Southerners On New Ground Strategic Almanac

STRAT EGIC SOUTH

GROUND

ALM A NAC

Invocation

Giving honor and gratitude to the Great Spirit aka Change aka the God of Celie and Shug, the life force that this planet breathes, who goes by many names.

May we tell each other what you look like ’til we start to notice you in one another.

Giving honor and gratitude to our Ancestors, guides, protectors, the queer and trans Detonators, and Southern Geniuses who intercede on our behalf and teach us how to fight. May we always say your names:

Joan Garner, Murph “the Detonator” Murphy, María Magdalena Gomez-Salgado “Mama Magda”, Ms. Kat Johnson, Keisha Webb, Jurina Hill aka Coach Juju Hill, Elandria Williams, Kathy Montoya, Lana Faye, LL Gimeno, Beatriz Carmen Mendoza, Isaiah Tivon Rasheed, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ivy Young, all our relations.

Giving honor and gratitude to the elements of this Southern land we call home, WE USHER IN:

WE USHER IN the red clay, creeping vines, smoky mountains, and glittery mica of the EARTH. Forest, we will defend you.

WE USHER IN the humid storm, the quiet holler, wide as the sky that carries our songs, our calls for justice, and to one another, AIR we breathe.

WE USHER IN the rising river, from clear ocean waves to brackish creek, thick with life. WATER, we know you are life and we will protect you.

WE USHER IN bright, warm, transforming magic of FIRE. Light our way. From Harriet’s Star to the candles we tend on our altars, lend us your light. Lend us your power to consume the structures that have stood too long and transform them into the kindling we need to gather our people closer to you and one another.

May we be gentle with one another so that we can be dangerous homosexuals together.

May we love our neighbors. Show us a love that leads us to their porches — clipboards, hope, and a vision in hand. May we inspire one another to do something different together.

May we nurture our bonds with our family, friends, and freedom fighters that the cages tried to take from us. May we ensure their freedom and their return to us swiftly and entirely.

May we heed the Spirit of History beneath our feet and at our backs. Remind us how to seek the strategies of the past; how to wrestle with the questions of the present; and experiment, evaluate, and try again until we draw maps to the future. May we remember time is a spiral, not a line, and plan accordingly.

May we remember that the ground can hold everything that we cannot. That, like the trees, we can find nourishment and memory through our networks even when we are far apart.

Lorde, in your wisdom, remind us that caring for self is political warfare, as you guide us in our re-membering of the uses of our anger and the usefulness of the erotic.

And if our destiny be to take root among the stars, then strengthen us for the tilling of the soil.

We, who vogue in the face of evil, find ourselves beyond the end times. We, who have survived plagues and apocalypse. We, who are already building a new world amidst the ashes of the old. We, who are looking for the ones who are looking for us. We, who dream and scheme. We, who keep each other close, keep each other safe. We, who gone be alright.

We, who ignite the kindred. We invite your blessings and thank you for your gifts.

Amen, Ase, and may it be so!

Welcome

elcome to SONG’s 2023 Strategic Almanac. I’m writing this from my home in New Orleans, less than four blocks from the Mississippi River. Along the river snakes River Road, lined with petrochemical plants and old sugar plantations. In 1811, the largest insurrection of enslaved persons in the U.S. marched along this road, led by Charles Deslondes. They gathered: four columns, eventually 500 souls deep, headed by democratically-elected leaders — women and men — and joined with other freedom fighters at each plantation they passed, some plantations burning to the ground as they marched. In historian Leon Waters’

words, their mission was “to liberate the tens of thousands of enslaved peoples held in bondage in the territory of Louisiana as they built a new republic.” Though these Abolitionists were stopped violently before they finished their mission, Waters continues, “The system of enslavement was put on notice that it would fall — which it did 54 years later when the insurrection’s descendants and others fought to end enslavement in the civil war.”

