Introduction
As we look back at ten years of organizing, activating, and advancing Left movement’s capacity to serve our communities, we remain fired up and dedicated to the work ahead. Join us in reflection, resistance, and recommitment to a vision of collective liberation.
Honoring the work and solidarity building we’ve led this past decade requires us to celebrate the strength, resilience, and unwavering love for our community’s power and persistence in resisting systems at work to diminish or silence us. As we complete our tenth year, we are overjoyed to share our wins, learnings, and goals for the future with you: our community, our comrades, our friends, and family. We reflect on this work with gratitude and grace, but make no mistake: we are ready to fight. Now, as ever, we commit to backing up our values with action.
VCW, founded and led by Black Queer and Trans folks, is dedicated to empowering and amplifying the movement work of organizations fighting to undo and repair systemic injustice. We help groups thoughtfully and intentionally manifest their mission, vision, and values through consulting, development, and strategic assessment.
We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished through our mission. In the past ten years:
- VCW has worked with more than two thousand five hundred individuals from more than seven hundred and fifty organizations to provide strategic consulting and programming.
- We established and run Security School (for the last five years)
- VCW’s Security school has trained up more than one hundred fifty organizations, working in issues like prison abolition, transformative justice, disability justice, immigrants’ rights (and more)
- We’ve continued to expand on our trainings and topics covered, and have included: Verbal and Physical De-escalation, Organizational Safety Planning, Transformative Conflict, Direct Action Security Teams, Intro to Digital Security and more
- Learned from and connected with countless individuals within and across our communities
Looking Back
We do this work so that we can all get free. For us all to feel safe in our bodies, our homes, our streets, our cities. We go beyond imagining what liberation might look like and lean into navigating our world as liberated beings. We move in direct opposition to state forces that are escalating efforts to keep us quiet, complacent, and afraid. We work with and organize in solidarity with organizations and communities committed to rebuilding a society free from racialized oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, language, and bodies. We do this work to get free.
Trump and his administration are accelerating and escalating their assault on our civil rights, liberties, and privacy. Acting with impunity, they are disappearing our community members, threatening to dismantle global alliances, solidifying policy and law that codifies the “illegality” of Trans bodies, the ownership of people’s wombs, expanding the prison industrial complex through ICE, and removing the already weak protections of our natural resources and wilderness. For most of us, this is nothing new. But the speed and disregard of so-called democratic procedures are unprecedented.
The Trump administration is operating in bold defiance of the judicial system and is brazenly threatening to remove all pretenses of our hard-fought civil rights protections. In the rise of this fascist oligarchy is an opportunity for radical change and reimagining the worlds that are possible for us. Building capacity for Left movements to connect, build coalitions, and organize is critical in maintaining the momentum we’ve never stopped working to uphold.
Ten years ago and today, our message and vision have remained steady: none of us is free until all of us are free. Then, as now, the prison industrial complex and ICE were weaponized against Black and immigrant communities. Then, as now, the state was engaged in military aggression in the Middle East, causing disruption, chaos, and death. Then, as now, the state was over-surveilling organizations and individuals actively resisting oppression and control. Then, as now, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, colonization, and all systems of dominance and power were engaged in overt and covert attacks on our communities. We resisted the state and its agents then, and we continue to resist today.
We are not afraid. We lean on our ancestors and those who fought and died in resistance to the state, and those who continue to resist. VCW is committed to maintaining and building momentum in these turbulent times, holding steady and offering support and expertise in movement safety, growth, and power.
Given that the systems we resist thrive on individualism, VCW has understood, from our inception, that to generate lasting impact in the lives of our communities, we must organize for change together across lines of difference, centering the voices of those most marginalized and rooting our collective efforts in a shared and evolving abolitionist and anti-fascist frameworks.
Collective liberation and solidarity are integral to our mission. We are duty-bound to develop practices of relationality and connectivity to shift culture and imagination toward freedom from oppressive systems.
We understand that to reach this goal, we also need an evolving framework that keeps a steady eye on the past. We know where we come from and honor the ancestors who laid down this revolutionary road we walk on. We draw from a lineage of resistance to systems of dominance, erasure, and supremacy. We recognize we did not kick off this movement work, but rather, we are following the love-worn path of Black and Brown radicals from our past and drawing from that collective power. We speak their names in acknowledgment so that they may continue to rest in power.
Looking Forward
Vision Change Win sees an audacious future rooted in the reclamation of agency, a celebration of our multitudes, and freedom from oppression— the embodied liberation of all oppressed peoples. Our role continues to be one of holistic guidance, intersectional support, strategic planning, resource-sharing, and skills development.
Future-facing programs and goals include:
- Deepening the national/regional conversation about community safety, transformative generative conflict, and liberatory conflict mediation
- Amplifying community-driven, abolitionist-centered safety practices
- Continuing to center the voices, lived experiences, and thought leadership of LBGTQIA Black, Indigenous, Disabled people, people of color, and folks navigating the margins of access, power, and privilege.
- Assessing the needs of post-election movement work and providing safety and security support.
- Enhancing community safety by expanding our Rapid Response support and community training.
- Greater accessibility for all programs, making audio available and on-demand trainings available.
Closing and Invitation to Action
Thank you for being with us through the years. We dream, fight, and build the skills and political power needed for a world free of exploitation, war, violence, and oppression. Our impact is entirely dependent on coalition building and growing the collective power of our community partners, alumni of VCW training, and the strategic alliances we forge with Left movement organizations that align with our vision for systems change. If you are new here, welcome! Come in, pull up a chair, and get close.