For my post this week I thought I’d talk a little more in depth about the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition and how it connects to the communities we’re studying. Our class discussions feel important to me because of their relevance to the challenges VSEC faces with its own community.
VSEC is a statewide group of youth activists who mobilize around climate justice. Throughout the year, the Coalition has a house where four to six full-time organizers live and work together. For the past two summers, we’ve hosted a Summer Organizing Program at the house with around twelve people each year. These people put a tremendous amount of work into relational work, direct action organizing, and outreach. Here is VSEC’s theory behind collective living:
Volunteer organizing and collective movement living has been at the heart of social change as far back as our tradition of organizing goes. For the civil rights movement, churches and Freedom Houses spread throughout the Deep South supported young organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The ability to live and work together grew the nonviolent movement of sit-ins and moral confrontation that forced the segregated system to its end and won a right to vote for the Black community. Gandhi’s Ashram housed the commitment of the Indian Independence movement and launched the Great Salt March. Collective movement centers have served as incubators for resistance and sparks for building the new world we are fighting for. Collective living provides our foundation of trust, unity, and commitment to each other, as we build social movements rooted in the love of people.
I have not been a full member of the Summer Organizing Program or lived at the house for an extended period of time, but I definitely consider myself a part of the community. The house is a home I know I can return to; the people who live there are my family, the people I trust most deeply. I would strongly consider living there after I graduate. So the effort toward collective living is one that feels very near to my heart, and I want to understand how such a community can be sustained long-term.
-Sarah
So here’s not something we’ve talked about much – those who’ve formed around a movement, and THEN move in together to facilitate that. The Highlander Center was like that as well (during the Civil Rights Movement). The living together experiment is incidental or tangential to the movement, usually, and comes and goes. Interesting addition!