 It's great to be here with you all. Can we just do a mic check? Can you all hear me well? Give me a thumbs up, type something in the chat, turn on your video and smile, however you wanna react to that. Great, great, great. I'll give a little bit of a disclaimer. I'm currently based in Northern Tanzania, not far from the site of what is proposed to be the longest heated crude oil pipeline in the world. And the internet here is quite bad. This week we have had issues with attacks on our internet and we've also had a conference come in. So it's quite an overloaded, you know, bandwidth at the moment. But what's working to our advantage is that it's 9 p.m. So, you know, the sort of high peak of time for internet use during the day has passed. So I hope that gives us enough space for continuity. I'll just ask Lisa and other thing. Feel free to pick up the momentum. Feel free to raise a conversation to keep everything going. You know, we're all teachers and we're all students. We're all here to learn together. We're all here to build our power together. We're all here to save our species and others. So, you know, we are in this together. And that often means, you know, working with the infrastructure that we have, as we all know, it might even get worse with time. So it's good practice, you know, now while we still have some. So my name is Phil and I'm from Sasquahannock, which is known today as Pennsylvania. And I've lived in East Africa for the past 13 years. Working closely with a number of social and political movements and struggles across mostly sub-Saharan Africa, but elsewhere in the world as well. And in the past several years, maybe three, four years, I've been more and more involved in the climate justice struggle. Before that I was involved quite heavily in a network called the National Land Defense League of Uganda. And I can talk a little bit about that experience, but what's important to me is to hear from you what you all would most benefit from in this two hours that we have together. So if we take the full two hours, I would really like to know that we've covered, you know, 70 or 80% of the ground that you would like to cover together. So I want to structure this session based on a few questions that I have for you all. So we're sort of working together here to build this session, and I'm feeling today that I would like to understand the broader 350 network a little bit better and it will be, you know, personally edifying and educational for me to at least get some time to hear from you all what challenges you're facing, what you'd like to just, I say too much or share too much about myself. I have a few questions and you can answer them in the chat. I'll try to make them as easy to answer as possible. So my first question is, I'd like to get a sense of your level of experience in organizing. So let's read ourselves on a scale of one to five. How much experience do you have in organizing? So one would be you're quite new to organizing, you've never really done it before. You know that you're a human being that can cooperate with other human beings and you're ready to learn, you're ready to put yourself to the test, but you haven't really done it yet. And then five would be, you know, you can do this in your sleep, you've been organizing people across all kinds of issues and all kinds of contexts for a long time and you're quite, you know, experienced. So just rank yourself on a scale of one to five, just drop that number in the chat. Welcome Katya, beautiful, welcome. Jeffrey, you as well, Austin, welcome, welcome. Pooja, welcome. Okay. Yes, yes, we can cooperate, Mercy. We can do it. Okay, Silas, welcome. George, have we heard from everyone? So I think we've heard from at least most of us and it sounds like there are a lot of newcomers. So really you're welcome to the table and one of the key principles of organizing is that you have to create many points of entry. You want people to be able to find you and get involved and, you know, so many movements sort of live this long drawn out life and they don't really evolve and build power because people are with the same people over and over. So, you know, organizing people is all about inviting people in, you know, that welcoming, that hospitality, that, you know, creating a sense of belonging. There's so much to say about all these things and more, but I'm glad that you found 350 or the respective, you know, movements and members and groups that you're with around the world. This is really good. I can see folks from South Dakota, from Fiji, from Sioux Falls, wonderful. Great, so my next question for you is, have any of you attended a session, convergence or meeting where you learned about organizing from any East African organizer where any East African organizer has facilitated a session? So if you haven't, you can just type no into the chat. And if you have, let us know if you remember anything from that session, maybe who facilitated it or any of the groups represented. Okay, I see a lot of no's. I just don't want to repeat something that many people have already heard. So if there are a lot of no's that gives me the green light to be able to share with you all, some stories, you know, some stories and learnings that I've been able to accumulate over these few years. Okay, so the next question I need to give a little bit of a background to. So when we talk about changing the world, there are many ways to do it. And there is a sort of leftist sociologist called Eric Holland Wright that died a few years ago. And he had this book called Envisioning Real Utopias. And in this book, he talked about three fundamental ways to make change. And we're not going to do a lot of like flashy tricks with like a facilitation here. This is going to be mostly a conversation between us, very informal. We might use breakout rooms if we decide that that's useful. But, you know, I'm not going to be showing a lot of, you know, big theoretical models or anything like that. So this is, this might be the only image that I share in this entire two hour session, but let me see if I can share my screen here. Can you all see a triple Venn diagram on your Zoom screens? Great, I see Austin's thumbs up. So mercy, thank you. So essentially Eric Holland Wright had this idea that change can be categorized or transformation of the world can be categorized in three different ways. And the language is a little bit dense, but we'll kind of dig into it as we go. So in this first, this top circle in this Venn diagram, let's look at something that he calls ruptural change. So what he means by ruptural change is change that destroys the system, dismantles the system, attacks the system, whether capitalism or authoritarianism or patriarchy, change that is disruptive and presents a threat against the status quo and against the system. So he calls that ruptural change. We can think of it as something that's kind of revolutionary, something that's very powerful. So if you've ever heard the term civil disobedience or the term direct action or you've participated in civil disobedience or direct action, very likely these are some of the things that Wright, the sociologist Wright was talking about when he talked about ruptural change. So that's our top circle in this Venn diagram. And then on this bottom left circle, he described something called interstitial transformation. And what he means by interstitial transformation is change outside of the system, change parallel to the system. So if you develop an alternative language, if you develop an alternative economy, a new currency that's only respected within your particular area, if you decide to do agroecology in a different way that's different from industrial farming, right? These are examples of creating the world, the utopian vision that you want to see outside of the system. You're not relying on the system to do it, you're creating it outside of and parallel to the system. So he calls that interstitial change. So we have ruptural change on the top, interstitial change on the bottom left. And then on the bottom right is the third circle which we call symbiotic transformation or symbiotic change. And symbiotic change basically means how do we use the levers of the system to change the system or to get the change that we want. So these would be things like advocacy, lobbying, often even some protests like symbolic protests can fall within this category. A lot of NGO work falls into this category, nonprofit work falls into this category, work that's doing advocacy, trying to work with state budgets, trying to negotiate with the private sector, these kinds of things using the lever of the system to make the change that you want. So just to recap, because I know this is, it's quite dense and I'm going through it fast. So we have ruptural change which is change against the system, it damages the system. We have interstitial change, that is a change parallel to or outside of the system. And then we have symbiotic change, change within the system or using the system. And so these are, some of these ways of creating change can work together. And that's why I'm just kind of pointing to the simple Venn diagram is because there can be some overlap, yeah? You can be engaged in, for example, one of the famous actions from I believe the Central United States was a solar farm that was built on the proposed pipeline path. So they were simultaneously using ruptural action by blockading and building physical infrastructure in the way of a fossil fuel pipeline. And then they were also prefiguring or envisioning the world that they wanted to have by showing that solar could be a viable, renewable energy compared to more dirty energies. So, they were sort of doing both at the same time. They were doing ruptural disruptive change while also that interstitial change. And similarly, many of us are engaged in both advocacy and disruption. So we might be somewhere in between symbiotic and ruptural. Not all of us do everything and not everything is the appropriate thing to do at all times, right? So there's some strategy built into this that we can get