Editor’s Note from Rivera Sun
The pandemic has shape-shifted activism, but it hasn’t stopped it. In our opening image (above), these activists blocked four streets in downtown San Francisco while they painted a giant mural (side image – and notice how small the people are!) of a hot air balloon that was visible from the skyrise offices above. This action was part of an international campaign to confront investment company Black Rock at their annual shareholders meetings over their financing of fossil fuels. Actions took place in New York, San Francisco, Brussels, and London.
But nonviolence is more than protests. It also includes actions and efforts covered in this week’s Nonviolence News, including an anti-racist parenting manual for COVID-19, the Great Potato Giveaway from farmers to food banks, South Africa’s Community Action Networks, the Brazilian women’s collective reforesting their river basin one seed at a time, acts of collective and public mourning like the Colombian social leaders dancing the African morticians’ dance in the streets, and the Native Hawaiians plans to shift their economy from extractive tourism to one rooted in traditional values of love for the land and community.
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Photo Credits: Photo (top) by Brooke Anderson.
Photo (thumbnail of balloon) by Survival Media Agency.
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Seed by Seed, This Women’s Collective Reforests Brazil: For more than 10 years, the 65 members of the Yarang Women’s Movement have collected native seeds and sold them downriver to areas in need of reforestation. Read more >>
Tenants Win Cooperative Home Ownership: 38 families in Minneapolis won cooperative ownership of their five apartment buildings after a rent strike, mutual aid effort, and an interest-free loan from the city. Read more >>
Faith Groups In 14 Countries Divest From Fossil Fuels: More than 40 faith institutions committed to divest their finances from fossil fuels while at the same time calling for the post-pandemic economic recovery to shift the world toward a low-carbon future. Read more >>
Ohio Quits Kicking People Off Unemployment After Hacker Creates a Script To Flood Website: The state previously set up a “fraud” website encouraging employers to report those who refused to go back on the job, angering workers and labor rights advocates. State officials say they are now reconsidering the policy after Motherboard reported that a hacker created a script to flood the “COVID-19 Fraud” website with junk data, with the goal of making it impossible to process these claims. Read more >>
Coronavirus Rolled Back Humanity’s “Earth Overshoot Day” Date: It shouldn’t take a pandemic to get humanity to live within their limits. But researchers as the Global Footprint Calculator just rolled back the date of “Earth Overshoot Day” for the first time in years. Read more >>
Hundreds of Apple Packing House Workers On Strike In Washington: Yakima County has the highest rate of COVID-19 cases on the West Coast. At six apple packing houses, workers are on strike in a women-led, multigenerational, and multiracial effort. Read more >>
13 Los Angeles Families Claim Empty Buildings For “Shelter From the Storm: In a city where more than 120,000 properties are vacant, Angelenos experiencing homelessness are taking over empty residences to protect themselves from COVID-19. Read more >>
National Day of Mourning Slams Trump and GOP’s Failed Covid-19 Response as US Death Toll Nears 100,000: As the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 climbed toward 100,000 and congressional Republicans continued “pumping the brakes” on further relief spending, a coalition of advocacy groups on Wednesday held a “National Day of Mourning” to protest the GOP’s inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic. Read more >>
Workers Are Afraid of Returning to Work Amid Pandemic. Will There Be a General Strike? Calls for a general strike are growing as millions of people consider going back to work after months of quarantine. Read more >>
New York Blocks Prisoner Release Efforts: The no-bail movement was on a roll from Vermont and New Jersey to Alaska and Georgia – and then the lock ‘em up mob struck back. Read more >>
With ‘Āina Aloha Economic Futures, Native Hawaiians Seek Economic Reboot Away From Tourism: In the wake of COVID-19, a new group in Hawai’i is looking to “reboot the entire operating system of the economy” from an extractive tourism economy to one rooted in the Native Hawaiian value of ʻāina aloha — a deep and abiding love for the land and communities. Read more >>
