News & Events
Dare to Utter Wrap Up
[image description and transcript in YouTube]
Goodbye Minnesota
We had an amazing week at the Advocacy Learning Center. Bringing back some great tools for social justice and renewed passion for the important work that is happening in our communities. We’ll be back in Minnesota this October to learn more about institutional change.
[image description: “I learned that it takes teamwork to accomplish statewide actions, that it’s not one person’s job but the collective that makes a better impact on state-level issues. I leaned that it is through unconditional love that we make our best impact – not anger or indifference or intolerance. I learned that the causes of poverty are systematic and not individual.”
Injustice
[image description, powerpoint slide: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.” Ernesto Guevara
Core Activities of Advocacy
[image description, powerpoint slide: Core Activities of Advocacy – Connect, Understand, Analyze, Strategize, Implement, Adapt (Social Change Advocacy SH pg 32-34]
Today at ALC
[description and transcript in YouTube]
Our Role
[image description, powerpoint slide with quote: “Our role is never to help the legal system manage cases or women’s lives – it is to continue to make women’s real experiences visible and to make women’s safety a goal of legal intervention and the responsibility of the community. We must resist the forces that swallow up social movements and their transforming agendas.” – an advocate]
Consciousness Raising
[image description, powerpoint slide: Consciousness Raising Table Discussion What is consciousness and consciousness raising? Consciousness – the state of being awake and aware especially of something within oneself. Consciousness Raising – a process of making people understand and be interested in important social and political issues.]
Starting the day with this wisdom:
[image description: powerpoint slide with a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu A movement toward justice demands the truth be told, the harm repaired and unjust conditions be eradicated.]
Enjoying the beauty of Minnesota
[image description: Tara (holding baby Clementine) and Aracelia are standing in front of a beautiful lake surrounded by green trees and grass.]
Social Change Advocacy
[image description, powerpoint slide with text: Social Change advocacy. Core Principles: Create an experience that is liberating vs. dominating, Engage in dialogue vs. counsel or advise, Recognize intersection and complexity vs. single aspects or events, Place the person’s reality and actual needs at the center vs. institutions’ needs, Engage with social networks, family, and community vs. isolated individuals, Approach as a social problem vs. individual or psychological. Core Activities: Connect with women/survivor and supportive networks to strengthen community and create solidarity, Understand the nature of violence against women and how it affects women individually and collectively, Analyze what it is that will alleviate the problems caused (for individuals and for women as a group) AND prevent them from occurring in the future, Strategize a course of action (steps, details and preparation) to create change, Implement the strategy – take the collective action and steps necessary to create the change, Reflect and adapt in relation to shifting conditions, success or failure of strategies used and intended or unintended consequences. Theoretical Foundation: Understand violence against women in the context of a system of gender oppression. The violence is a tool that maintains the oppression that all women experience to varying degrees. Gender oppression intersects with other forms of oppression; they reinforce and perpetuate each other. Collective action within and across communities and identity groups is necessary to end oppression in all forms. Women/survivors who have experienced violence must be a primary force in collective work to end violence against women and the system of gender oppression that it maintains.]