into later, but I would like to know from you. So all of this is a deep background to my question that I wanna ask you all. Where do you find yourselves in? Let me stop sharing my screen to make things easier for myself. Where do you find yourselves in this Venn diagram? So you can just let us know in the chat. Are you mostly ruptural? Are you mostly engaged in symbiotic means like advocacy? Do you do maybe just a little bit of interstitial change as well? How would you situate yourself in that Venn diagram? So feel free to give us a sentence in the chat that explains where you would find yourself. And I know it feels a bit abstract. If there are any questions, just feel free to unmute yourself. You don't need to raise your hand, just interrupt me and ask any questions if it's not clear. Kara says mostly symbiotic and traditional advocacy. Jeffrey says symbiotic with shades of interstitial. So leaning a little bit towards symbiotic, but not exclusively. So two responses from Kara and Jeffrey, anybody else? Silas, thank you. Symbiotic and interstitial. Thanks for that thorough response, Pooja. Symbiotic mostly. There's a question as we get more of your responses coming in, Pooja also asked about strikes. So any particular tactic might fall more than one place. Strikes, yeah, I think you could make an argument that strikes can be symbiotic. It depends on the type of strike, the context in which it's carried out. You can also do a general strike where all small business really shuts down tax revenue collection and everything across the city. And that's more ruptural. Maybe like a worker strike, formerly called by a worker union might be more symbiotic, but it's also a little bit ruptural. And it can also be interstitial. Instead of striking, we're gonna get together and cook dinner, we're gonna throw a party inside the factory or inside the school. Great examples around the world about different kinds of strikes. And it's one of the most thoroughly researched and discussed tactics when it comes to resistance. The enigma, I like that name, symbiotic mostly. A lot of symbiotic advocacy kind of responses, traditional advocacy, great. So, and then I didn't plan on asking this question, but I'm just curious because there are so many of you saying that you fall somewhere between interstitial and symbiotic, maybe leaning towards symbiotic. Let me ask about like the environment, the democratic conditions, the openness, the open space and rights that you have in your respective contexts. If you're to rank them on a scale of one to five, five being, you have all kinds of politicians that really listen to you and have like really amazing values and movement is well protected in your home and encouraged and the system is supporting you. And then one being, you live maybe in a very authoritarian dictatorship or where companies, private companies have all the power and steal all the land and your rights are suppressed and police are always after you. Just to give me a sense of the kind of conditions that we're each working with in the Zoom room. So one would be really bad conditions and then five would be really great conditions, three, three to four, very specific silence. Thanks for that response, Puja. So we have varying contexts. So symbiotic transformation tends to work better where there are better conditions for advocacy where the system is ready to listen and kind of act on what's being brought forth. Okay, great. This gives me a bit of a sense of the folks that we have in the room, a general sense of we as a small temporary collective here. So I'd like to actually give us each a chance to share, just 60 to 90 seconds, each of us. I'll call on your name. And I would love to hear from you about where you're calling from in the world. If you haven't shared that with us already, any details you might wanna share regarding your name and titles and pronouns and so on and so forth, if you haven't shared those yet. But just a quick one paragraph description about what you're working on in terms of the climate justice struggle, just to get a sense of who we have here together. Are we ready to do this? Can I start with the enigma because I'm so curious. Already the mysterious is drawing me in. The enigma, can you? Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. The enigma here, this is from Kenya. Mostly I'm doing social advocacy in governance processes that is actually budget advocacy, human rights and several other things. Mostly on climate action and climate change issues. I'm looking at it from the angle of advocating for more budgetary allocations for trip planting activities, conservation of forests and such kind of activities. I think that's enough of what you requested. Definitely, that's enough. And feel free to retain all of your enigmatic qualities as well. Thank you so much for sharing that. Which part of? I mean, from Nakuru. Great, I was with some flower farmers in Nakuru some a few years back. Great to have you in this session. And can you pass to another person here? Everybody should get a chance to just give us 60 to 90 seconds about themselves, including Lisa and Kelly who are joining us from 350 and for tech support here. So feel free to call on anyone that you see here. Awesome, I'd love Kara to go. Hi everyone, my name is Kara. I am joining in from South Dakota in the US where we recently started a local 350 branch. And we're mostly focused on like very hyper local efforts trying to get our cities to pass a 100% emissions reduction plan with some social equity in climate justice provisions in there. But it's really great to join you all. I'll pass it on to Ruth. Hello, everyone, my name is Ruth Davis. I am the organizing director over at MN 350 in Minnesota. We are doing a variety of different things as it relates to climate and racial and environmental justice. We have two different campaigns as it relates to transit. We have a campaign up north towards Bemidji on native land where we have an organizer who was working on, we are all treaty people. We have line three pipeline fight that we're continuing as well as current line five pipeline. So just to give you an overview of some of the things that we're working on. Beautiful, thank you, Ruth. Great to have you. And can you pass on to another person? And everybody can also reserve the right to decline and pass to the next person. But sorry to interrupt you, Ruth. Mercy, you're up. Hello, everyone. I'm Jambo. My name is Mercy. I'm from Kenya. I've been working on some divestment work, so especially the fossil fuel non-porifilation treaty, trying to get as many countries in the world to say no more fossil fuels because we don't need them anymore. We have enough already to tide us over for the next 10 years. I've also done some partner engagement work on ECOP and currently I'm just doing more of general climate organizing work. Thank you so much. And I'd like to pass over to Pooja. Pooja Kahoo. Hi, everyone. My name is Pooja Tolhawala. My pronouns are she, her, her. I'm based in Ben Salem, PA. It's a suburb of Philadelphia. In the US. I do a lot of things for the youth climate movement. So I'm part of Youngo. That's the UNFCCC's Children and Youth Constituency. And so there we get to do a lot of policy intervention, negotiation stuff, help design the youth of day of COP 27 that's coming up in Egypt. Those are just some examples. And then my day job is as the youth engagement manager at the Climate Initiative. And then I also run youth climate collaborative. And I'm trying to focus more on storytelling there and what else, like youth and decision making stuff, trying to get more youth on different boards and advisory councils. Those are just some highlights. I'll pass it to Phil. Great to meet a fellow Pennsylvania. Beautiful. Thank you, Pooja. So I'm going to share way too much about myself in this session. So I'm going to pass it to Kelly. Hi, everyone. Yeah, my name is Kelly. I'm currently the admin coordinator at 350 under the Global Campaign and Organizing Department. So I am really, really pitting you with the movement. I would say that I have been working with 350 for less than a year now. But I'm really impressed with the passion of everyone within the movement. And this is why, aside from doing tech support, I really like to join some of the sessions in this training. Yeah, my pronouns are she and her. I am based in Berlin. But I am from the Philippines. So I'd pass it on to Liz. Hi, everyone. I'm Liz. I use she, her pronouns. I'm based in London. I've been living here for seven and a half years. But originally from France. And I've been with 350 for just over a year now, doing freelancing, mainly organizing, coordinating, global mobilizations, or trainings like this one. And I'm also doing more like grassroots organizing in the UK as part of a direct action network. And I usually also go to COPS and organize with the global climate justice movement there. I will pass to George. Have you been? Well, thanks, Liz. So it's early in the morning. Good morning, everyone. George here coming from Fiji. Yeah, I work with 350.org as the Pacific organizer. Based here in Suva, Fiji, you're basically working with 18 Pacific Island nation countries around the region. Also the diaspora, Australia, New Zealand, and US. And basically highlighting vulnerabilities of our island communities to climate change while showcasing our strength and resilience as people. And something new that we're working on as well is around climate mobility and trying to input into a zero draft framework around regional policy that looks at climate mobility within the Pacific. And I'm going to pass it to Silas. Hey, everyone. I'm George. Working with the local NGO, Mount Kenya Network Forum. We are the head of communications. We deal mostly with climate and decision-making sections that I'm helping. And then they have a vision around and working with the local community to ensure the growing inclusion of both spatial needs and how they can interrelate their presence. Yeah. