#im so conflicted because financially it’s an awful decision but i just know seeing it live will change my life you know

[queerasian]

i simply do not have the extra money to justify indulging my dream of flying to new york to see an enemy of the people and yet i’m considering it anyways

[dabistits]

im super conflicted abt hawks atm but i was thinking abt his parallels with shigaraki and i was wondering kinda why there's a difference between wanting 'redemption' (i dont think this is the right word but i cant think of a better one 'want better' maybe?) for shigaraki but not for hawks? is it bc he made a permanent decision to kill twice as essentially an agent of the state?

Just to preface, I don’t think I’m objectively right for just wanting Hawks to eat shit immediately in the next chapter. I’m just complaining because a lot of people who “love both Hawks and Twice” and “think Hawks was wrong, but…” are hard to get away from without going in the other direction toward a group of people who have shitty fandom behavior, whose opinions about the Hawks/Twice situation are (unfortunately) much closer to my own. I don’t think there’s necessarily a “correct” way to feel about Hawks, but I feel differently than a lot of people I see around (who, ironically, are the ones insisting that there’s a “correct” way to feel about Hawks), and that’s frustrating. I want to be done with Hawks. I don’t want him to get any more focus in canon, I don’t want to see more posts about how Hawks committing murder is an indication of inner turmoil instead of him choosing a side, I don’t want to keep running into posts that tack on “but Hawks is also sad/a victim” in discussing what’s pretty clearly a tragedy for Jin and the LOV that Hawks was completely and 100% solely responsible for.

But, yeah, sure. I’ll also explain what I think is the difference between Tomura and Hawks:

1. Part of it is emotional and not logical for sure. I love Jin a lot. He embodies the person who has faced incredible adversity, and still comes out on the other side ready to love and open his heart to others, moreover to protect others. I’m not like that at all, but I think it’s very admirable. So in that sense, it hurts on a personal level to lose him over anyone else, and I can’t not associate that with Hawks, since he’s the killer.

2. Jin is a significant death. The nameless minions that Tomura has killed (many of whom were active “Quirk supremacists”) don’t mean anything to me compared to Jin, and?? Through the lens of narrative, I think that makes Tomura more forgivable, because I genuinely have no interest in there being any plot “resolution” with, like, the dead anti-mutant cultists, because I just do not care about them.

3. Tomura, especially early Tomura, has threatened to go places that are unforgivable, like leaving All Might’s students dead and forcibly bringing Bakugou over to their side (whatever terrible procedure that may have entailed). The difference is that the narrative never actually allowed him to cross that line by actually killing the kids, who we do care about as characters, so while the intent in itself is pretty awful, he was never allowed to complete the action that would take him over to the point of no return. Hawks, however, did cross the line by killing someone who we care about and who is narratively established as a “good person,” who even Hawks concedes is a good person.

3. a. I don’t like the MLA ideologically and I don’t like the decision to have the LOV team up with them. But, again, their takeover plan has been stopped in its tracks, which I’m actually fine with to prevent the LOV from crossing the moral event horizon, but that’s, like… completely irrelevant to me thinking Hawks shouldn’t have killed Jin.

3. b. Though there’s still a chance for Tomura to cross the moral event horizon, and I’m not going to convince myself that it won’t happen. If it’s going to happen, I think it’s highly possible that it might happen in this arc, because now Jin is dead and we know how Tomura and the LOV have historically responded to their friends getting hurt. I, and many others, have called Jin the “heart” of the LOV (his name is also literally written with the kanji for “benevolence”), and now without him, there is no remaining heart nor goodwill.

4. Although both Tomura and Hawks are, on one level, fighting on behalf of the ideals that they were “raised into,” their fights happen in very different ways. The MLA arc in particular made clear that the villains are, in part, fighting for their very survival in ways heroes just aren’t. The threat that the LOV were living under was constant—when it wasn’t heroes or other villain groups, it was trying to find money and shelter and essential upkeep. Hawks may not be “free” from the HPSC or the occasional villain attack, but he’s free from those constant material struggles. He’s not an “underdog.” 

