Thinking Big Gatherings
The Impact and Innovation Initiative’s Thinking Big Gatherings address areas of practice to which The Action Lab has made long-term commitments, and are central to the initiative’s goal of building new organizing toolkits. These gatherings create opportunities for participants to step out of daily routines and old habits, and away from purely institutional viewpoints. Participants explore together, learn across disciplines, and engage with thinkers and experts beyond our traditional silos, sparking new insights and strategies for change. Thinking Big Gatherings are opportunities for us to expand our community and deepen our capacity for strategic action, while providing educational and strategic support for the specific, ambitious change initiatives.
Highlights
Dismantling Racial Capitalism
Launched in late 2022, with a second series of convenings in December of 2023, our Dismantling Racial Capitalism convenings create space to develop and sharpen our understanding of racial capitalism, how it functions, its horrific consequences, and, most importantly, how we can challenge and dismantle it. Together with our partners at the Urban Democracy Lab, the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and the Initiative for Community Power at NYU Law, we bring together academics, organizers, policy-makers, students and change-makers for a deeply-rooted examination of how racial capitalism drives inequality, exploitation, and destruction, and how we can catalyze change.
Key to our convening series is the focus on bridging divides between social movements and academia to, together, analyze and workshop efforts of thinkers, organizers, and attorneys who are thinking and acting big, leading ambitious challenges to the status quo and making a more just and equitable future. Over the past year, our convening series has focused on the themes of housing, environmental justice, and reparations. These discussions have created space for the diverse array of participants to understand how injustice follows from the imperatives of our economic and racial order, while sharing and learning about successful campaigns that have identified footholds to subvert and invert the logic or racial capitalism.
Read and watch more about our recent Dismantling Racial Capitalism events:
Convening on Law and Power Building
For decades, lawyers invested in progressive social change have grappled with how to effectively deploy their skills and capacities – and, more broadly, law itself – in service of organizing for social, economic, and racial justice. The desire to wed law to transformative organizing efforts and collective mobilizations has generated innovative modalities of practice and frames of analysis. The convening sparked discussion, reflection, and strategic thinking, among practitioners, academics, and students with a shared commitment to using law to build a more just and democratic society.
NYC LPE founding and events
In March of 2023, The Action Lab helped launch Law and Political Economy NYC (LPE NYC) alongside our partners and collaborators at the LPE Project, which is housed at Yale Law School. LPE NYC aims to bring a law and political economy perspective to the many issues facing New York, while building a citywide network of students, lawyers, and other people organizing and fighting for a better future. Hundreds of lawyers, students, organizers, and other practitioners in the social justice movement attended the launch event, which was an animating and exciting demonstration of The Action Lab’s commitment to bridging critical legal academic perspectives to frontline movement organizing, practice, and action.
Related Events and Updates
Our Other Impact and Innovation Programming
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