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Silas. Yeah. To Austin. Hi, everybody. My name is Austin. I'm a graduate student at the University of South Dakota. And I'm a part of SODAC 350 with Kara and Jeff also in here. Like Kara said, we're working on kind of working with the city of Sioux Falls and trying to help promote their sustainability and climate action plan. And I'll pass it on to Jeff. So not much to add there, except South Dakota sits in the middle of the US, so flyover country is well-represented here today. And I'll pass it on to who's left here. I'm not sure. I think we got everyone. Did we miss anyone? Austin, have you gone? OK. Yes, Austin did go. Great. I'm Zones. And just really appreciate that we're making the most of this sort of Zoom apocalypse and trying to get online and cooperate together. It's really beautiful. I know sometimes Zoom can be extremely exhausting. And we spend a lot of time. So hopefully it's a life-giving space. And all over the shield, if you want to grab a beer, if you want to get some coffee, whatever it might be. I just want to share a few stories with you and what I've learned and then have a time for questions, feedback, that kind of thing. So just really simple kind of structure here. If we decide that breakout rooms would be helpful or something like that, we can decide that later. So I want to share a little bit of my journey, particularly with a group called the National Land Defense League in Uganda. But I have to kind of back up a little bit in order to tell this story and give some context. So I come from a long line of peasant farmers. And there's a lot of my history is wrapped up in settler colonialism within North America, and particularly on my father's side. But I do have some ancestors that really inspired me in the way that they fought for peasant land rights and food security in centuries past. And through a long series of events, I found myself studying in Uganda. And this was around the time that Occupy Wall Street came up with, especially the Americans in the room and maybe others might remember that time as for millennials like myself, a very kind of radicalizing moment and people coming together in this magical way to contest corporate corporatocracy and corporate power, money and politics. And I was one of those young people at that time that all of a sudden was just being swept up in this wave of everybody becoming an organizer and calling themselves an organizer. And so it was a really magical moment, but also very challenging. And being on, I think, the east coast of the US at that time, I developed like a craving. And I wanted to basically understand how power could be contested and how we could get power. Because every question in the world, you can have all kinds of beautiful technical answers about how to solve any kind of problem or challenge in the world. We've had so many scientists point out so many things to us regarding the climate crisis that we're in and the climate chaos that's ensuing. And it's hard to actually follow or enact any of the advice because we don't have power. And I got really interested in this question of power. It seems like this invisible thing, yet it rules our lives. And I didn't want to only understand it from a 21st century perspective. I did a lot of historical reading. And I've been privileged and fortunate enough to commit a lot of basically my whole adult life so far. I'm only 31 to exploring this issue of how ordinary people seize power, especially when those who currently entrenched by the power, money, structure, systems that they have, cultures that surround them and insulate them. And yeah, I wanted a global perspective on this. I wanted to learn from different continents. And this curiosity took me to be a student in central Uganda in 2009. And when I was in Uganda, I got to ask some of the questions. There's a lot of complaining about corruption in Uganda. So I started to ask deeper questions. Why is there so much corruption? What are the global politics behind this? What are the implications of US and European imperialism, of Chinese imperialism? How does this entrench a dictator like Moosevani, who has been in power for three and a half decades? So I was asking a lot of these kind of questions with fellow students. Immediately when I arrived on campus in Uganda in East Africa, the next week there was something called the Kabaka riots. In the particular university town where I happened to be going to a new school. And basically, I don't want to say a lot about the Kabaka riots, but it was this time where people were fed up with a dictator's behavior. And the tool that they felt they had to contest power in that moment was a riot. And the years that followed, the international kind of donor community, so-called donor community, the global north powers decided to invest more in policing, more in crowd control, more in military within Uganda. And so this, of course, resulted in more torture, more repression against dissidents and critics and activists and organizers across Uganda. And those university students and I, those university students and I that had been asking these tough questions came together and said, OK, we see what they're trying to do. Maybe they mean well, but it's not really working. There needs to be some kind of grassroots effort to shake things up and try to get power into the hands of the people. And of course, I will get to in the story how this what this has to do with climate soon. But first we were just questioning that bigger picture, that bigger picture issue of power and who has it and how do we how do we get it from them basically and share it and create the world that we want instead of being subjected to the one that powerful people are creating for us. And there were seven or eight of us as students from different universities. And so we started a group called Solidarity Uganda. And the idea was that we would give solidarity to communities that are struggling the worst of the worst of the worst situations because of the dictatorship that is oppressing them. And we would give that solidarity in whatever form they said was useful for them. We're very naive like young university students maybe still naive, but a little bit less so now. And yes, mercy three and a half decades as you know, 70 has been in power since 86. So this is also one of the youngest countries in the world in terms of demographics. So the median age is 17 years old. So that means more than half of the population is not even, can't drink, can't vote, is not yet 18. So this also creates a challenge in a country that's ruled by 80 year old people, octogenarians that control religion, business, politics, every kind of sphere of life when there's such an extreme minority and not in touch with the challenges of today. So that means also that most of societies does not remember a time, 80% of the population or more, doesn't remember a time before the Museveni regime. And those that do remember previous regimes, some of which were not as bad, had different political values, some were quite bad as well, but there's not this sort of historical memory that pervades society of like a better time, you know? So this is also a challenge, like building the capacity to imagine, this is part of the revolutionary opportunity of becoming an organizer is, you're always giving everyone that you know a little nudge, take a slightly bigger risk than you did last time, you know? Okay, you guys got a speed hump built in your town through the town council. Great, you got the budget, they implemented it, they made the speed hump, they're gonna be less traffic accidents. What can you do next, right? So there's this beautiful opportunity of being an organizer where you get to kind of not recognizing that they have power and recognizing that they can actually wield that power in all kinds of ways. You're that little provocateur that takes people that you come in contact with to the next level to become a slightly better version, more powerful version at least of their selves. So, you know, when we were building this network solidarity Uganda, we, we said, let's try the hardest thing first because if we're all like young, broke, you know, university students who don't know what we're doing, we don't have any like lawyers backing us up, we don't have any contacts in the media. We're not really like powerful or well connected. If we can win in a community where things are really, really bad under a lack of support, that means good things for the future. You know, that means that other communities where things aren't quite as bad can be, you know, even more powerful with hopefully with our solidarity involved. And, you know, we sat together and decided that the trickiest part of the country, the most repressive part of the country was a district called Amuru, A-M-U-R-U. I'll just type it in the chat if anybody wants to kind of look it up later. It's called Amuru District. And what was interesting about Amuru District is that, so in Northern Uganda, which had, you know, a protracted war for quite some time, lots of human rights abuses by an armed group in the state, there were a lot of like internally displaced people's camps. So people left their ancestral lands, went to places that were thought to be more secure and kind of left their lands alone for some time because of the insecurity. And during this time, Statehouse, the dictator and his family and closest people, started flying investors and helicopters over Northern Uganda and, you know, pointing down to the land and say, look, it's vacant, it's available. It's ready for you to invest and start, you know, a cotton farm or start, you know, a high-end sports game hunting resort or, you know, start drilling, speculative drilling for oil, you know, gold, minerals, whatever, you know, it's ready for your investment. And some investors are thought to have given them a yes and say, yeah, we're interested in this land. So of course this creates challenges because when the war ends, people go back to their ancestral lands, they go back to their gardens and homesteads. Things have grown up, trees have come up, landmarks are already kind of difficult to re-identify. And