These liberationists are SONG’s forebearers and kin. I see them through a queer lens, as organizers whose identities and desires for freedom and body autonomy were outside of the dictates of the racist-patriarchal-capitalist gender expectations of the slaveholding South. Like them, we conspire to summon, find, and build roads off the plantations of 2023. Like them, we seek to expand democratic practice and care for each other along those roads. Like them, we gather in a multiplicity of formations. Like them, we move through uncertainty and failures, on the faith that our efforts will light the way for future generations. Like them, we’ve been discerning a plan to guide our feet along the roads to liberation.

In the years leading up to 2020, SONG’s campaign and kinship work was on a roll: Free From Fear campaigns, including the Black Mama’s Bailout actions; Queer South Revivals; the Lorde’s

Werq fellowship; Member Initiated Projects; the Race Traitors project; and our basebuilding fellowships. In short, SONG was holding multiple regional programs, projects, and experiments aimed at growing possibilities for liberation amongst our people across the South.

As the work grew, we fell behind on developing and maintaining internal structures, supervision, and systems that could meet the demands of all this activity. Conflicts arose from organizational gaps. Then, the pandemic hit. And an uprising with multiple rapid response calls that stretched our capacity. And, climate disasters. And, individual health crises. Our staff and members needed to take time to grieve loved ones dying. We needed to triage. By 2021, we paused many of our outward-facing efforts. Our intention was to take a moment to fortify our capacity to meet the needs of this moment.

Across SONG’s formations, we heard again and again that we needed a strategic direction and to grapple with contradictions impacting our organizing. We heard that our people were isolated and saw a need for more connection and alignment. Without the vibrant, shared tactic of Black Mama’s Bail Outs to anchor and unify our ongoing campaigns to end money bail and melt ICE, some of us named that we had lost our way. So, three years ago, we set about this

strategic planning process. The road has been long and winding. We thought we’d get a couple of masterful strategists from SONG’s deep, wide bench of movement practitioners and thinkers to offer up brilliant direction we could trust. People said yes. And then, their lives started lifin’, impacted by all the calamities, from the macro to the micro, over the last three years. All of these changes required adjustment and meant some folks shifted out of the planning process and new folks joined to help develop and steward it.

SONG’s kinship called for this to be as much of a participatory, democratic process as we could make it. And, with our 30th year anniversary approaching, we wanted to do it with the benefit of our 30 years’ worth of relationships. This document reflects a process that has been developed by and with our membership, not only the staff and board. This plan has been shaped and worked by people from rural and small towns and by people who are Black, Immigrant, white, communists and anarchists, by anti-capitalists and hood feminists and regular degular folks. COVID-19 presented many obstacles to this participatory process, and in some ways it fell short of our ideals, but this is the process that we could make happen. We intended for this process to

fortify us for hard times ahead; to grow more shared political alignment, leadership, and understanding; so that even in disagreement, we make each other stronger. We intend to bring our people together, not faction us off. This is why we have engaged this way: because of the desire to be rooted in a strong power analysis; a belief that we are strongest together; that the people are powerful — in fact, more powerful than the systems and institutions that oppress us; that whatever grows our democratic practice to collectivize our power is what we need. We know that we live now in a time where, with one hand, we defend ourselves, and with the other, we do all the things that make life worth living: care for each other when sick, remind each other who we are when we have forgotten, and love each other.

This plan is styled as an almanac: a nod to the way that farmers for centuries have starved or prospered, based on their understanding of patterns and seasons. The weather itself, seen for too long as something separate or outside of us, now defines our very existence and geographies, as the climate crisis lands, again and again, at our doors. Our work will succeed, or falter, based on our understanding of the times we are in. It is too often forgotten

that in many maroon communities, the majority of the residents were disabled. Oppression structurally disables the oppressed, and we are in a time when more and more of us will have disabilities due to the conditions of our time. It is from this understanding that we bring nuance to our understanding of ideas like strength, speed, endurance, and pace. Throughout its history, SONG has had many metaphors that centered bold and fast animals, like the ‘raw stallions’. Alongside the stallion, we also offer the snail, in the tradition of how the Zapatistas spoke of it. A creature with their home on their back, leaving soft and wet trails. There are many bold tasks that now need doing, but there are also small tasks, interpersonal and everyday tasks. When the time comes we will require steadfastness and endurance, as well as speed and strength. Understanding our power means understanding we are the generators of what we do, and we generate what we need, together.

