Political Education

Wild team members Jake Waxman and Nneka Akubeze, along with colleagues from the Workplace Justice Lab, recently wrapped up the second year of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 2015 Distributed Leadership Project (DLP). This ongoing partnership with SEIU 2015 focuses on adapting an organizing framework that empowers staff and members to step into leadership roles and transition from mobilizing to organizing. This is critically important for a union that represents over 500,000 nursing home and homecare workers throughout the state of California relying on motivated efforts from members to expand reach. While this organizing approach, based on relationships and [...]

Freedom, Inc. (FI), based in Madison, WI, is a Black and Southeast Asian non-profit serving low- to no-income communities of color. Their mission is to achieve social justice by providing direct services, leadership development, and community organizing to end violence against women, gender-non-conforming and transgender individuals, and children in these communities. FI continues to confront the systems that directly impact the communities they support, with the biggest challenge being the threat of police violence and intentional targeting of communities of color, especially Black community members. Militarization and criminalization are crucial in advancing and protecting economic neoliberal-capitalist interests. There has [...]

Two years ago Sarah ElRaheb-Dagher, Marshall Ganz, Emily Lin, and Jake Waxman came together to see how we could adapt the class on Organizing that Marshall has taught for more than 20 years at Harvard. We drew on the learning from the hundreds (if not thousands) of workshops that we've developed and run in the field to see what a more "intensive" experience could bring to the Harvard classroom. Now in the 3rd iteration of this "innovation cycle", this year's MLD 377/378 included 80 participants from 37 countries. On the first weekend of the course, these 80 individuals shared [...]

Come February, children all around the U.S. are learning the names of Black leaders like Fedrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks in school. It is certainly important to recognize the accomplishments of these individuals and their contribution to American history, but for most Americans, Black History is taught using a time capsule that all too often begins with slavery and ends after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The version of American history which uplifts and centers Black achievements is robust and recent. Though there are many to choose from, here are just five of [...]

Now that it represents big sales and the end of summer, it might surprise you that Labor Day was originally an organizers’ holiday. “Organized labor was critical in the fight against child labor and for the eight-hour workday and the New Deal, which gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance,” says Chad Broughton of The Atlantic.  What has changed between the 19th century and now? Let’s not forget the history of what is truly a celebration of working people and what we can do when we come together for a cause. What is the Meaning of Labor Day? While 1894 [...]