so there are some of those intra-community challenges about how we go back and re-settle our land and continue on with our life of grazing animals and using the forest for its resources and gardening and farming and doing small business. So this community of Omuru went back to its land and already had its own fair share of internal challenges. But now this land was said to have been given by the state. This community's land given by the state two investors. One by the name of Bruce Martin, a South African sort of high-end sports game hunting investor. And the other one called Madhvani Sugarcane Corporation, a multinational that, you know, just clears out the most biodiverse areas and replaces them with monocrocked sugarcane plantations. And also in addition to grabbing land, creates a very poorly paying market, but at least a readily available market for local out growers to grow sugar on their own land and then sell it at a very low price to the company. So this company Notorious in Uganda already is trying to now go to another part of the country and start a new factory, a new place to produce sugar. So because of this contestation by these large investors and the community that had lived there since the, I believe it was the 14th century when they arrived, there was this history that wasn't lining up. You know, the state was saying one thing to these investors and the community that has been there is saying, you know, this is actually our ancestral land, this is what we have always done and, you know, we deserve to retain it. So this created a lot of challenges, of course, for a returning community after some decades of armed conflict. They started experiencing a lot of, you know, arrest. So if somebody was mobilizing the community to, you know, to protect this land from the encroaching investors, you know, they would go to jail or be tortured or disappeared. There was even somebody that was publicly executed almost ceremoniously in one of the trading centers over this land. So, you know, there are these two big land grabs and the total kind of like land mass we're talking about a hundred thousand acres of land. So it's a massive land affecting thousands and thousands of families, even though it's partially populated, it's still that massive that it's affecting thousands and thousands of farming families. And so we as, you know, young new organizers, you know, we hadn't really done this before. We said, let's find, if there's anybody in this community that is actually trying to protect the land and, you know, take yourselves on the line to do so, because these might be the best people to build relationships and trust with in order to see what kind of solidarity we can lend what they need from us, what we can learn from their struggle and their experiences. And what happened in, I believe it was May 2012, April or May 2012, the president actually flew with this helicopter to Amuru and he stopped at a primary school and he told the community there that if they didn't surrender their land to Madhvani Sugarcane Corporation, he would deny this district any education services, any roads and any like, you know, cell phone network infrastructure, that kind of thing. So he was deliberately saying no state budgets from your taxpayer monies are gonna be allowed to enter this district if you don't surrender the land. So it was a threat. And when he gave that threat, some women disrobed and their society, if you're an old woman and you point your breasts at somebody, it's like a bad omen, it's a curse. And so when these women did that, the military pointed their guns and then Museveni, the dictator told them, no, don't shoot these women. And he flew away from that place and never came back, but he started sending, you know, whoever he appoints from state house to continue this effort to try to grab the community's land. You know, the community had resisted with a variety of means, some violent but unarmed means and then some nonviolent means. So we can talk about that later if it's a bit of a rabbit trail from the story that I want to share. But, you know, we identified some of the community members that had mobilized this resistance to Museveni's, you know, evil speech that he gave at this primary school. And they invited us to their community. And this is a very traumatized and skeptical, rightfully skeptical community. So we knew that we had to be humble, you know, in order to receive their hospitality. Many people, especially for myself a foreigner, any foreigner that had gone there, some had been attacked, some Italians had been attacked. If there's anybody that looks like an Indian, they're just, you know, they were attacked because there's that affiliation with the Madhvani Corporation, which is run by Indians. So we had to kind of like be on the phone with them a few times and say, you know, we really would like to give our solidarity. We believe in your cause. Your cause is righteous to protect this land, you know, and we wanna be behind that. Winning their trust and showing that we are not spies, we're not coming on behalf of the company. It's long and it was patient, but I think what really helped was when we said, you know, we will come there at your hospitality and meet with the people in your community. Because they had always said, if anybody wants to get this land, then they need to negotiate directly with the owners of it, which is this community. It's collectively owned and managed by, you know, the cultural institution of this particular Mudur district. And so we went and, you know, kind of had a meeting with this community. We arrived at 2 p.m. And my friends in this room that are from East Africa can tell you that, you know, along the equator, tropic of Capricorn kind of zone, the sun goes down more or less pretty consistently each day, regardless of season. And so we knew that we had, you know, five hours before the sun would go down. And like every hour, so a new person would show up, people walked from, you know, 30 kilometers away, 40 kilometers away, taking their whole day to walk and have this meeting. Pillars, you know, local leaders, cultural leaders, people basically that had been organizing with their community to try to protect the land. And I think for me, this was like a learning moment about how serious this was. People did want to wait all the way until night to have the meeting because that's what made them feel more secure. And then that night we slept at somebody's home and then a few people stayed awake all night, you know, kind of guarding the door. And this experience like helped me read their experiences. And so I think one thing about being, one takeaway that I hope I can offer is that, you know, having that desire to learn about what people are going through is really important for organizers. Entering into their experiences, it's always going to be trivial, you know, you're never going to fully, truly like enter into their experiences to the possibility of entering into their experience as much as you can, you know, to have that willingness to learn from what they're going through, from the challenges that they have. And then to be honest also about your own challenges, maybe you also have a child and you're concerned about the future of the climate as it might affect your children's lives, you know, find those areas to connect on and find a common struggle, a common enemy, a common goal, something that, you know, makes your experiences similar enough to have that human kind of contact and touch. And for us, it was listening to Dolly Parton, you know, all night, these guys guarding the Dolly Parton. I never had been interested in Dolly Parton, but now every time I listen to Dolly Parton songs, there's like that nostalgic effect of being in, you know, remembering my friends and comrades there. So we had carried out, you know, some meetings and on the way back in the morning, we suffered some arrests and I won't get into all of that, but, you know, it took a long time to like build trust with this community. But once we had it, they were all in and they went, you know, village to village, raising consciousness about civil resistance basically and how we can actually wage our power to, you know, harness our collective power to protect this land and what kinds of strategies and tactics we can use and how we can mobilize people. And, you know, as a few people, we can talk about the snowflake model of organizing. It's kind of one of the models that we didn't know we were using, but we're kind of using where you have like a sort of maybe five or six people that you know, and they're quite motivated, quite dedicated and that way you don't need to know everyone. They also know five or six people, right? So just like a snowflake has that kind of crystalline structure where the center is, you know, replicated, it's a fractal, it's a pattern that keeps replicating outward, but the same sort of, you know, I don't know if chemical structure is the right hard science word, but the same, you know, structure just duplicating itself at scale. That's what a snowflake does to become a snowflake, right? So similarly, movements in order to grow, in order to get numbers and build people power, you know, they can often replicate themselves in such a way that, you know, Austin, you don't need to know a hundred different organizers. Silas, you don't need to know 200 different organizers. You just need to know five or six who also know five or six and we're all sort of loosely connected in this web. So through those networks that already existed in this community, you know, then the only kind of revolutionary ingredient that was needed is, you know, sort of strategy and tactics, you know, already it's a well-organized community. Now how can we resist to build our power and protect this land? So to make a long story short, one day, or at least shorter, sorry, this isn't very short, there was a community that, within Amur that something leaked to them that there was a government convoy that was sent from Kampala eight hours away by road to redistrict the land. So they were gonna