On February 15-17, 2008, thirty-three young activists and organizers ranging in age from 18 to 34 came to Highlander for Transitions: A Young Adult Leadership Gathering, which focused on leadership transition issues in Appalachia and the South. Participants explored the question of transition on three related levels:

• Individual transitions - including the many personal and professional changes that people go through in their 20s and early 30s.
• Leadership transitions - including how people can best move from youth to young adult to adult roles in their organizations and communities, finding good mentors, being a good mentor, dealing with elders who can't or won't share power and authority, developing leadership teams and working more communally/relationally, and how to handle leadership transitions in a more sustainable way.
• Movement transitions - including such questions as how movements develop, what being in a movement means, how movement work can be made more sustainable for both individuals and organizations, and what alternatives there are to traditional non-profit structures.

Transitions also provided an important opportunity for participants to network with other activists in the region. The gathering was racially and geographically diverse and included people with a wide range of experience and very different positions in their organizations. Still, participants found that they faced many of the same problems and that their work overlapped in significant ways - particularly around issues such as education, the criminalization of youth, and environmental justice.

Transitions was the first in what will be a series of local and regional gatherings to support young adults involved in social change in the region. Highlander will hold a second gathering for young adult activists in the fall, and staff members are currently documenting the Transitions curriculum for use in other gatherings on transition issues. Participants are also getting together locally and setting up a "circle" on the Building Leadership/Organizing Communities website (www.mybloc.net) so they can continue supporting each other and sharing ideas and strategies.

Workshop participants

On March 13-15, Highlander held its 8th multilingual capacity building workshop, focused on training interpreters to work in a social justice context. It was the largest interpreter training workshop so far, with thirty-six participants from North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Alabama, Florida, and Washington, DC. Among the organizations represented were Student Action with Farmworkers, Miami Workers Center, Southern Poverty Law Center, NC Legal Aid Immigrant Project, Coalición de Organizaciones Latinoamericanas, and the People United.

The workshop is designed to achieve three main objectives by providing

1. An analysis of the role of the interpreter in a social justice context.
2. A day of interpreter skills-building and techniques.
3. An opportunity for participants to prepare a variety of multilingual spaces.

Two participants from previous workshops - one from Asheville and one from New Orleans - co-facilitated the workshop with Highlander staff member Roberto Tijerina, another level in building the capacity of interpreters in the region and giving valuable experience with the curriculum to take back to their local communities.

To see pictures from the workshop, click here. For more information about Highlander's multilingual capacity building work, click here.

On March 7-8, 2008, Highlander staff members Mónica Hernández and Elandria Williams facilitated workshops at El Foro Latino and Foro Juvenil, the annual immigrant leadership gatherings for adults and young people in North Carolina sponsored by El Pueblo, attended this year by nearly 300 immigrants from across the state.

Mónica led a workshop on leadership and base building for social change that explored how different styles of leadership enhance or hinder social change, and helped participants identify concrete steps to strengthen leadership development in their own organizations and communities. It was attended by 40 people.

Elandria led two workshops on youth activism and young people's role in social change, attended by a total of 125 people. These sessions used popular theater and other techniques to help participants identify the forces and institutions that hold young people down and how they can "flip the script." Elandria was assisted in facilitating the workshops by two young people from El Centro Hispano who attended Highlander's 2007 Seeds of Fire youth leadership camp. The planning committee for El Foro Juvenil included two youth and two adult allies from El Pueblo who also attended the 2007 Seeds of Fire camp.

The Nashville group at Highlander

On February 22-24, Highlander hosted a weekend retreat by a group of about 30 undergraduate and graduate students from Nashville area colleges: American Baptist College, Fisk University, Tennessee State University and Vanderbilt.

The group was led by Rev. James Lawson, Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt who taught non-violence to the members of the Nashville sit-in movement in the early 1960s, and by John Egerton, a leading journalist of the South and the Civil Rights Movement.

For more information and a larger picture of the group at Highlander, click here.

Participants at the 75th

Check out "Highlander 75th Anniversary" - an article by Bobby Mitchell that appears in the Winter 2007 issue of the Coal River Mountain Watch Messenger.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

A few of us folks working for justice here in southern West Virginia attended the anniversary looking to share experiences, strategize and build on the growing movement of folks fighting for safe living conditions and a healthy environment . . . .

We found much more than a typical conference, this was a major cross generational, multi-issue approached celebration to social change. . . .

A main theme emphasized at the event was to just hear and be heard; so many folks with stories about grassroots battles and political struggles where so much has originated from the meetings and strategy sessions coming from this research center in eastern Tennessee. The solutions are coming right from the people.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is launching a national petition campaign to end modern-day slavery and sweatshops in the fields!

The petition calls on Burger King and other food industry leaders to work with the CIW to improve the wages and working conditions of the men and women who harvest their tomatoes, and support an industry-wide effort to end human rights violations and modern-day slavery in all of Florida's fields.

The petition will also serve notice that those who sign are "prepared to stop patronizing Burger King now, and other food industry leaders in the future, should they fail to do so."

For more information and to sign the petition, visit www.ciw-online.org/2008_Petitions/index.html.

The National Organizers Alliance Gathering VI will be held June 29-July 2 at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Community and labor organizers from many spectrums of the movement around the country will come together in the NOA tradition of sharing and learning, strategizing and building community. We will be looking back through decades of movement building for justice, learning from present organizing experiences and looking ahead to the future.

Space is limited. Information available on scholarships. Go to www.noacentral.org or email Gathering6@noacentral.org or phone 202-543-6603 x 204.

Data from Highlander's anemometer tower for January and February 2008 is now online.

If we had a windmill, we would have generated 787 kWh in January and 1,423 kWh in February, worth a total of $331.45 at current rates. Since we installed the anemometer tower in late September 2007, we would have made $612.70.

To view all of the data from the anemometer tower, click here.

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