United States Social Reform

What makes a social justice movement successful? Is it the popularity of the issue? Is it the number of rallies organized? Is it the number of people who participate? Is it the effect on the passage or blockage of a piece of legislation?

These questions came to mind after a workshop the Columban JPIC Office (USA) organized with other faith-based organizations on the interconnectedness of trade and migration examined through the lens of scripture for the first United States Social Forum (USSF) in Atlanta on June 27-July 1. After thoughtful preparation of two months, my fellow organizers and I were faced with a mere four participants in our workshop of approximately 10,000 people who attended the Social Forum. My initial reaction was disappointment.

But then I had to ask myself, what was disappointing? Was it the quality of the discussion that ensued? No. Although we were few, or perhaps because we were few, we shared a rich discussion and reflection on both personal experience and Scripture.

Sure, it would be easy to get caught up in the numbers game, but having attended workshops with large attendance, I wonder if they are any more effective. As a friend once told me, throw and pitcher of water over 100 people and they will only be hit with a few drops, but pour a pitcher of water on one person, and they are soaked.

After our humble workshop, I began thinking about Jesus. I doubt he got caught up in the numbers game. In story after story throughout the Gospel, it was Jesus’ personal and intimate connection with people that was the source of conversion.

Can we be so presumptuous to think that it is our own doing that inspires people to join our efforts? Certainly we can be instruments of peace and change. But in the end, whether people are aware or not, is it not the Spirit working in a person’s heart that is the true cause for conversion?

The USSF is one piece of a global social justice movement that began seven years ago with the first World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001.

The WSF has grown in size and scope each year since. The movement became so big that geographical regions and countries began hosting their own social forums to try and address more regional and local issues.

In the United States there have been local social forums in the Southwest, Southeast, Boston and Washington, D.C. The USSF in Atlanta was the first of its kind at a national level in the United States.

Back to my original question: What makes a social justice movement successful? I don’t really have an answer, since success can be defined in so many ways. Perhaps more important is to ask ourselves how can we be instruments of peace and change? How is God calling us to love our sisters and brothers, to love the Earth, and to feel our interconnectedness?

For countless people around the world, it is through the World Social Forum and regional Social Forums. We share with you this month more about both the WSF and USSF. Listen to your heart, and it may be calling you to join.

In peace,

Amy Woolam Echeverria
JPIC Office Coordinator

 History: Another World is Possible: About the World Social Forum

The first World Social Forum (WSF) was held in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where more than 12,000 representatives of social movements, activists and non-governmental organizations from around the world came together to network, educate one another and look for a way forward to create a more just, inclusive and sustainable world. They united under the slogan “Another World is Possible.”

Since 2001, the World Social Forum has met every year and has generated numerous regional and local versions. In 2007, the World Social Forum took place in Nairobi, Kenya. And while there will be no World Social Forum next year, the next Social Forum in 2009 will return to the Amazon River region.

The World Social Forum has been coordinated to coincide with and respond to the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, of business and political leaders primarily from industrialized countries. Ostensibly, they meet to discuss the world’s most-pressing social and economic issues. It has been widely criticized for being exclusive, secretive and non-transparent as well as for being more focused on profit-making than poverty reduction. That’s because heads of the largest multinational corporations have exclusive access to heads of state during the Forum.

Steep membership fees allow the largest corporations to set and control the agenda for the meetings, further undermining democratic principles.

In response to the tightly controlled Economic Forum, the World Social Forum and the more localized versions are a chaotic and joyous celebration of voice, participation and vision.
According to Frank Joyce in AlterNet, “As a cultural and political phenomenon, there is nothing quite like the WSF which started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. Even if you visit the United Nations or attend the Olympics, you won’t be so engaged with people from so many countries speaking so many languages, wearing so many different styles of clothing and so driven by a broadly shared social vision. Nowhere else can you have this kind of six day opportunity to march, sing, dance, demonstrate, talk, listen and learn” (www.alternet.org/stories/48097).

