Get Involved

Please get in contact anytime with sowestand@gmail.com

We provide training, support, and solidarity to grassroots struggles for environmental and social justice. We engage with popular education to build a culture of creative action and self-determination connecting different local experiences of injustice.

We work to provide support to groups and individuals, and to link up communities and groups that share similar experiences and goals.

We aim to build a movement to reclaim space, and share support, ideas, and strategies with one another across our diverse communities to take control of our lives. We use community popular education leading to creative and effective direct action. Popular education is a tool which helps join the dots between the causes of poverty, racism, climate change and other interrelated injustices and what we can do to challenge them.  Popular education encourages us all to become more aware of how an individual’s personal experiences are connected to larger societal problems. We are empowered to act to effect change on the problems that affect us.

With ‘So We Stand London’, communities of colour disproportionately affected by pollution, poverty and heavy industry have had enough and are rising up. In So We Stand Scotland, communities in Clydebank living with pollution by Glasgow airport,those facing fuel poverty and others across the Central Belt have had enough of living in the shadow of pollution and poverty and are organising together.

The benefits of joining the collective are

(1) being part of a wider movement using creative direct action and popular education to tackle social and environmental justice
(2) learning skills in order to be able to challenge injustice and create a world we want to live in
(3) pioneering organising practices which embody our external desires
(4) becoming embodied practitioners in social justice, anti-oppression community organising.
We engage in organising and action with a strong social justice framework i.e. race, class and gender analysis (see www.cwsworkshop.org/workshops/argj.html http://colours.mahost.org/org.html for examples). We will actively support others in the collective when they are facing financial difficulties to get to meetings.

So We Stand Roles:
‘Members’ are proactive in their project based and/or area based affinity groups, can be nominated to the spokes council and can vote at the AGM.
‘Collaborators’ are people or groups who collaborate on projects within project based and/or area based affinity groups who can vote at the AGM decided collectively with the affinity group they are organising with.
‘Supporters’ are people/ organisations that can be relied on and called on for support and publicity for the collective. Can vote at the project based and/or area based affinity group meetings if decided collectively with the affinity group they are organising with. Can vote at the UK AGM if decided collectively with the affinity group they are organising with.

Be part of a network, decision making process and empowering movement which develops:

1. Community based workshops and training programmes which support each other to take necessary action against (environmental, climate, racist) structural injustice. This includes anti-oppression work as integral to any progressive movement building.
2. Skill shares on creative resistance tactics with communities experiencing environmental injustice to build a movement of militancy to publicly intervene in structural oppression.

We have groups in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Brighton. We’d love the network to expand, and can offer support and training for anyone wanting to start organising in your area. Call us and we’ll talk you through how to track down like minded people in your area, or get your existing friends discussing how they might want to take action.

We support people to find their own way to creatively problem solve about issues of concern to them and will facilitate individual projects to create their own desires and demands around the issues they’re working on. We happily facilitate and welcome action  in our name as long as there is dialogue and you are accountable and focus within our principles. If you feel that you or your community is facing a situation of environmental injustice and would like support in addressing this, then feel free to get in touch.

We are organised entirely by dedicated volunteers and welcome financial support to keep us going. We are only a small organisation so cannot promise a lot of help straight away, but we would like to hear from you and see how we can provide the support you need.

We happily facilitate and welcome action in our name as long as there is dialogue and focus within our principles.

 

Why become a SoWeStander?

How to set up your own project