While many hands have helped us get to a plan, it was Forever-SONGster kai lumumba barrow, one of the people who helped fashion SONG’s organizing shop around 2012, who designed a very thorough strategic planning process, drawing from a similar process she led with Critical Resistance. Kai has guided us

through three phases out of six so far:

Phase 1: Planning to Plan

We assembled a strategic planning team, made up of staff, member-leaders, and board members. We established working agreements, roles, and responsibilities; convened our strategic planning committee; and contemplated our approach.

Phase 2: Take Stock / Situational Analysis

Our strategic planning team set about the work of reviewing SONG’s deep archive of documents — reports, survey results, meeting notes, action plans, debrief results, and more — looking for themes and patterns. This work was made possible by the diligent work of our archive team, Angela Henderson and Hieu Tran, who built a powerful index of documents culled from more than seven years of SONG’s recent history. We reviewed the history and current realities reflected in these documents and synthesized this information into an extensive SWOT analysis of the organization. We identified seven key contradictions we faced as

an organization relating to our theory of change, conflict resolution, member development, non-profit structure, shrinking capacity/growing scale, governance, and multi-racial organizing. Engaging with these contradictions, and deciding what we want to do in the face of them, has become the heart of our strategic plan. We’ve been bumping into these contradictions for a while, as has every movement organization we can think of. They reflect internal and external conditions. Some of them can be resolved, some of them cannot, but all of them can be addressed. One offering we have to share with the movement is how we don’t have to ignore them, turn away from them as folks point them out, or pretend they don’t exist. We can engage them and share how we are using them to grow more of what we need. These contradictions are addressed in the Contradictions section of this document.

Phase 3: Set Direction and Draft the Plan

We then began a period of broad community engagement. We shared and strategized around how to address these contradictions with our people through two virtual gatherings, two in-person

gatherings, and meetings with movement partner organizations. These gatherings are the basis for the suggestions we are offering in this plan. These ideas were generated by our people as we engaged with the contradictions we find in the work. The strategic planning committee established a writing team. Then we wrote, and we wrote, and we wrote some more. And we edited and we met and we wrote. After three years, consulting hundreds of documents, reflecting and listening to scores of our folk across the region, the strategic planning committee is offering a way forward. And after all that, we still aren’t done. We still have these phases to go:

Phase 4: Circulate the Draft

Share the plan with our folks.

Phase 5: Affirmation of the Plan

We will gather in November of 2023 to review and reflect on the plan — we will ask our folks to do what is needed — to affirm a plan. We intend to enter 2024 with a membership-affirmed strategic plan.

Phase 6: Ongoing Maintenance

Once we affirm the plan, it will be up to all of us to apply what we find within it. This is a living document in that it will continue to be updated, but also, in that it will come to life and take on deeper meaning through our action and experimentation.

While we started out calling this a strategic plan, we’ve realized it’s more like a go-bag, a collection of tools for orientation and survival as we take the road to liberation. Our people have made these bags many times. We are leaning into the wisdoms of our lineages even as we know we have to apply what we know in innovative and non-traditional ways. We are using the motif of the four directions, things of the earth that are cyclical and repeat. We are using the format of a farmer’s almanac because our people are people who know how to grow things from the dirt. The almanac is a tool that helps you make plans and decisions as you forecast the weather and conditions. We ask: how do we build and grow lives worth living? We offer here our read

on the political context we organize within — the weather conditions we face — and what we anticipate facing as we move forward. We never wanted this to be a report that sat on a shelf and never got used. We need this to be used and tried.We are offering ideas and suggestions and it will be up to us who find ourselves with these go-bags to decide what we will use and how we will manifest what is possible. This is a collection of tools and resources for abolitionists who have decided to survive and thrive into a chaotic unstable future.