have the minister of land, housing and urban development and they were going to have the minister of internal affairs with a armed military convoy bringing new markstones, you know, just physical actual stones. And this is also abnormal in Uganda. To say, to put them down in the ground and say, this is where Ajumani district, the adjacent district where the ruling party had a lot of political leadership and power begins because if they could say that this is Ajumani and not Amuru, then the land giveaway to these corporate powers could be swifter and easier for the state to accomplish. So when the news leaked, this community that had already been training itself and having all these planning meetings about how we can protect this land, they swung into action. There were primary school students by the hundreds going into the good thing about the bad infrastructure in Amuru district is that there's basically only one road to this particular place. And so the primary school children took their leaves and went with their teachers and flooded the road with their jogging and marching and songs. And what really turned the tides and was kind of a beautiful moment, a watershed moment maybe is what we might call it, was when the government convoy arrived and they found this community already clogging up the road, bringing their cattle on the road, just creating so much of a buzz on the road and so many roadblocks. And when the military escort for these big political leaders, started getting out their weapons and everything, again, six grandmothers came out, disrobed and cursed the two ministers that had come to facilitate this redistricting, this gerrymandering kind of exercise. And one of the ministers started crying and the other one turned away in shame. And they actually thwarted the whole exercise and they were able to on that day protect their land. And for us, as a little tiny, scrappy organization trying to support a very powerful community that clearly had a very long history of struggle against this very oppressive opponent. This was very inspiring. We had the privilege of entering into their experience and being a part of this very powerful thing that they had done. They had really thwarted this redistricting exercise and all kinds of calls started this time on this particular action as opposed to the one when the president came where there was almost no press. And people from all around the country started, we started seeing elderly women stripping naked, disrobing rather to protect their land. We started to see a lot of people riotational action to protect their land. And it was a point of reflection for us. And we said, I think sort of as a, this has been a really good learning experience like this we're trying to build and request from around the country of Uganda, not all of them, but quite a number, saying we also have a land issue with this politician trying to steal a large amount of land. And we didn't really have the capacity to support all of these communities. And we were really just learning from this community about how to actually succeed in such a thing. And, but we said, you know, we'll try our best. And we started to build kind of like a network of a regional network of organizers and then of educators and trainers that could teach about nonviolent resistance, that could teach about civil resistance, that could teach about community organizing. And that way we would be able to kind of absorb at scale, you know, the requests coming in for kind of strategic support. And relationships that we could build to wage struggle against a dictator that's very hungry to steal land. And we didn't have, of course, the funds to scale up and like build the infrastructure, but we had the commitment in the network. And those were like the two most important things. And as you start to like get some victories, you can sometimes do some fundraising. Unfortunately, like it would be nice, you know, if money could come first and then you can use money to organize. That's usually not the case. You usually have to have some kind of like victories under your belts. You have to score some wins. And then, you know, people take notice. So, you know, it took a lot of like, it was challenging, but we came into contact with, you know, quite a number of communities, including an indigenous group called the Benet and Mount Elgon. I'll type it in the chat. Benet of Mount Elgon. They're quite an inspiring indigenous minority community of I think about 7,000 population that has for several generations been trying to reclaim their, the ancestral highlands of Mount Elgon from this, you know, sort of state occupation. And we partnered with quite a number of communities to also try to stop similar large scale land grabs and not all were successful, but about six or seven were successful. And then we started to notice another challenge that when a community wins or chases off a land grabber or makes things expensive or complicated enough for the partially protects the land, maybe they don't achieve everything, but at least their struggle results and things not being as bad as they otherwise would be. We found that those communities that were victorious in their local struggles would then sort of sit back and relax. And then I'll go back to the point that I made earlier about the job of an organizer being to nudge people to take another step, okay, you achieve X, it's now time to the sort of the learning zone. You know, you don't wanna push someone too, too much in such a radical ambitious direction that they just feel so put off by it that it's totally impossible. And you don't want to be so incrementally thin with them that they, you know, they're not really achieving much and it's taking a lot of your own energy. You wanna find that sweet spot in between that is what we call the learning zones. You step a little bit out of your comfort zone, not too far, but a little bit out of your comfort zone. And so an organizer really tries to find that learning zone for people. How can we learn and grow? How can we discover our own power? Just a little bit more than last time. And so for this sort of nascent network that didn't have any infrastructure and was sort of communities here and there and different kingdoms, different regions of the country, far opposite corners of the country, how could we unite facing a common Lebanese land grabbing regime? How could we unite and affect policy? How could we unite and affect the implementation of neoliberal practices and the private sector's takeover of land in Uganda? And the way that, you know, there were four of us asking this question. We sat down in a few meetings and this is another beautiful thing I can hear already. I'm a few of you saying, yeah, we have a small enclave, a small group within our community. Like I've had the real privilege of being with so many powerful movements around the world and learning from them. And what I see almost consistently is that it starts with like roughly 10 people. You know, sometimes it's four, sometimes it's 12, sometimes it's six, but it's a small number of people. And if you think about the number of people that can sit around a dinner table and maintain the same one conversation without it being fractured into two conversations without having to kind of build protocol and bylaws. This is how we make a decision together. But it just sort of organically happens around the table. It's roughly that number, right? You're all focused on the topic at hand because it's a small enough group. So there's really no substitute in organizing for these small groups that try to do something together. Another thing that you can research when you get time sort of on the side is affinity groups. I've listed it in the chat. There's ways that even very large and massive movements make decisions across their membership together through affinity groups or at least organize, you know, mass protests, for example, through affinity groups. It's a way to get many, many small groups to kind of cooperate on a common objective or goal. So back to this sort of story and I'll try to pick things up and not be so terribly long-winded. So when these groups were, when we were recognizing this challenge, as I mentioned that groups were, okay, now we have one, let's sit back and wait. Maybe five years later, the land grabber will come back or another land grabber will come, but for now we're all right. There wasn't that culture of solidarity being nurtured among neighboring communities, neighboring tribes, neighboring people affected by more or less the same thing. So when we wanted to build this national network, we knew it was gonna be challenging. There are so many languages in Uganda. The demographics are so diverse. And if we were going to do this at the national level, as we should, as new neoliberal land reforms were coming through Uganda's parliament, we knew that it was gonna be a challenge internally just to handle like minor logistics like communication. So, four of us got together and we decided, let's just start with those communities that were victorious. Let's not invite everyone around the same table. Let's start from a point of strength and let's not do it in the capital city. Let's go to the site of one of these land grabs and that community will host like a national launch of this movement. We will invite people from all of these successful land defense struggles. And then like this community will give birth to the National Land Defense League. And so, then we had this other challenge because as an American like who works, you know, mostly in East Africa with global South communities, like I know the language sometimes slips between non-profit NGO have seen the challenge of how non-profitization or NGOization can kind of co-opt or make less effective, at least the struggles and the power that we're trying to build together, you know, through these very bureaucratic and formal cultures and processes and that kind of thing. And, you know, we were noticing this, we were noticing that sometimes communities would completely forget that the objectives that they