4. a. Tomura is also, in part, fighting to protect his marginalized friends. It’s for sure not on behalf of every marginalized person, but it’s certainly more than we’ve seen any pro hero fight for. The people Tomura is surrounded with are people who have never been protected nor cared for before, because they were not deemed “innocent” enough to deserve that care and protection, and Tomura continued to care for them even when it was troublesome for him to do so, when they disagreed with him, when they threatened him, and when they fucked up very, very badly. 

4. a. i. Eri is an example of a victim who the heroes fought for, but she’s an easy case to want to love and protect: Overhaul was inarguably an abuser who wanted to elevate the yakuza, she was being used in extended torture-experiment sessions, she killed her father on accident, she’s a child, she’s innocent, she’s selfless, she’s well-behaved. It’s basically not even a question whether or not she “deserves” help.

4. b. It’s people who are difficult who get overlooked. Hawks and hero society are completely unprepared to protect and care for people who don’t behave as they’re supposed to. Hawks did not care for the LOV who didn’t personally befriend him. For the one he did, when Jin didn’t cooperate the way Hawks wanted, he went for the kill. It’s either being easy and “manageable,” or die.

4. b. i. Tomura has specifically spared two people who tried to kill him or actually succeeded in killing his ally, people who he explicitly hated or did not care for. So make of that what you will, I guess.

5. From a leftist perspective, it’s just impossible not to account for the fact that Hawks helps maintain a social structure that creates so much suffering. The question isn’t really whether AFO’s teachings to Tomura are better (they’re not, and I want Tomura to break away from them), but it can’t really be ignored that Hawks is enforcing an ideal that’s wildly popular. Why this matters is that Tomura doing the wrong things will be roundly condemned, and he’ll probably be “punished” for them; but heroes are very unlikely to be punished or held accountable for committing murder, especially if it’s “justified.” 

5. a. This is problematic because it allows heroes, and the state, to define what a justified “emergency situation” is, and who can die in those emergencies. The people who are deemed killable “in an emergency” are usually those who are already marginalized; hence heroes can wait until those marginalized people get desperate enough to commit villainous acts, and then they can swoop in to arrest or kill them to widespread public acclaim.

5. b. Heroes (and law enforcement IRL) don’t address the roots of crime that lie in overarching oppressive structures like misogyny and capitalism. They don’t prevent theft by bringing people financial stability; they arrest people who were desperate enough to steal, and use those people to send a message to poor people everywhere. They make these conditions of desperation more permanent by punishing the most vulnerable people when they slip up, while doing absolutely nothing until the slip-up happens.

5. c. Heroes are punching down, and villains are punching up. That may not be the case with AFO, but I believe it with the LOV specifically, and I believe this matters because it’s exemplified between Hawks and Twice. Hawks targets someone who reached out to him, despite being hurt over and over again by types like him, who has dealt with poverty and fantasy mentally illness completely on his own, and kills him in defense of the very society that allowed all those things to happen to Jin. Hawks was given a choice: sympathize and relate to Jin, and acknowledge his well-founded grievances toward a dysfunctional society, or prioritize the safety and security of that dysfunctional society by permanently removing Jin from the equation. The choice he believes in is the choice he made.

5. d. In order for Tomura to make the same choice with the same implications, they’d have to be living in an alternate universe, in the Kingdom of AFO, where Tomura is a respected noble who infiltrates a rebel group who were going to “commit atrocities,” kills the one person who offered him a way out of AFO’s control, and possibly screws the rebels altogether, but everyone is happy that the rebels are gone. Even if you think Tomura is capable of that, it’s irrelevant because canon!BNHA has completely different power dynamics. Because Tomura’s violence will always be unpopular and persecuted, rather than justified and glorified by the state, he physically cannot replicate a choice like Hawks’. Tomura can approximate it, but even if he does, he’ll be hunted down by heroes for doing so. The circumstances and consequences for making such a choice are totally different.

So. That’s why I don’t think Tomura and Hawks can be equated. Suggesting that this is a level playing field is essentially believing that criminals and law enforcement exist on level playing fields, and they absolutely do not at all. Hawks is particularly abhorrent because he’s already followed through with his choice. He holds power by being part of the policing class, and regardless of how he came into it, he behaves exactly the same as everyone else who “freely” joined, and in his position of power he made the choice to eliminate someone who was socially powerless.

