Welcome to Dispatch #47! In this issue we complete the two-part series we began a couple issues ago when we discussed the 4 roles activists must fulfill in a social movement. This week, we’re sharing Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan - an 8-part framework that describes the different stages of successful social movements. We believe this information is critical for anyone trying to get a better understanding of a social movement's lifecycle because we often know how to get started, but are not always sure about what comes next and what to focus on in each stage.
Moyer noticed that there was a stage when activists and organizers felt like they had failed in achieving their goals, but that was actually right before they had their biggest successes. When we look at today’s social movements, they still follow a similar pattern - whether that’s Palestine Liberation, anti-ICE demonstrations in the US, global anti-Data Center organizing, or the fight against the climate crisis. These movements explode onto the scene but then can feel like they lose steam or even failed, but Moyer’s Movement Action Plan reminds us that the moment when we feel like giving up is the exact moment we need to keep pushing toward victory.
Scroll below to check out a condensed version of Moyer’s MAP that we created for easier reading, other great pieces we think are worth your time, and the story of Angela Manno, a fantastic eco-conscious creative!
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Easy Actions to Take
⏱~3min | Tell your Rep and the UK Foreign Secretary to Close Loopholes in the Israeli Settlement Trade Ban
Why: The UK, Canada, and France have announced bans on trade with illegal Israeli settlements which only serves to further entrench Israel’s incursions onto Palestinian territory in the West Bank. The ban is a good step forward but we must continue applying pressure to keep it from being a purely symbolic move. Critically, we must demand that loopholes in the bill be closed so that complicit companies do not skirt around enforcement of the ban. Organized by Human Aid & Advocacy
Why: Social media companies have profited algorithms designed to optimize the most hateful and rage-inducing content in order to boost engagement, furthering political division and violence in our communities. A few years ago, the EU recognised this problem and acted. Under their Digital Services Act, users can challenge platform decisions through independent, certified bodies which have no stake in protecting the companies they oversee. Section 217 of the Online Safety Act gives the government power to establish independent appeals. But there's a catch: the Government must commence the law before Ofcom can take the first steps to make it a reality. Organized by Take Back Big Tech
⏱~3min | (US Only) Demand an end to the Pentagon’s Journalist Blacklist
Why: Under Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Department of Defense has evicted dozens of journalists, from the New York Times to NPR — and tried to force reporters to surrender their press badges unless they pledged to report only on government-authorized information. Now, The Intercept has learned that U.S. Central Command — which oversees military operations in the Middle East — keeps a secret blacklist of journalists. The free press is a foundation of democracy, and its independence from government censorship is critical to a well-informed citizenry. Organized by The Intercept
Little (Movement) Wins
Flashback: The Death of Truth in the Age of AI
In our latest Deep Dive essay, we track how the evolution of information technology has shaped the way we think, determine truth, and conduct politics. We have already experienced monumental shifts in our lifetime through the advent of TV and social media, and now AI promises to change our political landscape in the most dramatic way yet. The father of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, famously said “the medium is the message” to describe how the ways information is transmitted is just as important as the information itself - and with the rise of the new medium of AI, we must reckon with how the messages we receive are actively changing around us and what that means for society and democracy itself.
Click below to learn about the relationship between information tech and politics, how we determine objective truth, and the ways AI threatens democracy.
Featured Piece
The Movement Action Plan by Bill Moyer
Social movements are big, and often messy endeavors, and what’s often missing is a bigger picture view and strategy for how they evolve and progress to achieve lasting change. US-activist and educator, Bill Moyer, created the Movement Action Plan as a tool to help organizers understand the larger evolution of successful social movements, drawing from historical and personal experience. It is designed to be a practical guide for activists who seek to analyze, plan and enhance their campaigns.
Bill Moyer wrote the Movement Action Plan in 1987, but it’s still very relevant today. We can see similar patterns that he describes below in the Civil Rights Movement, Anti-Nuclear Movement, Palestinian Liberation Movement, the growing Anti-Data Center Movement, and more. After reading, let us know, what stage do you think we're at with the movement you care about most?
Content Worth Consuming
- Creators Coalition on AI Glossary by CCAI Contributors
- A working vocabulary of AI terms for humans working in film, television, and content creation, updated continuously, with major revisions published quarterly, because we can't begin to regulate AI without first having a shared language around it.