identified that we need to protect our land. And, you know, another organization would start a land rights, a women's land rights program, for example, and call them for all these meetings. And then they would start getting t-shirts and then they would start getting, you know, transportation refunds, like rather generous transportation refunds from some of these larger, you know, kind of organizations. And we noticed that this was dividing communities. Something as petty as a t-shirt was dividing communities against themselves. Some communities that get to go to some of these fancy hotels for a meeting, get a t-shirt, they come back. And instead of that mobilizing people, people are actually jealous or, you know, why didn't I get to go to this meeting? And this wasn't the point. The whole point was, you know, this community identified that we need to protect this land, but such distractions came in and we saw that they were a real threat to the power of the communities and the network. And so we kind of decided nothing like t-shirts, you know, nothing where in a central way we need to raise a budget. And this gets me to the principle, like, which I think is a universal principle, which is to use organizing strategies that have the possibility of scaling up. And what I mean by that is organizing strategies that are accessible to any potential or would-be members. Everything they have is already right there for them. So for us, we asked ourselves, you know, not everybody has like a red t-shirt, for example. And if we do need to get red t-shirts, then we're gonna need to raise money and budgets and find a service provider to print them, et cetera, et cetera. But what people do have is millet, millet flour. Millet is the soup, you know, it's like the great grain superfood of East Africa. It's very nutritious. It's indigenous to the area. And everybody, when they cook millet, comes together around a basket in Endero. And you dip your hands into the basket and eat a common meal, yeah? So it has that kind of political significance that coming together, there's that joy, that feast of a delicious, there's this pride, you know, that people have when they eat kaloh, this millet bread that's made at home. Almost every area across Uganda, you will find people really excited about millet. So we said, you know, farmers farm millet and can carry a millet stock. People cook millet at home and they can make feasts. So let's organize around millet. You know, if you want to make your chapter of the National Land Defense League, the only thing you need to do is to make millet, call your, ask, how are we going to protect our land? And we just eat together and we're talking and we've made a chapter. So it was this accessible, you know, basically no cost way of allowing people to self-identify and join in. You know, we made it accessible. We created this point of entry that anybody could just step through them on. And of course, when this launch happened, this launch of the National Land Defense League communities got curious and a lot of chapters formed. Just a quick anecdote that a few months after the launch, in the Samura community, and this was years after the earlier story I told, that there started to be arsons. And they had to go back to the drawing board and say, what do we do? And what they decided was to occupy a United Nations office about two, three hours away from, it was like the nearest United Nations office to their community. So 232 people in the United Nations including children and infants, came to this office and occupied it for 33 days to call upon the UN to basically ask the government to stop killing them and to stop burning down their homes and forcefully evicting them from their ancestral lands. And there's a lot to say about that story that's quite inspiring, but for the takeaway about organizing what was interesting about it, was that at that time, the National Land Defense League, despite being so young, its members swung into action. And Uganda has tons of NGOs, really relies on patronage politics and everybody's sort of waiting for another person to mobilize them because of how many nonprofits and NGOs there are. And this network National Land Defense League didn't have any of that in its blood, you know, it's members from different kingdoms around the country said, yes, we must stand with our chapter in the Muru and they would go door-to-door asking, you know, different people, can you contribute a kilo of beans from your garden? Can you send a few chickens? And then when the more formal organizations wanted to come in and support, all they had to do was now give a budget for a big truck, you know, to load up all of these things being donated to send to the occupation so that the occupation could have food. As I share this with you all, some years after that occupation, there is like a half a year long, six months, I think there are now up to like seven months long occupation happening in another district of Uganda in relation to the National Land Defense League. So this, you know, it's at its high and low peaks. As a kind of nascent movement of a lot of elderly women, farmers and youth across mostly rural Uganda. But it's quite a powerful network and really doesn't have its organizing clearly defined. And it's, you know, a network and infrastructure and how it all works, it's not very clearly defined. And I think in a lot, basically every movement here is somewhere between polarity and lack of clarity. And you have to find a way to kind of like create enough structure because if you want to be more horizontal, more cooperative, you need more structure, not less. We can get into that if it's of interest to those who are here. So, you know, you need to be kind of flexible enough but also have the infrastructure that serves you. You need to be able to create that. So there are a lot of questions, you know a lot of rabbit trails we could take from this point. So I've belabored the story a lot. Just one quick theory to mention if I'm trying to kind of like wrap this up into some bite-size kind of takeaways. There's one theory called Dunbar's number and it's sort of, I think a psychology theory that talks about how the human brain can hold like 150 primary relationships, you know where you know the name of this person and you know what's going on in their lives. You know, your closest relatives the people you care about the most that matter the most to you maybe close colleagues, et cetera. So therefore, we can't be connected to everyone. We have to find a way to as organizers cooperate at scale and that means that you need to know people who know people. So that's one takeaway that I wanna make. I had the chance during the pandemic to do some research interviewing organizers from all kinds of issue areas, generations, demographics from across six continents, you know working with all kinds of models of organizing and there are five takeaways that really quick I just wanna kind of more methodically go through and then we'll hand the mic over to the rest of you. So the common things that came out of this study that I took a few months doing was that one movements often grow without a foundation and then if that foundation is not in place it's really hard to recover it. And the climate movement is probably the best example of this the recent climate movements, you know I think it's sunrise movement that talks about we need to go slow at first so that later we can go fast and paraphrasing you know we build that infrastructure until we have that trust. Once we have that trust and that infrastructure that culture, how do we make decisions then we can go fast together. And then extinction rebellion also I think grew a lot and even lent their comments to this study that I did grew a lot really fast especially amongst the white European demographics and when they realized that they were losing people that didn't fall within that privileged demographic they had to work backwards and undo a lot of the kind of community building and culture that they were putting in place. And that was really tough you know it took a lot of time to do that. So for those of you who are new when I asked on a scale of one to five how much organizing experience do you have don't feel pressured to become you know a veteran organizer somebody that's extremely effective and powerful don't feel that way. Go slow, learn together, be with people. We all know how to have relationships we are social creatures, be yourself. Take that time to listen, to learn go slowly, build the infrastructure that you need. With climate anxiety we're always told the opposite you know and we have to this is an emergency time right like we need to do things now yeah we need to do things yesterday but we can't do that at the expense of actually you know understanding what it is that we're putting in place because it's gonna create challenges for us later. So build that foundation whatever that might mean for you in your perspective context. And the second thing that we saw in the study is that organizers often fail to identify and work with their own verticality. What do I mean by verticality like hierarchy, privilege as there's this kind of activist and organizer culture that tends to fetishize the horizontal and you know we say ah we are all equal here we are all leaders but we don't really define what that means for us in terms of making decisions. And if we just sort of believe it as this wishy washy kind of thing then what happens often in groups is that the social dynamics default to the person in the room that has the most power maybe the most experience maybe is the most like strong willed or outspoken you know there are certain personality types or demographics at play that may make it challenging to actually move forward together. So recognize no there's nothing in the world that's completely horizontal because we all come from different experiences privileges et cetera. And so you know we have to look at those dynamics critically and then we can decide okay how do we make decisions together who makes what kinds of decisions and how. So