Offering this in this way, we hope to encourage all who might use it to understand this: the plan is only as good as we make it. These are tools based on our people’s wisdom, but it is up to you, dear reader, to add your light to ignite the kindred.

My dad, John O’Neal, had this poem that he wrote, called, If I Could Promise You A Love Song. He says it wouldn’t just be sweetness and joy, but it would also have blood and sweat and tears and flesh and bone. This is that kind of love song. And it only could be sung by a chorus.

My deepest gratitude to my comrades on our strategic plan writing team: Kai Barrow, aesha rasheed, Jade Brooks, Carlin Rushing, Hunter King, and Caitlin Breedlove, as well as DJ Hudson, who

penned our invocation. Big love and appreciation to members of the strategic planning team who joined the work in phases and seasons: Angela Henderson, Hieu Tran, Deborah Lilton, selma alamin, Key Jackson, and Monica Fikes. Also Suzanne Pharr, R’yana Anthony, Bia Jackson, and Micky Jordan, who were part of the earlier team. Thank you to the hands of support who helped bring this work to visual life: Emily Simons and David Jack Browning for their design and shaping of the visuals, and Ada McMahon for writing support and thought partnership.

Thank you for the steadfast commitments of the whole SONG staff and our current and past SONG Board members who contributed to this effort, including Kendra Johnson, selma alamin, Karen Mosley, Paulina Helm-Hernández, Roberto Tijerina, Hermelinda Cortés, Salem Acuña, Catalina Nieto, and Ada Smith. Gratitude for the consultation and brilliance shared by Trishala Deb, Makani Themba, Mary Hooks, Malachi Garza, and Malkia Devich Cyril. Thank you to all the caretakers, spirit workers, and family members who provided support, care labor, and guidance along the way. And thank you to our SONG members who participated in multiple rounds of input sessions and gatherings and assessments

and feedback conversations that poured into this offering. We are grateful for your patience and your rigor.

And finally, on a personal note and in recognition that the personal is political, I offer deepest gratitude to my wife Mandisa Moore-O’Neal and my mother Marilyn Norton for unwavering support. And on behalf of my Co, aesha, I offer thank yous to her beloveds and chosen family including Isaiah Rasheed, Shana Sassoon, Abram Himelstein, Audrey Stewart, Elizabeth Steeby, Treva Ellison, and Diana Panera.

Wendi Autumn Moore-O’Neal SONG Co-Director

Weather Report

we choose the earth | and the edge of each other’s battles | the war is the same if we lose, someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet | but if we win, there’s no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting i look to meet you upon whatever barricade you erect or choose — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

e exist inside intertwined and accelerating crises: imperialist war, genocide, disease, economic turmoil, and political and ecological collapse. Climate catastrophe and widening social inequality spawn famine, unrest, and displacement. The plantation is ablaze. The flaming collapse is at once perilous and pregnant with possibility for liberation. The danger of this moment is real, but when the plantation is burning, an enslaved person whose mind is set on freedom does not shout, “Let me put the fire out!” No, they say, “It’s time to run.” They gather their mama and siblings and kinfolk, they collect supplies along the way, and THEY RUN. There is danger, but there also is hope. We are not suggesting

our people run from the South; we are suggesting we run from allegiance to our individual stake in power systems that do not serve us.