Defense Workers Were Deemed Essential During Pandemic; But They’re Protesting The Lack of “Defense” Measures Against Contagion: Thanks to the defense industry’s sprawling lobbying apparatus, defense workers have been forced to show up to work to build weapons — even as a number of workers at those factories have tested positive for coronavirus. Read more >>
Shell Must Fall! Protests Target Shareholders Meeting: After a night of autonomous decentralised actions, the group ‘Shell Must Fall!’ protests in front of the Shell Headquarters in the Hague during their annual shareholders meeting. Read more >>
Extinction Rebellion Covers Trafalgar Square With 2,000 Pairs of Shoes: People also held a banner that reads ‘Covid today > Climate tomorrow > Act Now’; connecting failures to the respond to the pandemic to the failure to assure a livable future for youth. Read more >>
JPMorgan Chase Faces Investor Revolt Over Financing Climate Destruction: Activist and shareholder frustrations with JPMorgan Chase’s funding of global climate catastrophe were on full display Tuesday during the multinational investment bank’s virtual Annual General Meeting. Read more >>
Extinction Rebellion Around the World: Croatians sidewalk chalk messages, Denmark’s Digital Disruption, bank protests, planters taking over car parking spots, and so much more. Read more >>
Little Village Residents Hit Hard By Toxic Plume Fight Back: Organizing to counter environmental racism, here’s how this community is standing up for their rights, even amidst COVID-19. Read more >>
#FreeBlackMamas Demands Prisoner Release: Protesters, led by currently and formerly incarcerated women, trans and non gender-binary people, demanded releases and an end to unjust cash bail. Read more >>
The History of Mutual Aid Has Prepared POC For This Pandemic: Here are frontline stories of mutual aid organizing from people around the US. Read more >>
Asian Americans, Mutual Aid and Cooperatives Are Nothing New: For these communities, solidarity economics have been practiced out of necessity. But there are lessons we could all learn. Read more >>
Asian American Feminists Release “Care In the Time of Coronavirus”: The downloadable document covers a wide range of issues and concerns from an Asian American feminist lens. Read more >>
Anti-Racist Parenting During COVID-19: “The cultural work we do in our homes, the care work we do in our communities, and the activism we do to end systems of oppression may look different in the time of COVID-19, but it matters all the more.” Read more >>
Draft Women? Hell No! A 1-hr webinar on what’s going on and how a growing, intergenerational network is standing up to say: Hell No! Don’t expand the draft to women, abolish the draft system for everyone! Read more >>
Disobedient Peace: In contrast to a “negative peace” rooted in simply the absence of certain kinds of violence, Disobedient Peace is about building knowledge collectively through reflection and action, questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about a complex social order and obedience to authority, and developing a moral identity and action plans to disobey inhumane social orders. Read more >>
No War 2020 Goes Online! Access From Anywhere May 28-31: Divest, disarm, demilitarize, this year’s World Beyond War conference features three days of online teach-ins, talks, and workshops. Find out more here >>
Fashion Industry Challenges COVID-19 Racism: Asian American designers such as Phillip Lim and Prabal Gurung are using their clothes to fight against the rising tide of corona-related xenophobia and help the relief effort. Read more >>
48 Colombian Social Leaders Protest Lack of Healthcare and Food: In the middle of the road, demonstrators placed a coffin and performed the dance of the African morticians. This dance has been going viral on social media lately. Read more >>
Italy’s Sardines Get Creative To Move the Movement Forward: A potted basil plant with a cardboard sign that read #6000Sardines held a demonstration in a public square. It was promoting a constructive program of buying potted plants to support the burgeoning anti-far right movement’s efforts. Read more >>
Giant Street Mural Painted in San Francisco to Pressure Blackrock’s Skyscraper Offices: A socially-distanced protest can be safe, creative, and effective. Here’s a good example. Read more >>
The Great Potato Giveaway: Giving away food is just one example of how people around the world are adjusting to the strain the coronavirus pandemic has put on supply chains, as restaurants, schools and hotels close. With unemployment soaring, demand from food banks is rising fast at the same time farmers have fewer outlets to sell their crops. Read more >>