recognizing that we're always both vertical and horizontal but what's gonna work for us and how can we actually live within our values what kind of system can we create together in order to make decisions together. The third thing that we saw I know I'm going through these things and really kind of touching on them way too fast I can share the study later as well. The third thing is that organizers are often expected to work within a one size fits all framework and it's really helpful you know sometimes for a movement as big as 350 to say this is how we organize. We need a coordinator for communications at every level of you know every sub regional level or something you know sometimes it helps to have those things prescribed for us because then we don't need to build it all from scratch we say oh yeah sure I can volunteer to be the social media engagement person for you know region ABCD. So that does help but we can never be reduced to a position we can never be reduced to a job description or a biography right. We are complex creatures so recognizing that we don't need to squeeze into what's prescribed for us even if what's prescribed for us does give some preliminary direction. And then the fourth thing we saw is that movements often lack horizontal accountability so accountability is really important. Movements are meant to move we don't want to slow down and be so lethargic and not do anything we're meant to move and change the world yeah. But we have to have that accountability along the way because it builds trust when we lose accountability then our conflicts start to become internal and we often lose sight of the goal of the opponents that we have of the targets that we're trying to persuade or move. So building horizontal accountability is important. It doesn't look like a corporation or a government accountability must look to the people that are most affected by the issues that we're fighting for. The fifth thing that we found in the study is that movements have a challenge identifying whether or not and also how to work with other movements. And this is obviously the case within the climate justice struggle as well. Yes we share common interests. We have Fridays for future. We have extinction rebellion. We have all kinds of indigenous communities. There are all kinds of organizations to support this work. And sometimes it feels quite confusing and we don't really have the tools for figuring out how to work with those other groups. But there are some people that have started speculating about tools that can help us determine who we should work with and how. So I'm throwing all this out there basically to wet our appetites for whatever questions or comments you might have. Perhaps you have a reaction to any story I shared or any kind of principle that I'm trying to tie in here. I would love to hear from you all where you wanna take this. So I'm gonna turn off my microphone and pass it on to you. The floor is open. Maybe what we could do is just have a cue. So feel free to use the raise your hand feature if we can give you the floor. Try to keep your comments brief and accommodating for the rest of the 30 minutes that we have together. So if you go down to reactions at the bottom of the screen, you can then click raise hand. And then when you're finished talking, you can click the lower hand button. Maybe it's a bit of information overload for me to talk at you for a full hour. Criticism also welcome. Bad jokes, welcome. Well, I'll pipe in and say that a seemingly specific story was opened up a whole lot of windows. Seemed pretty universal for a, I guess a narrow perspective. It was inspiring there on how many notes I found myself taking. So thank you for that. Many thanks for the appreciation, Jeffrey. Is there anything that you were surprised, resonated with your experience that you could share with us? Well, I'd say that we've been careful and cognizant so far in our organization to do it without alienation. And at this stage, we're trying to invite as many groups within the community as we can find to give voice to our goal, which is to help the city adopt a sustainability and climate action plan. So that resonated, one of our members, Michael Heisler has been very careful to point out that if you grow too fast, you will collapse very fast too. So the caution is appreciated. I think for anybody is welcome to chime in. For me, as I think a white North American, I've had to like really manage my anxiety around climate organizing. I've been a part of too many projects that feel this need to move fast because maybe there's a real looming threat for the first time that someone is ever experiencing that feeling of that real looming imminent threat in their lives. Maybe not to trivialize it too much, but maybe to hyperboleize to make a point, but it's something that is really hard, I think. To go slow in a time of emergency. There are things that, you know, the thief breaks into the house, you need to take action and it's not gonna be perfect, you know? You don't have time to sit back and strategize. You have to do something right now. And yet at the same time, we need to be patient. It's a paradox and contradiction that I'm still trying to figure out how to sit with. It's hard for me. Thanks for sharing that, Jeffrey. Does anybody else have any feedback? I mean, I have other notes, but I feel like I've already overloaded a lot. Mercy, you're unmuted. I wanted to say I am quite impressed about how you've been accommodating of the cultural context of Uganda because I can imagine there was a lot of shock and but being just being able to recognize that this is what works in this context and just making space for that. And also I like the note about making entry points into organizations and not just viewing them as static things that need to work once and for all. And we're going to do it with this set group of people and that's it. You always need to have channels where people can join in, join in on the action. So I think those two are really stood out for me. Thanks for sharing that. There was one really, could I say like a mentor or like an experienced organizer that told me that the biggest reason that any of us do something is because someone asked us to. So maybe it does start with that, asking more people to do something, opening that door. And I also find it interesting how you mentioned the story where there was this other organization fracturing the movement because in most instances, people don't think they are doing some sort of harm but it just put this in, it brings it to the forefront just how some, we need to find ways to work together and not fracture each other's actions in a way. Thank you for sharing that Comrade, yeah. And it's, there is this like principle within maybe activist culture of do no harm that many people try to observe and there's debates about what it means to do no harm. And especially within the climate movement then there are even deeper debates about what does it mean to do no harm and also there is maybe the recognition that this thing is pretty complex and we are gonna do harm. I'm very sure I have done harm even to people that I, and to comrades that I've had the pleasure of meeting. I'm very sure I've done some harm. And it's, we live in this age of cancel culture, like you do a little bit of harm and you're out and that seems relevant to this discussion. I'm not really sure how, but it seems relevant to the discussion. Jump in and say something, this is Rory Davis. I think it's huge as it relates to intent versus impact. So how if I am not intending on harming but I did and the realization of I did this and then how do we move forward from it? I won't even say fix, but how do we move forward from, how do I learn from the harm that I committed or that I did, how do I change that? And then how do we move forward together from it? Because we still need each other together as well. It's my thoughts behind that. Do you Ruth or anybody else here have a response to that question? I think that it's going to be important that we, I think a lot of times there's the lack of intentional listening to whoever the organization or the group or the audience is intentionally listening, not listening for a rebuttal, not listening to just give a response, but intentionally listening to who that audience is, who that organization, who that group is that you have caused the harm to. And then collaborate and we're coming together and better understanding how I committed it. What did I do wrong? What can I do different going forward? And then how we can work together. Thank you for sharing that. It sounds just easier saying, you know, but also a lot to hold. Somebody close to me is, you know, studied psychology and took me through 16personalities.com which is kind of like a Western psychology, Myers-Briggs thing where you learn your personality type and a 16 different, you know, breaking down 7 billion of our species into 16 personalities may be a bit superficial, but when I saw my personality type and then I read about, you know, my strengths and weaknesses, I was like, okay, this really does describe me. And then, you know, it described to me how I am as a friend, how I am as a parent, how I am as a partner, how I am as a worker, you know, I, as I read other people and the kinds of space that I'm capable or might be more challenging for me to create with different kinds of groups. So there are many kinds of personality assessments, of course, for me that just, just doing that sort of like self-reflection on how I come off to others, it's hard to kind of step outside of yourself and think about the inadvertent arm you might be causing, but it's a good exercise for organizers. It's also good for, we did it with Solidaries Uganda. We went to an island, one, one, there's an island district of something like 80, something islands about 60, something of them are populated in Uganda. And we just took a few days to kind of understand each other. You know, we're in this really mess of severe repression, a very repressive state, you know, carving out that space and time to actually