We are in apocalyptic times in the word’s original meaning: a time when the epoch changes. Across the globe, authoritarian movements are on the rise. In the U.S., they are flavored heavily by the white supremacist ideologies embedded deeply at the core of the American colonial project. Nevertheless, we see people of color being pulled into what are fundamentally white nationalist movements, and we know this is because the despair over the world order is breaking the minds and spirits of our people. Fascist forces in the U.S. are waging violence in the streets, making alarming gains in local and state governments across the country, and positioning themselves to attempt to take unilateral control of federal institutions. They are utilizing wedge issues, fueling conspiracy, and scapegoating marginalized people to gain and preserve power. They do this because the world is changing. They do this because their grasp on power is becoming increasingly precarious. They also do this because we have been winning. Because queer and trans people, disabled people, women, Black, Indigenous, and people of color have been taking to the streets, asserting our

power, and carving out space that refuses their right to dominion over our lives.

The hair rising on our arms tells us that the threat is dire, that it is real, and that it is coming at us quickly. What we know about power is that it is the ability to make manifest what you will, but that it also has many different forms: ideological, systemic, individual, etc. The current dominant system, in all its power, offers no solutions. Capitalism requires millions of people to be seen as disposable. It requires despair. It requires the belief that we can do nothing to save each other and thus must only look out for ourselves. There are those living in this system who cannot imagine a way forward that is not the reckless, devouring march of global capitalism. In the face of capitalism in crisis, people across the globe are increasingly embracing the false promise of fascist movements. In a failure of imagination, they have chosen to align with domination and death. Even among those who reject these movements, there are those who, in their grief and despair, have abandoned their will to fight, their hope for liberation.

This impacts us deeply inside our bodies, relationships, and communities as well. We are surviving a spiritual and emotional crisis of fragmentation, despair, loneliness, disinformation, and division. Artificial intelligence pushes

the boundaries of what activities are considered human, while social media and technology at large continue to reconfigure global communication away from much of all we once knew it to be. Our bodies themselves are changing in response, and relationship to, technology. In the absence of connected communities, of deep local and neighborhood organizing, the silences and harms between us grow. In this country, the vestiges of a social safety net, already meager and threadbare, are being unwoven. As the pace of disintegration quickens, the dominant capitalist political parties are responding with increasing militarism and repression. Our comrades face terrorism charges for defending the forest. For rebellion in the face of surveillance, control, constant threat, and death. There is alarming urgency and alignment among those who lure us towards authoritarianism.

In today’s world, there is no escape from the imperialist greed and violence that have ravaged the earth and expanded the plantation globally. From wherever we find ourselves, we must allow the old world to collapse and do our part to birth a world anew. We must imagine and shape into being another world more free and just and glorious than the white supremacist hetero-patriarchal capitalist plantation. We know there has never been

any safety on the plantation. We must build safety for ourselves. This calls every single one of us to responsibility in our times. Each day summons us to choices: we do not control the danger and we did not choose these risks, but we have choices about how we meet them, toward a new world that is a fruition of our desires, longing, and legacy. Our compass points toward the north star of liberation, not towards stabilizing or controlling the deadly system we are currently surviving. Our compass points toward a new world. This moment poses critical questions for organizers: How do we love and protect each other amid collapse? How do we expand the circle of who is protected and cared for in these times? How do we organize, not just in resistance to a bleak future offered to us by the existing systems, but such that the shape of our organizing plants and nurtures seeds that will birth a different future?

The tradition of Southerners on New Ground is that we embrace hope over fear, and that we know ourselves to be beings of many longings and desires: specifically, the desire for each other, and to be in real community. We know our people are powerful, and we root ourselves in this truth. If it’s true that our power comes from the people and that we belong to the people, then what has to be different for us to come

together and make what we need? The waters are rising. We know that we may not all survive, but we will not choose death prematurely nor surrender our humanity by abandoning each other. Carved into the heart of SONG’s history is a strategy of organizing around longing, desire, and beloved community. From this place, we draw maps to organize beyond our fear.

