Movement Building

On my last program visit to the Middle East, I had a chance to spend two days with Stop the Wall Campaign (a Grassroots International partner) staff and leaders throughout the West Bank. Through all of our conversations, two distinct but complementary themes arose – steadfastness and fierce determination from farmers who had been in the struggle for decades, and creative vibrant energy from youth who have recently taken on leadership in their local committees and in the broader movement.

Despite being denied, again, title to the land on which they have labored, there is no quit in this group of women from El Estribo.

On December 10, 2011, the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) will celebrate 20 years of human rights promotion and defense in Haiti. A partner of Grassroots International, POHDH is a non-partisan association of eight non-profit, non-governmental Haitian rights organizations bound by shared beliefs in human rights (individual and collective), democracy, and public education around the issues of social, political, and cultural rights.

Janaina Stronzake is a youth leader within Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) – the largest peasant movement in Latin America with over 1.5 million members.

Right now, government representatives from around the world are gathered in Durban, South Africa, for the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference – better known as the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17).  Historically, these closed-door meetings are where some of the world’s largest polluting countries – including the United States – discuss (and occasionally adopt) global climate policy.  At last year’s COP16 meeting in Cancun, Mexico, these governments negotiated the details of polluting and land-grabbing projects like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and other carbon-trading schemes, which are fundamentally about profit – not forests, not people, and not global w

The United Nations declared November 29 to be the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People some 63 years ago.