Extinction Rebellion Denmark and Australia Launch Digital Rebellions: Danish rebels designed a web browser add-on to overwhelm selected polluters with a barrage of web requests. Each request contained messages from a recent UN environmental report calling for urgent action. The action was the digital equivalent of queueing up at McDonalds and ordering the non-existent vegan, zero-waste Happy Meal again and again. Read more >>
Artists Create Street Murals To Boost Spirits During Pandemic: Leaving bright paintings with inspiring messages throughout the city, these Santa Monica artists are infusing a bit of hope into their community. Read more >>
Making a Community Action Net (Work): Community Action Networks in South Africa bring residents from varied backgrounds into collective action to find solutions to COVID-related issues. Here’s what we can learn from their experience. Read more >>
When Activist Burnout Was A Problem 50 Years Ago, This Group Found A Solution: As activists weary from war, campus killings, a tyrant in the White House and poverty at home started dropping out, Movement for a New Society built a model of sustainability. Read more >>
What’s Next for Asia’s Social Movements? The pandemic gives states an excuse to clamp down on the opposition, but it will also allow protesters to build solidarity with their communities. Read more >>
Here’s How To Stop Local Surveillance: This toolkit offers strategies and tactics for protecting your right to privacy – and your community’s. Read more >>
The French Villages That Rescued Thousands During WWII Continue To Welcome Refugees: Wanting to study a place that specialized in peace, anthropologist Maggie Paxson came to Le Chambon — only to discover that its good deeds aren’t just in the past. Read more >>
How Do You Protest When You Can’t Take To The Streets? Cyberspace has become the main arena for social movements, as digital tools are used to help activists and citizens communicate, organize, and mobilize. Read more >>
Three Ways Human Rights Groups Can Build Hope During COVID-19: The guide offers lessons on why messaging matters for human rights groups responding to the pandemic. Rather than unintentionally re-creating fear and anxiety, the guide argues, human rights actors should be amplifying the values and solutions that point us towards a better resolution of our present situation. Read more >>
In A Pandemic, Be A Positive Disruptor – Not An Ambulance Chaser: In moments of crisis, it is critical that social justice advocates remain focused on ethical and transformative advocacy, not reactive short-term change. Read more >>
New Cohort Forming! Nonviolence Online Community Course – 6 Week Course with Rivera Sun, Wednesdays starting May 28th: Co-facilitated with Pace e Bene’s Veronica Pelicaric, this online course is intended to provide an opportunity to build community while studying nonviolence. Read more >>
Intergenerational Peace Literacy Through Peace Literature Course w/ Nonviolence News Editor Rivera Sun: Using the award-winning Ari Ara Series, this summer course introduces practical skills for building peace in our lives, communities, and world. Starts June 10th. Read more >>
Poor People’s Digital March on June 20th: Shifting a previously planned street march in Washington, DC, online, this action organizes people digitally instead. Read more >>
Sunrise Movement Creative School 4 New Courses: Offering online courses in story, art, video, and graphic design, this summer series offers ways to support creative change making. Read more >>
Support Undocumented Workers COVID-19 Relief Fund: Movimiento Cosecha gave out $300,000 in relief funds last week, but 30 minutes later, they had 5,000 new requests for aid. Here’s how to support migrant workers and families >>
#GeneralStrike2020 – How To Participate: General Strikes are being organized for the first of each month, including worker, rent, debt, and shopping strikes. Read more >>
Global Week of Actions May 25 to 31 Against Sanctions and Imperialism: Join with others to organize against sanctions and imperialism. Be creative – if we can’t gather then do something virtual or a car caravan. Read more >>
#ShareMyCheck Supports Economic Justice Based Stimulus Check Redistribution: Here’s how people are sharing the wealth. Read more >>
Global Degrowth Day 2020: Celebrate the second annual Global Degrowth Day on June 6. Be part of a diverse movement for global justice, sustainability and well-being. As the coronavirus pandemic may still prohibit gatherings in June, they offer support for creating virtual events. Read more >>
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