At our best, organizing for queer and trans liberation represents an existential threat to the heteropatriarchal future the Right is working to maintain and manifest. Queer magic is a force that rebels, excites, and unites. It summons our collective longings, and weaves us together in resistance and in joy. Because of how we shine together when we have cast out shame, we are dangerous to a system that relies on isolation and self-hatred. At our worst, LGBTQ+ movements fall prey to cooptation and attempts to divide us. Our communities are also susceptible to the powers of division, gatekeeping, policing, and control that we have learned from our wider society. In order to challenge our own oppression, we have to challenge the divisions inside our own communities and undo the work of the oppressor that lies within.

The times demand this work be done on behalf of ourselves and our people. In 2023, over 500 anti-trans and,

more broadly, anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced at state and local levels. We are the Right’s current favorite scapegoat, but we are hardly the first community to be targeted, and we will not be the last. Our oppression is interconnected, and none of us are strong enough to stand alone. Our strategies for self-defense must be based on building solidarity and power with other oppressed people.

The legislative attacks against queer and trans folks are a strategy incubated in the South. They build on policies like North Carolina’s 2016 bathroom bill(s) but also on experiments like the waves of attacks on immigrants in Georgia in the early 2000s, and Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature by Solicitation law, which forced sex workers, mostly Black trans women harrassed by the police, to register as sex offenders. These strategies have always centered on creating a cultural identity for some dependent on the hatred of others, and teaching that supremacist logic will save some from shared conditions that impact us all. We have seen this strategy in the massive economic infrastructure of white supremacy that has been carefully built, wrought, and maintained in the South over centuries. It is and was a system where each is assigned their place, in order to make a brutal sense of the world.

These legislative strategies are

paralleled by increased violence against our community, violence that spills out to touch everyone. As transphobic attacks have increased, we’ve also seen the harassment and murder of cisgender people who fail to conform to patriarchal ideals about gender. All evidence indicates that a 2022 vigilante attack on a power plant in Moore County, N.C., was perpetrated in an attempt to shut down a local drag show. The attack left 40,000 people without power for days in the middle of winter. County residents were collateral damage for insidious hate, as we will all be if this hate is allowed to grow. In addition to targeting queer and trans people, the Right is testing and advancing its power via escalating efforts to criminalize migration, roll back labor protections, restrict voting rights, and curtail reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy. In the South, we have seen explosive experimentation with oppressive legislation, exemplified most visibly in Florida, and virtual bans on abortion in almost every state. Efforts to eliminate reproductive and anti-racist education coincide with bans on affirmative action and the consolidation of right-wing control of most major media sources. These are not accidental targets; this offensive aims to defend the lie that some deserve to dominate. These interwoven attacks siphon our energy by requiring us

to defend our right to exist on our own terms. Defense is necessary, but it cannot be our only strategy. We must use our focus—our energy and life force—not only to protect one another but to keep building the world we desire and dream.

We are not fighting the same war as the war that is being waged on us. We are not fighting for a dying system. A system based on an insatiable, bloodthirsty pursuit of profit through (neo)colonial occupation, class warfare, and imperialist domination. We are fighting for our lives, for those we love, and for our people to be able to thrive. We are not trying to prop up a dying system. We are trying to build a new one, all while taking care of our people along the way. There may be ways to temporarily secure a more humane experience within the current system, at least for some, but we know thriving is not an option. The U.S. is just spit and tape and coercion and brutality. We understand our power; the state does not. The things we know come from the earth and will last when all of this is gone. There has been a lot in our organizing work that has been about defending, dismantling and taking apart, and we now need the work that connects and builds.

We know we must act, but when our bodies are under attack and in shock, we are often not sure how. When we do come together, how do we confront the

contradictions that emerge from collective organizing? What shape should we take? How do we sit with all that is unknown while embracing experimentation? How do we treat the plagues that breed so much fragility, infighting, cynicism, and insularity in our movements? How do we build the muscles that allow us to work across our differences? How can we use our places of disagreement to sharpen each other and strengthen our strategies? How do we do the work that breaks open, disrupts dominant power dynamics, holds conflict, heals, and repairs? How do we build movements, collectives, organizations, and communities that reflect the values we speak and that nurture the world we are trying to build?

