Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Organizing is to the community what spiritual practice is to the individual.” Being a part of movements is complex work, it requires a faith.

in spite of their best intentions, those who aren’t directly impacted only see the surface layer(s) of the impact, and thus come up with surface solutions that don’t address the deep-seated multi-pronged need in the community.

The word “strategy” is a military term, which means a plan of action towards a goal. I want to really emphasize the “a”s in that sentence—there is a practice of narrowing down, identifying one path forward, one strategy, one way, one agenda, one leader, one set of values, etc. Reducing the wild and wonderful world into one thing that we can grasp,

(We are calling for a movement-wide shift away from action that isn’t grounded in a vision of deep systemic change, as that ultimately is a misuse of our time and energy.)

Octavia Butler, one of the cornerstones of my awareness of emergent strategy, spoke of the fatal human flaw as a combination of hierarchy and intelligence.

the practices of collaboration and adaptation and transformative justice, are science fictional behavior. We didn’t create this understanding, we observed it amongst the afrofuturists and sci fi writers and creators we grew up loving and being liberated by. Language changes with time, and sometimes the word for a people or an action comes centuries

We define a shift as social, political, economic and/or cultural transformation. From our perspective, we want shifts in the direction of ecological resilience and social equity, as an imperative. We believe that shifts can emerge from collective “aha” moments when social movements awaken the popular imagination to new possibilities and spark socia

destroying a person doesn’t destroy all of the systems that allow harmful people to do harm.

One of my favorite ways of understanding nature creating more possibilities, is to watch water move through the world. Water creates the ways for itself, moving with gravity, moving around obstacles, wearing down obstacles, reshaping the world. When there isn’t an overt way forward, water seeps into the land, becomes a vapor in the sky, freezes int

in a beautiful twist, being soft in your rightness, as opposed to smashing people with your brilliance, can open others up to whatever wisdom you’ve accumulated.