[repwinpril9y0a1]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[pat78701]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[stormdoors78476]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[porchenclose10019]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[rtawngs20815]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[grgedoors02142]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[rtscrndr53704]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[repwincoml4a0a5]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[repwincostl4m0a2]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[repwinpril9y0a1]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[stormdoors78476]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM

[porchenclose10019]

She's The Best Answer To Donald Trump You Never Heard Of

Heather Booth doesn’t look like a revolutionary. She sits demurely on a sofa, dressed simply in black, fingering a silver necklace. She speaks softly, selecting her words with care and enunciating cleanly. Dignity. Respect. Community.

But something comes over her when she begins to talk about helping people organize to make their world better. The sweet smile fades. She sits up straighter. Her voice tightens, the words come faster. Power. Together. Act. She strikes a gently curled fist into an open palm. IM-pact.

Booth, 71, is one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes. Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard.

Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

Heather is one of the people who makes this all work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Booth is the founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which for over four decades has trained grassroots activists to advance progressive causes across the country. The academy’s goal, according to its website, is both aspirational ― to “give people a sense of their own power to improve society” ― and enormously practical ― to teach a “strategic, rigorous, results-oriented approach to social action.”

To that end, Booth has worked with a range of liberal groups, from USAction, MoveOn, People’s Action, NAACP National Voter Fund, Alliance for Citizenship and the Voter Participation Center, to the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the Center for Community Change. (She’s also blogged for HuffPost.)

“Heather is one of the people who makes this all work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), indicating a sweep of progressive issues ― including the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren, then a Harvard law professor, had a vision of that federal consumer agency in 2007. But she confessed to a colleague that she had no idea how to make it happen, how to harness the political energy needed to push it past the opposition of powerful corporate financial interests.

Her colleague said simply, “Call Heather.”

So it was that, deep in the financial crisis of 2008, with Wall Street giants collapsing, mortgaged homes going under water and banks facing insolvency, throngs of activists appeared to demand real financial reform. They were drawn from labor unions, civil rights organizations, consumer and citizen action groups, and unaffiliated individuals who had never before been politically active but who were furious at the abuse of ordinary Americans.

Booth’s work wasn’t simply a matter of gathering people for protest marches, although those were important. She helped activists devise the tactics to pressure specific legislators. Together they faced off against the monied interests of big business and the political bosses.

And they succeeded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law. Politicians and other notable figures gathered on stage for a gala signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building. Booth was in the back of the auditorium.

But she felt vindicated. In the fight against Goliath, Booth later told Bill Moyers with a disarming smile, “Sometimes David wins.”

Warren said, “I’m in awe.’’

Today, opposition to the actions and conduct of President Donald Trump keeps rolling out in the street and on social media. The ugly firing of FBI Director James Comey has ignited new outrage. But the question is whether all that energy can be harnessed for action beyond protest marches ― or if it will dissipate like the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.

That’s where Booth comes in.

The Trump era “is a perilous and inspiring time ― both are true,” she told HuffPost. “The peril can’t be overstated. I do think families will be ripped apart, people will unjustly be imprisoned, jobs will be destroyed. I think lives may be destroyed,” she said. “I fear for unjustified wars. I think the structure of democracy itself will be threatened, from simple protections of people’s health and safety to the ability to live a decent life. So ... a time of great peril.”

“But ...” She allowed herself a broad smile, offering a glimpse of the spirit that has powered uphill battles all these years. “I am incredibly heartened by the outpouring of people standing up to say, ‘You’re not going to do this. We are going to defend our lives, our families. Our democracy! And we are going to defend each other.’”

“If you stand together and organize,” Booth said, “you can change the world.”

This conviction goes way back. In the early 1950s, the sole African-American child in her first-grade class in Brooklyn, New York ― a boy named Benjamin ― was accused by a white student of having stolen her lunch money. The accuser and her friends crowded around Benjamin, pointing and taunting. Booth pushed her way into the circle, put her arm around Benjamin and just stood with him. (And, of course, the accuser then found her lunch money in her shoe.)

