The Blueprint for Belonging project (B4B) is pleased to introduce its 2026 commissioned papers and conversations series. This series focuses on how California’s community organizing field can confront challenges and opportunities distinct to our current socio-political moment. In it, key thinkers from across the state tackle dynamics that they identify as pressing today. These authors and interviewees collectively represent many decades worth of experience as strategists and social-change leaders. The dynamics that they address include emergent issues as well as ones that have enduring roots, but have taken on greater weight or urgency as they intersect with a shifting political landscape.
California has long given birth to social movements that raise public consciousness, drive policy wins, and change understandings of what is possible – not only for the state, but for the country and world. (For a short documentary history of the past few decades of California’s organizing field, and how it helped shift California to one of the most progressive states in the country, see "Transforming California from Red to Blue.") Today, organizers face a daunting landscape, marked by an empowered authoritarian movement that controls all branches of the federal government, spiraling economic precarity and inequality, and a civic sphere in which many dig deeper into opposition with one another while others are pushed out altogether.
This is the common backdrop against which all of the contributions to this series sit. Each author and interviewee is concerned with the question of where the organizing field goes from here – not for its own survival, but for that of society, our shared future, and our path toward belonging for all. What must the field do to continue to be a force for progress? How must it adapt when progress requires not only winning fights for equity and justice, but also addressing mistrust and cynicism, and bridging wide social divides?
“New Organizing Strategies for California’s Future” is a set of contributions to a broad conversation across social change makers in the state. You are invited to that conversation. We look forward to hearing from you.
Scroll down to read the papers in this series. We will periodically update this page with new publications - stay tuned for more to come!
The banner and thumbnail illustration for this page was created by Ermina Emmanouel for The Greats, and has been adapted and republished under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. See the original artwork here.
