In the last year, MG reached over 6,000 people through workshops, retreats, strategy sessions, and speaking events. Tens of thousands more engaged with our cultural productions, read our articles, downloaded our curriculum, or listened to our staff guest on podcasts. Some of our key accomplishments include: - Created and hosted a 5-session online course, entitled Course Correction: Just Transition in the Age of Covid-19. The course explored the structural causes of the pandemic, along with the strategic implications, openings and challenges for Ecological Justice & Just Transition, represented by this new pandemic reality. Over 4,500 individuals registered as participants for this course. It was held May 2020-July 2020.
- On March 7, 2020, we hosted a daylong training in Oakland, attended by 100+ participants, in a training-for-trainers format, which covered some of our most popular curriculum tools featured in our recently released Propagate, Pollinate, Practice MG Curriculum Toolbox. Originally, over 200 participants registered for this daylong session. Understandably, roughly half stayed home, due to the evolving nature of the developing pandemic and MG widely shared videos and curriculum after the event.
- In Fall 2019, we launched Season 2 of the comedic web series The North Pole Show. Written by Josh Healey, Yvan Iturriaga, Reyna Amaya, Donte Clark, and produced in collaboration with Rosario Dawson, The North Pole Season 2 premiered at Oakland’s historic Grand Lake Theater on Sept 4th, 2019, to a sold-out venue. That week there were also simultaneous screenings in 13 cities: New Orleans, Austin, Chicago, Phoenix, Seattle, Charlotte, Portland, Santa Rosa, Hartford, Athens, Buffalo, Los Angeles, and Boston. In Season 2, The North Pole’s main characters face up against ICE agents and shady sheriffs, wildfires and white supremacists, as they find themselves in the middle of the conversation around immigrant rights and black/brown unity, toxic air and toxic masculinity, hood vegans, and tamale revolutions.
- We seriously expanded our capacity by hiring 4 new staff! In Sept 2019 we began a long-planned hiring process, with the objective of adding two new members to our staff collective. Yet the search yielded incredible candidates – which, along with stronger than anticipated funding, led us to extend an offer to four individuals. Abbas Khalid, Angela Aguilar, Melissa ‘Crosby’, and Tré Vasquez joined MG staff January 2020, and after a 6-month candidacy period, became full staff collective members in July 2020.
- In February 2020, MG and Grassroots International, released a report entitled Protesta Y Propuesta which centers the stories of over a dozen Puerto Rican social movements who have taken the lead in meeting the needs of the archipelago’s people and natural resources, following Hurricane Maria. We wrote the report after training at GRI’s Strategy Retreat in Puerto Rico in 2019 which included a week learning and meeting with frontline organizers across PR. GRI used the report in its efforts to organize funders at the Environmental Grantmakers Association Conference.
- We hosted a Webinar in November 2019 titled Wildfires, Shutoffs, and a Just Transition, focused on the need for mutual aid, disability justice, and regaining community control of our energy grids. We also joined the founding Leadership Team of Reclaim Our Power a critical campaign to transform our energy system rooted in frontline community vision, regenerative solutions, and bioregional governance.
- The North Pole Season 2 received a further boost, when we produced and released its anthem song and music video Flame Go in Dec 2019, written by and featuring Zion I, MADlines, and DONBLAK. Over the last year, The North Pole has featured as an exemplary activist popular culture 'intervention' in many organizing spaces - most recently in a webinar conference hosted by Race Forward titled Seeds, Stories and Strategies, which took place in July 2020. To date the show has over 100,000 views.
- We have engaged in deep relationship building with California Native / Indigenous-led organizations in the greater Bay Area and beyond. Over the last year, we have participated in multiple shared projects and learning exchanges with the Cultural Conservancy and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Many of these processes are focused on building out and supporting indigenous-led land rematriation and reclamation campaigns. We also began a joint study and relationship building at the intersections of climate justice & disability justice with the amazing Sins Invalid.
- We hosted a youth delegation to the SF Bay Area, from our sister organization PUSH Buffalo in Dec 2020, who were interested in a Just Transition learning exchange in the Bay with organizations like Urban Tilth, APEN and others.
- We substantially grew our Communications and Social Media capacity and reach. And our amazing operations team has helped us make the leap from google docs to secure systems on NextCloud with the support of Palante Cooperative and Progressive Technology Project.
- In the Spring of 2020, we created a new CoVid-19 related blog titled This Is the Beginning. Thus far, we have published seven articles including pieces on Parenting in CoVid, Permanently Organized Communities, Understanding Bioregions, and most recently, Meeting Chaos with Calm: How to Prepare for a Potential Coup.
- All told, MG staff have been featured in over a dozen webinars and podcasts in recent months, hosted by a varied range of organizations, like Creating Freedom Movements, the Center for Political Education, the North California Resilience Network and many more.
- Oh yeah, lest we forget: We figured out how to survive, adapt, lead, and thrive in the midst of a long-term pandemic.
Thanks for all your support! |