In the United States, smaller regional WSF forum spin-offs have been held in the Midwest, Southeast, on the U.S.-Mexico border, in Washington, D.C., and Boston. Organizations have come together to network, strategize and learn from each other. All of this local resource-sharing and movement building finally coalesced into the first-ever U.S. Social Forum (USSF), which took place from June 27-July 1 this year in Atlanta.

More than 10,000 people participated, from all over the United States with many international delegates, united under the slogan, “Another World Is Possible; Another U.S. Is Necessary.”

There were nearly 1,000 workshops, and hundreds of organizations sent representatives with a strong and vibrant community and grassroots presence as well as significant and engaged participation by youth. Topics and issues discussed were wide and varied, although certain themes were more prominent, including immigrants’ rights, New Orleans and the victims of Hurricane Katrina, globalization, women’s rights, indigenous rights and organizing against war and militarism.

In wrapping up the assembly, resolutions were floated that will continue to be deliberated in a collective process before scheduled adopted in September. There were press conferences, marches, concerts and other creative actions. And while the next US Social Forum will not take place for a couple of years, there are plans for a global day of action scheduled for January 26, 2008. The Americas Social Forum will be held in Guatemala City in October 2008.

Read other articles about the U.S. Social Forum:

A Light Within (The Heart of Empire)
Left Turn Magazine
www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=13033

A Declaration of Interdependence
Sojourners
blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2007/07/tim-kumfer-a-declaration-of-in.html

US Social Forum Forges Common Ground
Inter Press Service
www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38397

Values: World Social Forum Charter of Principles

The committee of Brazilian organizations that conceived of and organized the first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in 2001 evaluating its results and the expectations it raised. In response, they drew up this “Charter of Principles” to guide future Social Forums:

1. The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth.
2. The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized in time and place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre that “another world is possible,” it becomes a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it.
3. The World Social Forum is a world process. All the meetings that are held as part of this process have an international dimension.
4. The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations’ interests, with the complicity of national governments. They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal human rights, and those of all citizens— men and women—of all nations and the environment and will rest on democratic international systems and institutions at the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty of peoples.
5. The World Social Forum brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but it does not intend to be a body representing world civil society.
6. The meetings of the World Social Forum do not deliberate on behalf of the World Social Forum as a body. No one, therefore, will be authorized, on behalf of any of the editions of the Forum, to express positions claiming to be those of all its participants. The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body, whether by vote or acclamation, on declarations or proposals for action that would commit all, or the majority, of them and that propose to be taken as establishing positions of the Forum as a body. It thus does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants in its meetings, nor does it intend to constitute the only option for interrelation and action by the organizations and movements that participate in it.
7. Nonetheless, organizations or groups of organizations that participate in the Forums meetings must be assured the right, during such meetings, to deliberate on declarations or actions they may decide on, whether singly or in coordination with other participants. The World Social Forum undertakes to circulate such decisions widely by the means at its disposal, without directing, hierarchizing, censuring or restricting them, but as deliberations of the organizations or groups of organizations that made the decisions.
8. The World Social Forum is a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party context that, in a decentralized fashion, interrelates organizations and movements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the international to build another world.
9. The World Social Forum will always be a forum open to pluralism and to the diversity of activities and ways of engaging of the organizations and movements that decide to participate in it, as well as the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles. Neither party representations nor military organizations shall participate in the Forum. Government leaders and members of legislatures who accept the commitments of this Charter may be invited to participate in a personal capacity.
10. The World Social Forum is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist views of economy, development and history and to the use of violence as a means of social control by the State. It upholds respect for Human Rights, the practices of real democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, ethnicities, genders and peoples, and condemns all forms of domination and all subjection of one person by another.
11. As a forum for debate, the World Social Forum is a movement of ideas that prompts reflection, and the transparent circulation of the results of that reflection, on the mechanisms and instruments of domination by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome that domination, and on the alternatives proposed to solve the problems of exclusion and social inequality that the process of capitalist globalization with its racist, sexist and environmentally destructive dimensions is creating internationally and within countries.
12. As a framework for the exchange of experiences, the World Social Forum encourages understanding and mutual recognition among its participant organizations and movements, and places special value on the exchange among them, particularly on all that society is building to centre economic activity and political action on meeting the needs of people and respecting nature, in the present and for future generations.
13. As a context for interrelations, the World Social Forum seeks to strengthen and create new national and international links among organizations and movements of society, that—in both public and private life—will increase the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization the world is undergoing and to the violence used by the State, and reinforce the humanizing measures being taken by the action of these movements and organizations.
14. The World Social Forum is a process that encourages its participant organizations and movements to situate their actions, from the local level to the national level and seeking active participation in international contexts, as issues of planetary citizenship, and to introduce onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices that they are experimenting in building a new world in solidarity.