We have sighted collapse on the horizon, and we cast a summoning spell to call forth a new world. We are grounded in collective liberation and shared kinship in which we celebrate an unwavering commitment to vibrant, wild life. We prepare the birthing room for a new world, knowing that birth is both messy and beautiful. We seek to be doulas for liberation. We act in the lineage of Black feminism and in the tradition of abolition that calls for rigorous self-reflection. In our “strategic planning process,” we looked inside for our medicine and attempted to assess our readiness to meet the

liberated world we have summoned. We found brilliance and bravery. We found misalignment and misinformation. We found questions and contradictions. We found commitment, care, and connection.

Southern organizing traditions have much to share about living and loving and building home in places often hostile and homicidal toward us. Our conditions have often required building relationships with people who have wildly different viewpoints and experiences. In multiplicity, we have found strength and developed an analysis of how power is organized, both here at home and in relationship to struggles in the Global South. In 2023, Tyre Nichols was murdered by police in Memphis who had direct connection to training by Israeli security forces who use the same tactics of terror to commit ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. And with the rise of “Cop Cities” in Atlanta and beyond, the repressive apparatus of the state is only intensifying, applying more and more of its imperialist practices of domination and control on a domestic level. Our fight here for abolition in the belly of the beast is inextricably linked with these struggles abroad.

We are surrounded by opportunities for building power and creating alternative ways to care for each other that challenge the legitimacy of the existing world order.

We gather strength and inspiration from massive rebellions in defense of Black life, from organizing to stop pipelines and to free people from cages, from rising movements of tenant organizing, abortion, mutual aid, disaster relief efforts, and a renaissance of labor organizing in this country. Southern organizing traditions also teach us the importance of Black feminism. They teach us that care is a form of resistance. That even when we have lost, we refuse to lose each other, our values, or our undying love for our people. That we matter to each other as more than just workers and producers. Now, as the government continues to abandon our basic needs in the midst of an ongoing pandemic and climate crisis, we must take care of one another, engage our contradictions, and move at a sustainable pace, knowing that our work is neither a sprint nor a marathon, but a dance towards freedom.

Chaos is God’s most dangerous face — Amorphous, roiling, hungry.

Shape Chaos—Shape God. Act.

Alter the speed or the direction of Change. Vary the scope of Change. Recombine the seeds of Change. Transmute the impact of Change. Seize Change. Use it.

Adapt and grow.

— Lauren Olamina, from the Book of Earthseed, Parables — Octavia E. Butler

We know we must find, support, train, and gather our people in order to come together, build power, and make change through community organizing. We know for sure that many of the core skills honed and taught at SONG are badly needed in these times: the art of listening, of deep connective outreach, of facilitation, of building deeply meaningful gatherings, of holding legacy, of retaining core members over decades — held together in a kinship network more important than any of us individually.

The Zapatistas say, “asking we walk.” That is how we have uncovered, built, and will enact this strategic plan. Collectively, we mapped out the typography of the primary contradictions that exist within Southerners on New Ground and the context in which we organize. This strategic almanac is not a set route on a map; it is a compass for organizing within contradictions. Now we must use this compass to continue to make the road while walking it, knowing that each step toward liberation must have liberation in it.

Contradictions

e as members of SONG decided to strengthen our work by collectively developing a strategic plan . . . in taking up the challenges posed by this current global crisis, [see Weather Report] we have worked to identify our organization’s strengths and weaknesses. We think that this process will help us transform threats into opportunities and, through the process of understanding and struggling with our weaknesses, turn those into strengths. . . What do we mean when we talk about contradictions? In doing this work of organizing, we immediately notice all sorts of contradictions. These contradictions present themselves as things around us and within us that are in struggle with one another. Or, as things that seem almost impossible to be existing at the same time: like can we be liberated and oppressed simultaneously? What are the ideas, the structures,

