Common Good Collective

In A Regerative Economy, The Frontlines Take The Lead

The Frontline is a Force – Building Resilient, Regenerative and Equitable Economies from Climate Justice Alliance on Vimeo.

The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) formed in 2013 to create a new center of gravity in the climate movement by uniting frontline communities and organizations into a formidable force. Our translocal organizing strategy and mobilizing capacity is building a Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression, and towards resilient, regenerative and equitable economies. We believe that the process of transition must place race, gender and class at the center of the solutions equation in order to make it a truly Just Transition. Read more

Share with a friend

Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Poetry for Building Community, Reader Permalink

If 2017 Was A Poem by Mahogany L. Browne

In her poem, “If 2017 was a poem title”, Browne reflects on the Black experience so that you feel stuck in a quagmire of mundane oppression. I am present in every one of the hundred scenes she creates. While she reflects on her hometown of Brooklyn, she weaves in events throughout America’s history that connects us with her experience.

Spike Lee and The Role of A Patriot by Reggie Ugwu

It’s a funny thing, Zooming with Spike Lee. He’s remote, confined within a box within a box on your computer screen, and yet somehow undiminished.

Maybe it’s the look — the ball cap and the glasses — or maybe it’s the way he looks at you. Lee has been staring directly into cameras for more than 30 years. Think of his most famous characters — Mars Blackmon, from his 1986 feature “She’s Gotta Have It,” and a series of Nike commercials with Michael Jordan; or Mookie from “Do the Right Thing” — and they’re confronting you head-on. This is Lee’s preferred stance: undaunted, in your face, eye-to-eye. And it works. Even on a stuttering videoconference, the man is unmistakable.

He’s been isolating at his home on the Upper East Side since March, when the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of New York City. His only regular contact with the outside world comes via his bike — a gift, custom-painted orange and blue in honor of his beloved New York Knicks — which he rides alone for three to five miles each morning, wearing a mask and helmet. At night, he has family dinners with his wife, Tonya, and two children, Satchel and Jackson, just as the neighbors begin cheering and banging pots and pans as part of citywide tributes to beleaguered health care workers.

As a 63-year-old African-American, Lee is in a high-risk group for mortality from the virus. Is he afraid? “Hell yeah, I’m afraid!” he said, sitting on a sofa beneath an oversized, vintage poster for the 1950 biopic “The Jackie Robinson Story.” “That’s why I’m keeping my black ass in the house!”

This is Lee at a strange and singular moment in his career. He has spent nearly four decades and more than 30 films reckoning with the jagged and brutal course of history. Now, in the middle of a global calamity, and with a new film, “Da 5 Bloods,” that revisits the Vietnam War, he is its witness once again — older, more contemplative and as insatiable as ever, despite a legacy as solid as exists in American cinema.

Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence: In Conversation with Resmaa Menakem

The best laws and diversity training have not gotten us anywhere near where we want to go. Therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem is working with old wisdom and very new science about our bodies and nervous systems, and all we condense into the word “race.” Krista sat down with him in Minneapolis, where they both live and work, before the pandemic lockdown began. In this heartbreaking moment, after the killing of George Floyd and the history it carries, Resmaa Menakem’s practices offer us the beginning to change at a cellular level.

The most compelling part about this podcast is Menakem’s ingenious transformations of language around a difficult subject. For instance, instead of using the phrase “people of color”, Menakem refers to racial minorities as “people of culture”, moving away from the familiar, yet vague, descriptor and grounding the subjects in their humanity. These subtle rhetorical switches invites both the listener and the speaker to see themselves and their communities anew.

Share with a friend

Reader, Structure Of Belonging, The Abundant Community, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

Radical Acceptance: The Work Our Souls Require by Ekemini Uwan

More than three months have passed since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic. Initially, shock and denial gave way to coping with humor: There were a plethora of jokes on social media about introverts thriving and extroverts languishing under these dystopian conditions. There was wistful reminiscence of “the last time” we hugged a friend or sat down to eat at a restaurant, and planning for what we’d do when things went back to normal. I, like many Americans, thought that the coronavirus would quickly run its course, that after a month or so things would return to normal. Of course, that assumes that there is a “normal” that awaits us someday.Yet as the days turn to weeks and the weeks turn to months, the novelty of staying home has worn off. The partisan wave of anti-lockdown protests that sprang up all over the country showed the desire for normalcy at its extreme, but even those who are responsibly limiting contact with others are feeling the frustration. Students are growing weary of online instruction and long to see their teachers and classmates in person. Many of those who were gainfully employed before the pandemic are now unemployed and anxious as bills mount. Essential workers are risking exposure to the virus when they clock in. In the quest to return to normal, many states have reopened despite cautions given by scientific experts who warn of a second wave of outbreaks, which is now on the horizon, due to the premature reopening of states.