A BIG, Summer Sunshine SWS financial and support appeal
This is warm-hearted call out to ask people to make a donation, small or large, to help us keep SWS organising through 2011 and 2012. Our upcoming plans will soon be here which include a support programme for community activists, a call out for SWS community activist support workers, the SWS political education programme and all the new communities in resistance ….all help much appreciated.
help SWS by donating!
♦ New website coming soon… ♦
What?
- So We Stand organises to challenge environmental injustices from the frontline. This means recognising that it disproportionately afffects poor and black communities. We think environmental justice, social justice and anti-racism are the same struggle.
- We work directly with frontline communties of resistance against sites of environmental injustice.
- We don’t prioritise our own voices or those of the more priviliged. We prioritise the voices of those already fighting their own battles.
- We are committed to anti-oppression. This means committing to constantly challenging ourselves as; individuals, SWS as an organisation, players in wider systems and structures as well as always being critical of the hierarchies in the world around us.
- We wholeheartedly support all forms of community self-defence. This includes all strategies and methods of empowerment and defence from the people fighting injustices on the frontline. This means not leading, judging or imposing – from us or anyone else.
How?
- We are committed to using popular education as our main tool for engagement. This means getting to know groups and adapting to their needs, working with their experience and needs and not imposing hierarchies.
- This means solidarity with communities, on their terms. Providing the support they want, when they want it, in the forms that they want it. In practice this could mean many things like – running a workshop, helping to find funding, facilitating a meeting…
- We see power in networking communities facing environmental injustices – to help end their isolation in struggle and to enable the sharing of experience, strategy, skills and importantly, stories of groups facing similar battles.
- We are committed to, where appropriate, promoting these voices at a wider level by supporting groups in organising wider theoretical events, raising awareness of lived struggle. Always when based on the principles above – never by pretending to know someone else’s story or retelling in our own voices.
- supporting the development of CREATIVE resistance among communities.
- We are not against the so called ‘environmental movement’, but hold it in a critical friendship. We believe it holds with it an embedded sense of self-congratulation which fails to address it’s own privilege. This, in turn, up holds and recreates many of the unchallenged systems of oppression and hierarchy embedded in all struggle, including environmental struggle . To define yourself as a ‘movement’ or as an ‘environmental activist’ in itself invisibilises and ignores the real fight on the front lines of environmental injustices, it denies the experiences of those environmental warriors who are not part of your ‘movement’ but who fight daily for their health, lives and communities. Therefore, we will not organise with groups that we feel don’t organise within an anti-oppression framework in this sense.
(see anti-oppression organising page for more detailed explanation)
Please get in contact anytime with sowestand@gmail.com
