Project Description
The Movement Vision Project, a special project of the Center for Community Change, will create a more positive, vision-oriented and integrated movement for social change in the United States. The Project will excavate the progressive vision for the future of the United States according to movement activists. What would society look like if they ran the country? The Project will explore the extent to which activists have a shared vision, and the Project will develop strategies for how movements can link and advance shared, long-term strategies for change. Toward these ends, the Project will entail two primary activities, in consecutive phases:
In Phase One, several hundred activists and advocates will be interviewed about their vision and strategic goals for the future of the United States. Each activist will be asked to explore her or his goals for a progressive United States – not details of minute policy compromises or grand visions for designing a utopia, but tangible ideas for what a progressive United States would look like, how it would be structured and what it would feel like to live in. Interviews will focus on the key single-issue movements along the progressive spectrum – including education reform, environmental justice, labor/economic justice, health policy, criminal justice, immigrant rights, trade and globalization and foreign policy. Would gun safety activists ban all guns? Would peace activists disband the military? Would anti-corporate globalization activists end all outsourcing? Cultural and identity activists will also be interviewed – on topics such as race, sexuality, gender, religion, art and entertainment. For instance, what would meaning would race have in a just society? Hundreds of interviews will be conducted with national activists, as well as activists in four key focus sites across the country: the cities of Miami and Los Angles, and the states of Colorado and Kentucky. As a result, we’ll know if there is a shared vision for the future of the United States, and if not, what the disagreements are and why they exist.
The results of these interviews will be synthesized in a book, as well as several articles and papers on each focus site. Part of the synthesis will be to identify overarching themes and goals that cut across the many issue “silos” and might form the basis for unified campaigns on social change. The synthesis documents will report other ideas from activists for how to move the progressive vision forward.
In Phase Two, the Project will develop targeted efforts to build vision-oriented collaborations among national movements and among activists working in the four focus sites. The book and focus site papers will be used as groundwork to convene national organizations working in different fields, or several local groups working in many different fields, to discuss what it would mean for them to advance a long-term, shared vision through their day-to-day work. This is unexplored territory for progressive movement building — how to operationalize a shared vision in the context of short-term organizing and advocacy, where our field isn’t organized in a top-down fashion. Does the vision only echo in our rhetoric and messaging? Does it shape our immediate policy choices? How does our long-term vision pollinate our ideas and actions? Working with partner organizations in the four sites and other national organizations, the Project will investigate what is needed to advance a shared, long-term vision across different fields of the progressive movement.
In addition, strategies will also be pursued to bring the progressive movement vision to wider audiences. The book will be marketed in mainstream and liberal media, and the Project will reach out to cultural artists to generate visual and performance pieces that reflect on and respond to the ideas in the book.
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