be human together, to understand each other more deeply, to ask about your hopes and fears, you know, creating all that time is actually very meaningful and helpful for the social fabric of a group. And the more trust you have, you know, you move at the speed of trust, this is, I'm now appropriating words of Adrienne Marie Brown, who's a great organizer from the United States. So you're not gonna really achieve what you want to. You can also work and organize with people that you don't trust, but having some clarity about the boundaries. And I'm sure I'm speaking to some of the East Africans in the room, you've probably collaborated with people that you're not sure whether you can trust or not because of various factors. And you can actually work with each other, it's hard, it goes slower, you know, you're not ready to make a big splash together until you're really more certain. But yeah, carving out that space to learn about yourself, but also within the context of the team that you're on is something that I've found to be really quite useful. Another way to think about it might be that there might be a time not to organize, not to recruit people. Sometimes in the climate struggle, you may need five people who can monkey rent and, you know, stop a large truck from making a shipment or something. And, you know, you really don't need to recruit hundreds of people, you might just need that small kind of a group that already has a lot of internal trust, but then you want to think about how that action can inspire other groups, similar groups to come up or contribute to a broader campaign. You know, how can it not be done in isolation? How can it be incorporated as part of a broader, more powerful movement or effort? So, when not to organize is also a consideration. Sometimes, you know, what tilts the balance for LGBT comes out. And that's what really, you know, that pop culture moment is what was needed. And maybe, yeah, of course, organizing still needed to be done. There's no substitute for it, but, you know, full tool that we have, but it's not the only tool. Are there any other reflections? The space is open still for 15 more minutes. I am going through a challenge. Maybe I can give a little bit of a real-time case study here. I'm going through a challenge with a group of 300 people right now that is physically present where I am. Trying to land on one or two clear objectives across tremendous diversity of over 50, like to put it in the form of nation-states, there are over 50 nation-states represented in this group of 300 people. And we're trying to come to one or two clear objectives. And we have one more day to do that. And we haven't gained much ground in the past two days. Does anybody have any advice? Maybe a little bit more context. Like, what are you working towards? What tactics have you been trying the past two days? Yeah, what are the demographics of the group? It is a Pan-African group. And I am just hoping, I'm just hosting like a little, you know, in any group you have a spectrum of opinions. I think our spectrum is from my opinion and the opinion of, you know, people that I think are values overlap enough. We find ourselves like on the political left. And we would like the objectives of this movement to be very clear on the political left and not vague and say, oh, you know, justice and dignity for all. And, you know, yes, we want those things, but also that language can easily, you know, total or Chinese national offshore oil company can come in and give justice and dignity for all and their own way of looking at things. So the tactic that we've been using is to try to tilt the conversation and our preferred politics is to get people in the evening that share our values around the campfire and talking, having a dream together and figuring out how we can influence the main program. We have like a few people in the coordinating team that actually quite a number that share our values. So it feels a bit like the sort of central organizing team has strong values and then the members who are present, some of them share those values, but maybe the majority don't. So it's a bit of an interesting thing because you don't want to undermine, you know, democratic process and all that kind of thing. At the same time, you don't want to compromise on your on your on your values. So I don't know if that helps mercy to get more of a specific response from you. I don't know, maybe explore more on the values and experiences and maybe try to come up with a shared vision of what you want to achieve. I guess that's the best advice I would come up with, given the details. Thank you. Thank you. I was looking for, you know, the perfect silver bullet that would change everything in your response, right? So lots of leaning on you. There's a great comment from George in the chat. Thank you, George. And actually, it reminds me, I could share a bit of a toolbox that I helped develop with a group called beautiful trouble, which I've been a part of for, I think, since 2015, 2016. There is a principle within this toolbox that speaks to exactly what George is talking about, take leadership from the most impacted people. They will always be the ones that you can, you know, best enlist because they stand to gain or lose something from, you know, the work that you're doing. So they'll be committed, you know, and they're the best people to take direction from. If you go to beautiful trouble.org and you click on the link that says toolbox, it will take you to this toolbox that has hundreds and hundreds of stories, tactics, principles, theories and methodologies. You can also, there are a few ways to use the toolbox. You can click sets and then there are a few kind of thematically specific kinds of sets, you know, and there's one for organizing one-on-one. So I'm making the assumption that many of you ended up in this session because you were interested in organizing and that's what I was asked to come and talk about. So this would be a starting point for some tools on organizing. We are going to develop more methodologies for this organizing set that talk about how to actually do the organizing because this toolbox is more strong in creative activism and strategy and tactics than it is in the sort of nitty gritties of organizing. But at least here you do see, you know, follow the lead of the most impacted is somewhat related to it. I think what George is sharing in the chat. But there are a number of things here and you can, here's one that I shared today, use organizing strategies that scale. Written up by one of our comrades called, my face is also there. We got a lot of the theory from, I think this was wrong and it needs to be changed. We got a lot of the theory from somebody called Fiona who is also listed in the toolbox elsewhere. And, you know, she talked a lot about how in western Uganda recruitment was done for this movement. So as you click any tool you can go through and read more in depth about that particular tool, you know, real world applications. There's a lot to click around if there are tools that you like, you can click this little heart. And then you can go to my tools and then you can download a PDF. And it will just automatically create a little mini book out of the tools that you like. So sometimes when a campaign comes to me and says, you know, we have such and such challenges, can you give us some direction? Instead of, you know, telling them what to do. Well, okay, I have a lot selected in mind, you know, it's like over 80 pages. But, you know, I'll just click three or four and then I export a PDF and drop it to them. So there's a lot of ways to use this toolbox. Just dig around in it sometime and see if there's anything that might, you know, be, be useful for you and your struggles. I do want to share my contacts. I, you know, for the past several years, I was just kind of like doing scrappy organizing for no pay or sometimes I would get a little money or something and, you know, keep my family afloat to give my contribution to our budget. But lately I got like a nine to five job that allows me to be an organizer and support organizers and support movements and do more climate justice work. So that gives me enough space in my life. Or if I can't directly maybe connect you to people that are facing or have gone through similar challenges that you have. So I would love it if anybody wants to get, and thanks Kelly for sharing the link in the chat. If anybody wants to, you know, get in touch or if you have a specific challenge that maybe you don't want to discuss in this group and would rather discuss, you know, one on one. I might know some folks, you know, to put you in touch with that have gone through the same thing and can speak about their experience or maybe I've experienced it myself. So yeah, it would be great to be in touch. I'll share that. That email in the chat. This is my email. And there are two emails. That's the email that is my professional email. Here's my personal email. My name is all this going to the same person. So whatever. However you want to get in touch is great if you'd like to. Decarved out. I think, you know, not that this is a circular praise session where we're all praising each other, but one beautiful thing about 350 is. That a lot of the teammates. That are brought aboard to even just the professional side of what 350 has to do. Come from grassroots organizing. And I think this is what makes it a powerful kind of. Large network. You know, it's so centered and rooted in that kind of culture. And, you know, that differentiates it from some of the larger kind of. I NGOs that are more historical and have been around and all that kind of thing. And might be, you know, quite powerful and helpful in other ways, but one of the great assets of 350 is that organizing culture remains intact. The partners that it's choosing are people that are, you know, really engaged in, in, in, in, in the, in the climate justice struggle, including those of you in this room. So it's just really always a privilege to kind of have a chance to, to meet you, talk more with you, learn from.