Approved and adopted in São Paulo, Brazil, on April 9, 2001, by the organizations that make up the World Social Forum Organizing Committee, approved with modifications by the World Social Forum International Council on June 10, 2001.

For more information, please see www.forumsocialmundial.org.br

Participants: Who else came?

Here is a short list of some other USSF 2007 participants whose workshops impressed us, who collaborate on similar issues, or are doing innovative work for social change. Check them out!

American Friends Service Committee
www.afsc.org/default.htm
The American Friends Service Committee is a practical expression of the faith of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Committed to the principles of nonviolence and justice, it seeks in its work and witness to draw on the transforming power of love, human and divine.

Beehive Design Collective
www.beehivecollective.org/english/front.htm
The Beehive’s mission is to cross-pollinate the grassroots, by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images that can be used as educational and organizing tools. In the process of this effort we seek to take the “who made that!?” and “how much does it cost!?” out of our creative endeavors, by anonymously functioning as word-to-image translators of the information we convey. We build and disseminate these visual tools with the hope that they will self-replicate and take on life of their own.

Center of Concern
www.coc.org
Since 1971, the Center of Concern has offered moral vision and provided effective leadership in the struggle to end hunger, poverty, environmental decline, and injustice in the United States and around the world. Our goal is to provide individuals and organizations with basic tools to address these universal questions: What are the root causes of human suffering in the world today? How can we change the system to increase social justice and offer hope?

We provide reliable information and analysis on development issues, practical alternatives to current development policies and practical suggestions for personal action, and faith reflections on this work for justice.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers
www.ciw-online.org
The CIW is a community-based worker organization. Our members are largely Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian immigrants working in low-wage jobs throughout the state of Florida. We strive to build our strength as a community on a basis of reflection and analysis, constant attention to coalition building across ethnic divisions, and an ongoing investment in leadership development to help our members continually develop their skills in community education and organization.

Corporate Accountability International
www.stopcorporateabuse.org/cms
Corporate Accountability International is a membership organization that protects people by waging and winning campaigns that challenge irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions around the world.

Global Justice Ecology Project
www.globaljusticeecology.org
Global Justice Ecology Project advances global justice and ecological awareness by identifying issues, creating strategies, organizing campaigns, building alliances and disseminating photographic images that demonstrate the interconnections between the social and the ecological, promoting a crucial holistic analysis to unify and strengthen movements.

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
www.iatp.org
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy promotes resilient family farms, rural communities and ecosystems around the world through research and education, science and technology, and advocacy.

National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
www.nnirr.org
We work to promote a just immigration and refugee policy in the United States and to defend and expand the rights of all immigrants and refugees, regardless of immigration status. The National Network bases its efforts in the principles of equality and justice, and seeks the enfranchisement of all immigrant and refugee communities in the United States through organizing and advocating for their full labor, environmental, civil and human rights.

Planners Network
www.plannersnetwork.org
Planners Network is an association of professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas, who promote fundamental change in our political and economic systems.

