Single-Family Zoning in the Fresno Region

Introduction The authors would like to thank Joshua Cantong, Data Analyst at the Othering and Belonging Institute for their valuable insights and contributions. This brief report continues our series investigating the extent of restrictive and...

Environmental Justice from the Bottom-Up

In recent years, advocates’ push for development without displacement in California has been incorporated into state grant-making pilot programs like the Equitable Community Revitalization Grant. Investments in urgently needed low-income housing...

Targeted Universalism Bibliography

The framework of targeted universalism has been a compelling framework for work in many different contexts. The sources referenced in this bibliography reflect this diversity of uses and application areas. Targeted universalism is a framework that focuses on policy and program design...

Bridging and Power Building Paper Series

This series looks at the longstanding art and science of organizing, in relation to today’s social dynamics. Our premise is that for us to build power, we need to bridge across lines of difference in ways more radical than ever before. This series is authored by a working group from across California...

Concluding Thoughts on Bridging and Power Building

At the outset of the B4B working groups’ journey, we envisioned a set of trainings, analytical and strategizing tools, and shared bridging tenets that shape our practice (toolbox), politics, and culture. If we are successful, we will see...

Community Organizing, Electoral Work, and Bridging

The most basic premise of electoral work is grounded in breaking. Campaigns must draw a line in the sand between themselves and their opposition, providing a firm “us-and-them” distinction that is crystal clear. In the elections themselves of course, there are winners and there are losers...

Coalitions: Vision, Bridging, Belonging

Coalitions, at their best, ensure that we are stronger than the sum of our parts. If a coalition is defined as a set of distinct groups joining together for a shared goal, we might expect that this, by its nature, involves bridging...

The Strategic Implications of Mass Mobilization as a Tactic

Mass mobilization as a tactic–without linking it to community organizing, base-building, and civic engagement–has some very useful aspects and also some steep downsides. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement illustrate...

The Center for Third World Organizing Model’s Essential Components

In the 1980s, Gary Delgado, an Alinsky-trained organizer, challenged the country’s dominant grassroots power building model by asserting that (1) communities of color should be organized by young people of color; (2) organizations and campaigns should reflect...

The History of the Alinsky Organizing Model and Its Practice within Community and Organized Labor

Saul Alinsky was a native of Chicago, a vital manufacturing and transportation hub for the country in the 1930s. Scores of meat packing companies, warehouses, and train lines converged on the Second City and employed thousands of...

Organizing, Power Building, and Bridging

If progressives are to win, transformative change in the long run, we will not do so by achieving piecemeal policy victories for individual target groups. Rather, victory will be in shifting people’s worldview about themselves and the kind of society they want...

Belonging Design Principles

Design Principles for Building Belonging Across our planet, people are looking for effective ways to build just, equitable, and inclusive institutions that serve and support everyone. Even more challenging, we’re looking for ways to do so without...

Video: Climate Refugees: Facts and Findings, and Strategies for 'Loss and Damage.'

On Thursday, July 27 we hosted a panel to mark the release of our research brief, “ Climate Refugees: Facts and Findings, and Strategies for 'Loss and Damage.' ” This panel discussed ideas to strengthen and bridge movements for climate refugee...

Climate Refugees

Facts, Findings, and Strategies for ‘Loss and Damage.’ - Despite the growing consensus among climate scientists and international governing bodies that forced migration is an effect of climate change, and although the expression “climate refugees” is often used to describe climate-induced migration across ...

Beloved Community Talks: End The Housing Crisis

On July 25, 2023 OBI Research Director Stephen Menendian participated in an online panel hosted by the King Center that explored solutions to the housing crisis. He talked about the need to invest more in multi-family housing.

Explore Othering and Belonging

Principles for Reframing the National Security Narrative

Our public discourse is seeded with dangerous and counterproductive ideas concerning national security that are so deeply embedded we may often be unaware that we, as story tellers, are invoking or reinforcing them in our own narrations. Thus, over...
Nov
16

Across Lines: Grief. with Bayo Akomolafe, Professor Sa’ed Atshan, and Cecilie Surasky

How do we catch people where they fall? How do we respond to this crisis in a way that doesn’t reinforce its architecture? What kind of politics is being summoned at this time?

Video: Disability & Blackness

One of the hidden aspects of the Black Panther Party in the California Bay Area was its contributions to the nascent disability rights movement in the 1970s. In 1977, the Party famously supported a 26-day occupation of a federal building in San...