also a tool to find alignment and build consensus.
We often hear from our advocacy, organizing, and civic engagement partners that many binary tensions exist in their work – between mobilizing and organizing, building power or dismantling entrenched power, working at the grassroots or grasstops levels, etc. Loan reminded us that we can often agree on the North Star. A multimodal, cross-sector, cross-movement approach is necessary to achieve the shared vision articulated by Rising Majority. Each movement has a role to play, and by joining forces we can create a more unified, durable, and dynamic movement of movements.
We deeply enjoyed our session with Rising Majority, and look forward to following along to hear how their Movement Congress takes shape this summer.
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