Project South
www.projectsouth.org
Project South is a leadership development organization based in the U.S. South creating spaces for movement building. We work with communities pushed forward by the struggle to strengthen leadership and provide popular political and economic education for personal and social transformation.

Take Action: Support the Jubilee Act

The central objective of the 2007 Sabbath Year is a hearing in the House and Senate and, ultimately, passage of the Jubilee Act HR 2634. This bill will cancel the debt of approximately 67 impoverished countries in the Global South. The Jubilee Act was introduced on June 7 by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the original introducers of the legislation in the last Congress.

The Jubilee Act cancels impoverished country debt; removes economic conditionalities from the cancellation process; mandates transparency and accountability from governments and international financial institutions; and moves forward with more responsible lending practices.

This month, send a message to your representative and urge them to co-sponsor the new Jubilee Act, HR 2634, which provides for greater responsibility in lending and expanded cancellation of debts owed to the United States and the international financial institutions by impoverished countries.

For more information and to take action for Jubilee debt cancellation, please visit www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee-act.html

Update on SOA/WHINSEC funding vote:
The grassroots mobilizing effort was tremendous. Tens of thousands of emails, faxes and calls flooded the halls of Congress in the lead-up to vote to cut funding to the School of America (SOA)/WHINSEC.

Students, clergy, union members and veterans traveled to Washington and visited with hundreds of congressional offices to communicate clearly that there is no room for such institutions in our future. Sadly, despite this, the SOA/WHINSEC survived by a mere six votes.

While we did not get enough members of Congress to vote with us, it was clear to us and our supporters in the House that we have tremendous power when we mobilize together. We gained the support of new Republicans and new members of Congress, the margin of SOA/WHINSEC survival is rapidly dwindling, and this week, due to grassroots pressure, we added several new cosponsors to HR 1707 bringing our total to 111. We thank you for all your amazing work, sacrifice, commitment and support! For more information, please visit: www.soaw.org.

Resources & Events

Know Your Rights
This is a compilation of different “know your rights” pages, for responding to immigration raids, detentions, etc. It is a wiki, so feel free to add new resources.
migrantsrights.wiki.zoho.com/Know-Your-Rights.html

Pax Christi USA Annual Conference: Pursuit of Peace in a Culture of Violence
Pax Christi USA is pleased to announce this year’s conference, “The Pursuit of Peace in a Culture of Violence: A National Catholic Conference on Peacemaking,” to be held August 10-12 at Seattle University in Seattle.

Jack Jezreel, executive director of Just Faith Ministries, is the keynote speaker, along with seminar presenters including Camilo Mejia, Ray McGovern, Dr. Jeanette Rodriguez, Ted Fortier, the Pax Christi Anti-Racism Team, the Rev. Charles Morris and Sr. Jamie Phelps, OP. There also will be opportunity for a national grassroots discernment on “The Peoples’ Peace Initiative.” For more information, please see www.paxchristiusa.org.

International Forum on Globalization Teach-In: Confronting the Triple Crisis
The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) is an alliance of 60 leading activists, scholars, economists, researchers and writers formed to stimulate new thinking, joint activity, and public education in response to economic globalization. On September 14-16, the alliance will hold a teach-in at Lisner Auditorium, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., on “Confronting the Triple Crisis: Climate Change, Peak Oil, and Global Resource Depletion.” For more information, please see www.ifg.org.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Care for Creation:
Around the Globe, Farmers Losing Ground
Inter Press Service
www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38343

Economic Justice:
Congress Introduces Legislation to Address the G-8’s Unfinished Agenda on Debt
Jubilee USA
www.jubileeusa.org/press/press-item/article

A Slow Demise in the Delta
The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article

Migration:
Trading on Migrant Labor
By David Bacon
The American Prospect
www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=trading_on_migrant_labor

Peace:
Iraq Isn’t South Korea
Foreign Policy in Focus
www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4354

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