Anna Castro

Constructing Solidarity Narratives during Conflict and Crisis

Whether it is expressing solidarity with human rights in Palestine, amplifying the demands of queer and trans community members, or making connections between immigrant, climate, and racial justice movements, constructing narratives is a challenging process generally, but even more so during times of crisis and conflict.

How do organizations move through internal disagreements around values and political analysis? What happens when groups don't have solid partnerships with communities that they wish to be in solidarity with?

Solidarity Is at Building Movement Project and Transgender Law Center have supported many groups that have struggled to uplift solidarity narratives due to a misalignment of values, political differences, or community criticism.

During this session, we will bring our expertise, lessons learned, and resources to participants. The session will use an interactive approach that includes brief presentations, scenario workshopping, reflection questions, and peer exchange. Additionally, participants will receive tools, guides, and resources to strengthen their capacity to develop strategic solidarity narratives and practices within their organizations.

Better together: How to practice transformative solidarity

Solidarity requires constant practice that must happen in community.

This breakout session explores the internal mechanisms that lead to either performative or transformative acts of solidarity. Under the Trump administration, communities have been relentlessly and explicitly targeted based on race, nationality, faith, gender, and sexual orientation. A scarcity mindset underlies these attacks, and social justice organizations have shifted the narrative by using a solidarity strategy that reveals the true abundance of power that exists when we work together.

This doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a shared vision of liberation and an understanding that centering the most impacted may require a revaluation of how we organize and operate. By working through the decision-making process that happens when engaging in acts of solidarity, participants will gain insight into how to tackle shifting their organizational culture. Examples from active campaigns in the racial justice, immigrant rights, and MASA movement space will take this dialogue from theory into practice.

Participants will walk away with a toolkit that offers concrete ways to analyze their organizations current solidarity practices, ways to course correct and engage in “movement maintenance”, and ideas to sustain and promote the leadership of younger or junior level staff.

If You Ran a Solidarity Workshop...

This session will be an open conversation about how people engage in solidarity practice, and the components and elements that they would like to see in a curriculum and workshop emphasizing solidarity. We will be gathering input and ideas for a solidarity practice curriculum tailored towards young people.