EMILY SIMONS

the systems, the relationships that seem totally incompatible with each other? This is how we understand contradictions. And we understand that the larger contradictions in the system we live in are fundamental to the work that we’re doing to generate Liberation in our Lifetime — the big, aspirational goal. We’re dealing with a large capitalist system that creates a vast amount of wealth for some and then creates another group of folks that depend upon that exploitation and extraction just to exist: that’s a primary contradiction. . . . When we need to buy things like computers that make our lives manageable but make miserable conditions for our community and families, say, in the Congo and throughout the world. The things we depend upon make other people’s lives miserable — that’s a contradiction, devastates the environment, these are contradictions that we live with. Wanting to be safe, while also needing to take risks. Internalized oppression, while fighting oppression . . . everyday struggles that we’re all engaged in. Being punitive when we’re abolitionists. Looking to get revenge when we need to be thinking about other ways of problem solving. In SONG, we’re facing contradictions at the core of our work. From these contradictions, we hope to identify: 1) the critical issues that we need to work on over the next few years, 2) the threats and opportunities that are facing us as we navigate these contradictions, and 3) our strengths and challenges in moving forward despite and sometimes in harmony with these contradictions.”

— kai lumumba barrow, SONG’s “Strategic Planning Process: A Grounding” video

Many of the contradictions that SONG grapples with are pervasive across movement and are present in other organizations. This precise set of contradictions are the ones deemed most relevant to SONG by core leaders and members. They relate to our theory of change, conflict resolution, member development, non-profit structure, shrinking capacity/ growing scale, governance practices, and multi-racial organizing.

We have collectively mapped out pathways for strengthening our work in response to each contradiction. The full details of these pathways are available to our active membership in the internal-facing, full version of this document. However, we invite all those reading this condensed version to consider the contradictions we grapple with, as well as our process for collective engagement detailed above in the “Welcome” section. We also invite you to view Emily Simon’s graphic note from one of our strategic planning sessions with our membership and her illustration of our planting calendar, which depicts some of the avenues for addressing the contradictions identified by SONG members throughout our strategic planning process.

A Living Document

his is a living document. It is a response to the planning process with membership. We put out a call for people to speak to contradictions; this document is our way of giving back what we heard. We will seek to create a virtual document that gets to live beside the hardcopy. Each of the pieces will continue to get developed by the staff and our members; it will have a life like that of a song. When you start off with a simple oneword song, like amen, by the time you finish it, it is a whole new song. This plan was collectively generated and represents the weaknesses and strengths of the SONG we are right now. We are proud of our capacity to name the political alignment we have been able to develop. We have more alignment now than we did when we started. We believe we this document puts SONG in a good position to make decisions about things that have needed decisions made. None of us will agree with every suggestion in this document, every decision we make, or every leader. But we are supporters of SONG, members of SONG’s body. Where any of us have disagreement, we each have agency to be able to express our disagreement and be in the practice of making SONG better. Finally, this plan seeks to get us all on assignment, and from that place we can develop workplans, and provide space for feedback and dialogue.

Planting Calendar Summary 2024-2026

This document lays out a possible seasonal timeline for planting, growing, and harvesting the work of this plan. It can be found here)

Glossary

Find our SONG glossary here.

Songbook V.1

his playlist is a recording of the SONG community sing in Witakers, NC on April 7th, 2023. The community sing was led by Wendi Autumn Moore-O’Neal during the first in-person Strategic Planning Session with SONG membership. It was lovingly recorded and compiled by SONG member Rolynné Anderson.

Abolitionist Tarot

hese tarot cards were chosen to represent the themes grappled with within this document by artist and Forever SONGster kai lumumba barrow. They are from “[b]REACH: The Libretto,” a series of 78 mixed-media collages rendered as abolitionist tarot cards that were originally designed to accompany the Gallery of the Streets visual opera, [b]REACH: adventures in heterotopia. The work features a group of fantastical characters that forecast abolitionist principles, strategies, and contradictions.