- 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? by Mark Engler
- As Trump wages an unpopular war with Iran, historian Jeremy Varon discusses what we can learn from the movement that turned the tide against the Iraq War.
- How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive by Adem Ay
- Participants explain the secret to the "good vibes" that have sustained Albania's flamingo revolution as a peaceful protest for over 60 days.
- Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists by Daniel Boguslaw
- New hires and comments in interviews show that the AI giant is using its capabilities against dissenters, laying the groundwork for terrifying new age of surveillance capitalism.
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"‘Courage’ is a muscle developed through a series of successfully-taken risks. Each success expands the courage muscle, and loosens the self-limiting beliefs we walk around with."
– George Lakey, Activist & Sociologist
Conscious Creatives: Angela Manno
Angela Manno is a Scotland and New York-based artist, activist, and educator on a mission to help people fall back in love with our natural environment before it's too late. Her creative vision was sparked by the "Earthrise" image — Earth rising over the moon’s surface, taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968–which gave her a sense of our planet's beauty and fragility that she never let go of. She spent the next four decades building a body of work rooted in that feeling, starting with paintings of our planet from a distance, then to landscapes, and now focusing on protecting endangered species.
Her most recent and notable work, “The Sacred Biodiversity Oracle,” is a project that took decades to shape. It started in the late 1990s, when she stumbled into a week-long workshop hosted by a master of Byzantine-Russian iconography — an ancient form of religious art that uses egg tempera, gold leaf, and pulverized semi-precious stones to paint sacred figures that were meant to feel like portals that connected you to the divine. After immersing herself in this style for nearly 20 years, she felt the need to take a more eco-centric focus. If saints and angels deserved this level of reverence, why not endangered species like a honeybee, monarch butterfly, orangutan, or pangolin? While Western culture has divorced human society from nature, Angela felt it was critical to redefine our relationship with nature to be more appreciative so she began painting non-human species in this religious form with each animal's habitat, role, and threats displayed carefully. It eventually resulted in a 36-card deck designed to be an art book, field guide, and call-to-action that features endangered species alongside a QR code linking directly to conservation organizations around the world for people to learn more about each species’ plight and ways they can help — whether it be through donating, volunteering, or other direct actions — because it’s not enough to only create awareness; it’s necessary to provide a path to take action.
Known for her fusion of artistry and ecological consciousness, Angela’s works has become prominent in the art world — residing in NASA, the Smithsonian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. Statistics, graphs, and reminders that we are in the sixth mass extinction often make people look away, not because they don't care but because fear without anything to do produce paralysis. However, what produces action, she argues, is love — the devotional kind that comes from really looking at another being and recognizing it as sacred. Angela Manno reminds us that underneath the politics, legislation, and science, the deepest driver of change is something much simpler: a re-enchantment with the living world.
🖥 Learn More About Angela Manno | 🛍 Buy The Sacred Biodiversity Oracle
Resources & Tools
Here are some great resources from our directory. Please share these links with anyone that might find them helpful:
- 🔌 Open Alternatives | A massive directory of open-source (ie. free!) alternatives to popular software for nearly everything, from messaging & collaboration tools to business management & AI software.
- 🖼 Artist Opportunity Database | A helpful, non-exhaustive database by Fractured Atlas with active artist grants, awards, fellowships, open calls, and residencies from across the world–collected into one place for easy access.
- 🤝 Find Help | A web tool to find free or reduced-cost resources like food, housing, financial assistance, health care, and more in the USA.
- 💝 Freecycle | A worldwide network of people who are giving and getting things for free in their own towns and neighborhoods. It’s all about reuse and keeping useful things out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by local volunteers, and membership is free.
- 💝 Free Repair Cafes | A worldwide repair cafe finder that help you repair your clothes, furniture, appliances, bicycles, toys, etc. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee, lend a hand with someone else’s repair job, or get inspired at the Repair & DIY reading table.
➡️ Explore More on our Directory!
Know any resources that you think would be a great add to our directory? Share it with us! (We only see so much from our corner of the world)
If you're new here, don't forget to sign up to get full access to our directory and free newsletters sent to your inbox every other Sunday. Till next time, do your best and take it one day at a time. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up. And remember, you're not alone. We always have each other.
With Love & Light,
Elisa & Ray
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