Our Initiatives
The Action Lab’s Ongoing Initiatives
Despite the many profound political and cultural challenges we face as a movement for racial, economic, and environmental justice today, there remains significant potential for positive change. But to realize the potential and promise of the many intersecting struggles for justice, we must do better, and we must do more. The Action Lab’s five initiatives provide the space, resources, and scaffolding to better understand these challenges, their roots, and their disparate impacts and to forge new pathways through them. The Action Lab’s initiatives provide the structure, resources, and discipline for organizers, artists, and leaders to move us toward a future of connection, resilience, justice, freedom, solidarity, and dignity for all. Movements, organizations, and leaders need space and means to renew the bonds of community, to learn, to imagine inspired futures that resonate with the needs and desires of people around the world and to step back to think more deeply and creatively about the strategies to get there. Our five initiatives are designed to meet those needs.
Impact and Innovation Initiative
Progressive organizations face tremendous pressure to respond to the urgent, whether by marshaling resources for defense from immediate threats, seizing opportunities for incremental change, or jumping from one campaign to the next. As a result, our movement is perpetually pivoting to the “now,” leading us to neglect the perspective, strategies, and tools we need to transform the future in more fundamental ways.
Power to Win Initiative
The Power to Win Initiative cultivates opportunities for change-makers to learn together, sharpen our crafts, deepen our rigor and discipline, practice through hands-on field engagement, and strategize for a new shared future.
The Power to Win Initiative provides high-quality and high-impact spaces for deep reflection, honest evaluation, and shared learning, while working to catalyze generative practices that organizers and organizations can use to build power and community at scale.
Our training series, learning delegations, political education curricula, resource toolkits, and interdisciplinary workshops are valuable contributions to the work of our partners, and to a growing number of organizers across the country.
Belafonte Initiative
Culture, not politics, is the way we make meaning of the world. We make sense of our own experiences by telling stories; we understand experiences far from our own through the empathy that art can inspire. We need an infrastructure to support this kind of bold imagining—a space and a way of being together to conceptualize, create and engage—shaped by artists and culture-creators who can help unlock our collective imagination and inspire action.
Gathering Strength Initiative
The Action Lab’s Gathering Strength Initiative creates vital space for healing, reflection and calm – for organizers, leaders, and social justice artists to cultivate individual and shared well being. As a part of this work, we cultivate practices of personal, institutional and communal well-being and resilience, and explore how such practices can reshape how we build our organizations and how we can envision and embody leadership. Through this work, we are developing a shared commitment to well-being, joy and health – not just as hallmarks of the world we want to create, but as features of the world we create and inhabit now.
La Tejedora Initiative
La Tejedora ("the weaver") is a Puerto Rican led initiative which is building an infrastructure for movement leaders on the archipelago to fight alongside allies in the diaspora and globally for Puerto Rican self-determination, decolonization and climate justice. La Tejedora is being incubated and amplified at the Action Lab.
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