Community Activism, Social Change and Sustainability

The Activist's Handbook by Randy Shaw is a classic worth reading for anyone interested in social change movements. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6737001.php

People want to address poverty, environmental issues, humanitarian
issues and other social and economic problems born out of
repression and exploitation, although we have been without the necessary
resources due to fragmented communication and communities, it is
websites like this one that help restore such resources.

This lack is partly attributed to the early 1980s government agenda to destroy strong community structures by eliminating public funding for community group projects, closing down community halls, meeting places, youth clubs and privatizing everything from water to land.

Randy Shaw, gives an example in The Activists Handbook :

"Federal programmes in the early 1980s stopped VISTA, in which
committed young people worked as organizers and activists in low income
neighbourhoods. These positions provided an instant connection to
community organizations fighting for social change and acted as an
alternative career path for recent college graduates. The defunding of grass roots activists jobs in the 80s has left today's young people with a dearth
of mentors among their general elders".

Another example-

"The anti-incinerator coalition blasted the mayor's decision. On the
eve of the city council vote, activists brought nearly 800
children—Hasidic, Latino, and African-American—to City Hall to urge the
council to reject the mayor's plan to build new incinerators. Rabbi
Niederman of the UJO told the crowd that 'just because we are poor does
not mean our children must breathe air made poisonous by
garbage-burning incinerators.' Luis Garden Acosta of El Puente focused
on the path breaking coalition that had been formed between the
often-warring groups, noting that 'in our common air we have found
common ground.''

The birth and rise of political terrorism was a means to incite fear and loathing by the oligarchy, aimed at modern ethically mixed communities and opposing religious communities, in an attempt to wipe out communal strength and spirit, corporate agendas are to focus on human, cultural, spiritual and racial
differences to make us feel more separate from one another and
perpetuate conflict within communities by this Machiavellian technique
of creating extremist political and religious atmospheres to perpetuate fragmenting mixed ethnic communities.

We all have voices and never stop speaking out but recent laws born out of these terrorism acts make it illegal for us to hand out leaflets or demonstrate communally, or even speak on the streets without a license. Social movements such as ecological sustainability, organic food growing communities and other forms of social change activism is the biggest threat to capitalism. Capitalism's biggest weapon is to wipe out strong community network structures and social reform by creating a mono-culture of one brand names for multi-national corporations to block valuable channels for like minded free thinking people to communicate with one another and produce an active movement.

There are no community notice boards allowed in large corporations like Starbucks, Safeway's, or Borders to name a few, the kind of community notice boards you find in organic food stores and out of the way bohemian community cafes, bookshops and galleries which are continuously being closed down because the rent is too high or they have been bought out by a chain company.

This is not at all co-incidence, it is part of a very well constructed
plan to stop us rebuilding communities to protect the oligarchic system
from any of us creating social change, to stop communities becoming independent of the capitalistic machine, there are plenty of other examples of how this is happening in the west and it is necessary for us to address and to make people aware of because it will create a stronger backlash, once people realize what is really happening, our human rights, voice and freedom to act is being chastised in many ways.

Through my travels across seven cities of the USA, my roots in the UK and Europe and even in other countries such as North Africa, Thailand where I have travelled and and Central America where I lived since 2006, I have observed two very important things that are common ground problems between the these coutries and their complex social structures.

The first observation is that any social movement or communally operated project is a threat to the corporate bodies. Corporations want everything to operate uniformally, without individual power and autonomy because it keeps people dependant on corporations, they do not want us becoming self sufficient and self sustainable. Therefore corporate bodies fragment communities in all cultures, stamping out individualism, free thinking and community spirit in every form.

Despite this, the second observation is that we as a humanity love to
work together, it is more in our nature to be social despite cultural
or spiritual differernces and people in communities do care and do want
change, but not all of us know where to start in order to create this
change because many of our community resources have been removed, many
of us now look to the word wide web for substitute community hubs. We
all have the power to change things, we all know this deep inside but
we have been so distracted from this truth for a long time, running the
labyrinth of distraction which tricked us into surrendering our soveign dignity,
our minds and bodies to the capitalistic machine.

Autonomy and withdrawing ourselves as currency from oligarchy
manipulation is to maintain the strength of gifting ourselves with the
freedom of choice. In this case we create choice by taking action of change into our own hands to create a strong network of community artists, scientists, whistle-blowers, speakers, writers, inventors, activists, healers and visionaries who share a philosophy or idea that can be realized with momentum, our community is making new history.

The surrealist art movement, feminism and existentialism were forms of
thought born out of visionaries, artists, writers and philosophers
(such as Andrea Breton, Simone De Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre) who were people who sat discussing philosophy in small communal cafes and who put words into action by working together creating a strong active community
network; same as the Greenpeace story, it wasn't just the media
success, these visionaries, journalists and activists were skilled with
their tactical media grabbing action, but it was also because these
people had a courage with a supportive social community to become activists.
Where as Rosa Parks story, is an example of an individuals courageous action.

Every form of social change comes from brave decisions made by individual free thinkers who refuse to accept varios forms of repression so they create choice for themselves and others through action and communication of an idea, and the courage to act upon that idea.

We all have the experience and abilities at our fingertips to begin using resources to start localised and vocalised sustainability workshops, restoring communities, teaching people how to be more sustainable in a positive and peaceful and powerful way.