From 9:00 AM until 4:30 PM
At Register for Zoom Link
Join our all virtual conference Dec. 3 as seven progressive organizations come together to dissect the 2022 election results and chart the path for our movements in the next two years and beyond.
Featuring analysis of election results by John Nichols and Sen. Jamie Eldridge; strategy presentations on peace and justice issues by by Phyllis Bennis, Prof. Jackson Lears, and Lindsay Koshgarian; and examination of the domestic progressive agenda by Jean-Luc Pierite, Jordan Berg-Powers and Mallory Hanora.
John Nichols is National affairs correspondent for The Nation. His most recent book is Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis.
Jamie Eldridge is State Senator representing the Middlesex and Worcester District, which includes Ayer, Acton, and Marlborough.
Phyllis Bennis is director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. The seventh edition of her Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict : A Primer was published in 2018.
T. J. Jackson Lears is an American cultural and intellectual historian with interests in comparative religious history, literature and the visual arts, folklore and folk beliefs. He is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers and Editor in Chief of Raritan. He is author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.
Lindsay Koshgarian is Program Director for the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She is an expert in dissecting the Federal budget including the contrast between Pentagon spending and domestic needs.
Jordan Berg Powers is Executive Director at Mass Alliance. In his over a decade there, he has helped elect new progressive leaders across the state, recruited progressive champions to run, and trained hundreds of grassroots organizers. Jordan is active in campaigns for saving public education, environmental justice, and a more progressive tax system for the Commonwealth.
Jean-Luc Pierite is President of the Board of the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB). A member of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana and originally from New Orleans, he resides in Jamaica Plain.
Mallory Hanora is Executive Director of Families for Justice as Healing, a Roxbury based prison abolitionist organization led by incarcerated women, formerly incarcerated women, and women with incarcerated loved ones, which works to move Massachusetts towards community based solutions rather than constructing a new women’s prison.
This conference will be all-virtual. It will be run as a single Zoom meeting and breakouts will be joined from the main Zoom meeting.
Sponsored by the Massachusetts Progressive Action Organizing Committee, whose constituent groups are: Massachusetts Peace Action, Our Revolution Massachusetts, Progressive Democrats of America, Progressive Massachusetts, North American Indian Center of Boston, and Incorruptible Mass, and by Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment.
Register to attend. We appreciate those who register early because it helps us plan the event!
Massachusetts progressive organizations are invited to cosponsor or endorse. See details and sign up. Cosponsors and endorsers are invited to set up a literature table and one person’s registration is included with the endorsement fee.
Payment can also be made by check payable to Massachusetts Peace Action. Mail to 11 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 and write “Facing our Challenges” on the memo line.
Conference Agenda
9:00 am - Gathering and information conversation for early birds
9:30 am – Welcoming Remarks; Political Update by John Nichols and Jamie Eldridge
10:35 am – Militarism and its ideology, with Phyllis Bennis, Jackson Lears and Lindsay Koshgarian
11:40 am – Breakouts on militarism
1:00 pm – Lunch Break
2:00 pm – Organizing for Power, with Jordan Berg Powers, Jean-Luc Pierite, and Mallory Hanora
3:00 pm – Breakouts on organizing — choice of topics: Climate change and trees, labor activism, Indigenous solidarity, prisons/decarceration, youth organizing, electoral organizing, state legislation, Poor People’s Campaign, Community based emergency response, The Right’s Push to Change School Curricula, Democratic Party: Combating elite control, or Corporate and PAC Funding in Elections.
4:20 pm – Closing remarks / report backs
We live at a time characterized by numerous dire threats to justice, peace, and the very stability of our country. Among these threats are rampant militarism, galloping climate change, growing inequality, an ongoing and divisive pandemic, and the emergence of a dangerous right-wing extremist movement. The goal of this Conference is to explore with activists and thought leaders how to address these enormous obstacles to the fulfillment of a progressive vision.
Among the questions we will examine are: How do we speak about militarism as we address inequality, climate change, racism and threats to democratic processes? And how do we understand and overcome the political vacuum which not only led to the exponential growth of corporate power (including the military industrial complex) but also destroyed belief that a collective or government can solve the problems currently undermining our societies?
But we will also draw lessons and encouragement from positive developments brought about by our progressive movement in the face of neoliberal and reactionary onslaught.