Highlights of 2008 Work and 2009 Plans
Pam McMichael, Director
2008 Year-End Letter
We are midway through the first cycle of THREADS, working with 35 activists and organizers helping to strengthen local work, and building relationships and connections across issues and identities. Through popular education, people explore what mountaintop removal in West Virginia has to do with environmental degradation along the Gulf and how raids on immigrant workers in western North Carolina are connected to criminalization of youth in Mississippi. We will complete this cycle of THREADS in 2009 and start a second cycle as part of our five-year strategy to train 150+ southern organizers.
Last summer, 35 youth and adult allies attended the Seeds of Fire youth camp concentrated on criminal justice, education and economics, including a two-day training on nonviolence. We are conducting mini-camps in local communities in the coming months focused on these same issues. In collaboration with the Gathering for Justice, staff conducted a nonviolence training in Little Rock for 41 people including current and former gang members, formerly incarcerated, people in recovery, from shelters and religious communities. Nonviolence training will be a continued area of work for Highlander as people hone their strategies for addressing issues in education and stopping the cradle to prison pipeline. We are also collaborating with Appalshop, High Rocks and others to launch the STAY Project, a youth-initiated and led project to engage Appalachian youth in creating opportunities to stay at home in the region in light of economic realities, being LGBTQQ and the ability to have leadership and be change agents in their communities.
We are working to end the raids and conduct public education about the larger problem of aggressive practices by ICE in our region and are part of a new campaign with the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. In the last year, we have been active helping communities build rapid response coalitions, completed a Know Your Rights training of trainers to do work region wide, and compiled a Southern based rapid response resource guide. We conducted a train the trainers Justice School for TIRCC organizing staff so they can implement the political and organizing leadership institute across the state, and continue to serve on the steering committee of the Southeast Immigrant Rights Network.
We will be convening artists, cultural workers and organizers to develop educational tools and materials about globalization and immigration in the context of race. Much work has been done to build understanding of immigration as an economic issue, but in the historic paradigm of the Black/white South, there is further need to build understanding of immigration with a race analysis. Doing so offers an important frame for People of Color and working class whites to work together.
Having completed our 10th Multilingual Capacity Building workshop for interpreters for social justice, we are pleased to announce that our multilingual capacity building curriculum is being printed and will be available soon. In January, we will develop and pilot a level-two curriculum. We see great progress toward our primary goal to increase efforts throughout the region to address organizing across language and culture.
In the last 15 months, over 120 people gathered for three Southern Strategies sessions convened by Highlander with partner organizations, the culmination of which focused on The Economy and the Elections. We shared our analysis of what this current moment means and planned collaborative actions to address long-standing structural disparities in our region. Highlander will continue to play an anchoring role in this strategic work. (For a report on the first two sessions, see www.highlandercenter.org/southern-strategies.asp.)
Economic justice will be central to our work, developing and disseminating educational tools, working with collaborative partners to incorporate local and national alternative economic models and by serving on the Solidarity Economic Network Coordinating Committee, among other efforts.
It was also a big year for us in terms of expansion and protection of 'place.' We purchased property next to us, and grew Highlander's grounds by 80 acres, a 3 bedroom house and 500 apple trees. Our vision for the land includes first, second, and third horizon steps to connect the land to current and expanded programs while enhancing the experience of people who come. In the first horizon, we will start vegetable gardens, create trails, reclaim the pond and incorporate the sustainability connections of the environment and the economy.
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