As an adolescent, Booth felt she didn’t fit in. She tried out for the cheerleading squad, but quit when she found out that more talented black girls had been turned away. She volunteered for the school chorus, but apparently had no aptitude for singing. At the Christmas pageant, she was asked to just silently mouth the words.

“I was insecure most of my life,” she said, “and in almost all situations felt I was not good enough, didn’t know enough.”

Even so, one day in her early teens, the would-be activist stood by herself in New York City’s Times Square handing out leaflets urging an end to the death penalty. It wasn’t pleasant. In the late 1950s, Times Square was a vile pit of hucksters, porn shops and addicts. One guy spit on her. Flustered, she kept dropping her leaflets. “I was really frightened,” she said.

The lesson she took from that experience, however, wasn’t that you had to stop protesting, but that you had to stop doing it alone. You had to draw others into the action. Get organized. Together you could achieve results even if you were scared and insecure.

Booth felt that power a few years later in Mississippi, where as a University of Chicago student, she spent the Freedom Summer of 1964 organizing for voter rights. That, too, was frightening and inspiring. “We were standing for something that mattered, that was bigger than ourselves, and if as an individual I didn’t know what I was doing, as a group we did know what we were doing,” she said. “And over time I could see that because of this, we were ending segregation.”

Some years later, as a young mother of toddlers on Chicago’s South Side, Booth gathered a group of working moms to form a neighborhood day care cooperative ― and found the idea blocked by the city’s byzantine licensing codes. So they began organizing other parents across the city, at church and synagogue meetings and other community forums.

“People flocked to us,” Booth recalled in a recent TEDx talk. “People gained confidence, found their voice, spoke about their love for their kids, the child care they needed, their vision for the future.”

They framed the conflict as loving mothers versus uncaring bureaucrats. The press noticed. Then Chicago’s politicians noticed. Within six months, she said the city had agreed to one-stop licensing, a licensing review board of parents and child care providers, and $1 million for new child care centers.

It starts where there is an injustice in the world. ... And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’ Heather Booth

The potency of targeted, strategic organizing is a key idea taught at the Midwest Academy, which Booth started in 1973. She chose the name not for the academy’s location, Chicago, but because it sounded wholesome, a clean break from the strident rhetoric of the student left. “We didn’t want to be mean,” she explained.

Three core ideas guide the 25,000 activists who have trained at the academy: The goal of organizing must be concrete improvement in people’s lives. The organizing must help ordinary people develop their own sense of power. And activists should seek change that is systemic ― not just fixing the water supply in Flint, but giving people in Flint some oversight of the water system.

Among the academy’s teaching materials is a strategic planning chart to help organizers link a specific and achievable goal with available resources (money, allies, media contacts), the names of decision-makers whose support or acquiescence is needed, the tactics required to win over opponents, and the messaging to mobilize others to join in.

“Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is awful, they’re giving money to the wealthiest and taking away our fundamental services, so let’s do a hands-around-the-Capitol’ ― well, that may be a good thing to do,” Booth said. “But can we do it in a way that builds our organization’s resources, brings in more people, maybe raises funds? And afterwards, let’s look at what worked and what didn’t work. What do we do next?”

As valuable as organizing is, Booth understands that it’s a tool for social progress, not the driving force behind it.

“It doesn’t start with training, although the training helps people be more effective,” she said. “It starts where there is an injustice in the world ― people living in fear that some family member will be deported who’s been here 20 years. And people say, ‘We need to do something about that. Let’s take some action.’”

After a police officer killed black teen Michael Brown, for instance, “there was an outpouring across the country. No one had to be told, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ Not just ‘I can’t,’ but ‘we can’t.’ So it starts with people’s anger, love, fear, hate, concern and standing up to say, ‘It can’t continue like this.’”

Today, at a time when many feel powerless and despairing, Booth draws inspiration and energy from the protests that have been erupting since Trump’s inauguration. “We are gaining strength,” she observed.

“The size, the numbers, the beauty of the effort, how representative it is of America ― all of America ― the number of places it’s happening. And how beautifully nonviolent, peaceful and intense they are simultaneously.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2rcnSmM