| Jan 16 2008 |
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| A vibrating US Social Forum |
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Norman Stockwell
On January 26th, 2008, people and organizations will join together –
individually – to create a day of global actions around the theme of
“another world is possible.”
Over 15 planned actions are currently confirmed across the United States,
with more still in the planning stages. Themes will include immigrant
rights and worker justice; healthcare; bringing the troops home; climate
change and waste reduction. These planned actions will take many different
forms including a people’s music concert, a media strategy summit, an art
exhibition, forums, and workshops. Participants will include the Poor
Peoples’ Economic Human Rights Campaign, sectors of organized labor,
numerous political musicians and artists, and just plain folks that have
never been active before.
The seeds of many of these actions have grown in the soil that was
fertilized in Atlanta last June, when the first-ever US Social Forum was
held. Other forums had certainly taken place in the United States, but
their focus was more local or regional, here for the first time, a
country-wide organizing committee, rooted in the southern United States,
organized a very successful and meaningful forum.
The USSF in Atlanta was notable in several ways – first the diversity of
the organizing committee itself, which successfully strove to put
leadership and decision-making in the hands of people of diverse gender
identities, lower incomes, and those differently-abled. The event did a
good job of reflecting the diversity of its organizers. Youth had a strong
presence, and the racial diversity was broader than any other US activist
gathering in recent memory. Working with limited time and resources, the
organizing committee was able to pull-off an event of over 12,000 people
that ran smoothly, and even had printed programs available before the
first activities started.
Great efforts were made to promote diverse and community-based media
coverage as well. A well-outfitted press center – albeit a bit
“off-the-beaten-track” - was set-up behind the main plenary stage. A
collaboration between Pacifica Radio (the world's oldest community radio
network – begun in 1949) and AMARC (the world's community radio network)
working together with ALER - based in Quito, Ecuador was able to provide
daily live and downloadable coverage of all the forum’s events in English,
Spanish, and French to a global audience. In addition, scores of
independent reporters blogged, and posted articles, photos, and raw tape
of events to a common website.
Organizers successful structured the 5-day event to avoid the “star
syndrome” by placing horizontally organized workshops during daytime
hours, and holding larger plenary gatherings in the evenings. By setting
the USSF in the southern United States, organizers were able to tap in to
the hundreds of small independent organizations that have been doing
social justice work on-the-ground for the past four decades. Many of these
groups, rooted in the civil rights struggles of the late-1950s and
early-1960s brought a strong message of “working within the spaces
available” to a younger generation. But at the same time, the younger
activists and the newer struggles of immigrant rights, gay, lesbian &
transgender rights and environmentalism were well-represented and
well-heeded.
The USSF provided space to build new relationships among existing
activists and to share and critique analyses and strategies. For older
activists, it helped renew and rekindle energies, for younger ones, it was
a chance to see the possibilities of another world.
The spirit and style of this year’s World Social Forum events will be as
diverse as the groups and individuals participating. Some of the events in
the US include:
In California, activists and journ |
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terraviva radio |
In cooperation with Amarc  |
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q&a |
 'Militarism and Paranoia will strike WSF'
"In future many activists will be prevented from travelling to other countries by being denied entry visas, because a new kind of criminalisation of social protest is under way," says Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. |
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 Taking stands is vital for the WSF
The WSF as an "open space" idea can either be implemented in a liberal direction or in a committed, progressive direction, says Walden Bello, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South. |
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 Davos has lost its arrogance
The WSF didn’t produce the progressive wave in Latin America by itself; nevertheless, it would be difficult to imagine it without (the presence of) the WSF, says Cândido Grzybowski, director of iBase (Brazil) and member of the WSF's International Committee. |
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 We Now Need Accomplishments
"We will need legs of a marathon runner to lay the foundation of true democracy", says Anuradha Mittal, social activist and Head of the Oakland Institute in California. |
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news from the WSF |
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IPS World Service |
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TerraViva on PDF
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voices |
 Native Peoples and the World Social Forum
For the indigenous peoples, the Forum provide a platform for the traditional knowledge and diverse characteristics of each region, as people raise their voices in support of justice and rights, writes T. Marcos Terena (Brazil),member of the Xané indigenous group and president of the ITC Inter-tribal Committee |
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 Labour Still has to Catch Up with the WSF
Whilst new union strategies, new labour movements, and even new spaces for a new kind of international labour struggle are developing, labour does not yet have the impact on the WSF that is necessary, writes Peter Waterman, a longtime commentator on labour and social movement internationalism. |
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 A vibrating US Social Forum
Over 15 planned actions are currently confirmed across the United States. The seeds of many of these actions have grown in the soil that was fertilized in Atlanta last June, when the first-ever US Social Forum was held, writes journalist Norman Stockwell from Madison, Wisconsin |
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 The Forum at the Crossroads
By Walden Bello, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines |
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terraviva Archives |
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