Strategy Summits: Collective Care as a Strategy

Panel Overview: This panel will explore the opportunities and limits of collective care – which Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce define as “efforts by an oppressed group to meet its own needs for survival and safety” – as a movement strategy. When does collective care advance a movement’s strategy by attracting new members to the base, sustaining the members we have, or prefiguring the changes we seek? When is collective care distracting or demobilizing? What responsibilities do our movements have to support people through periods of fatigue or crisis? Where and how do we draw the lines?

Moderator:

Lissy Romanow was formerly the Executive Director of Momentum, a training organization dedicated to building social movement organizations for the 21st century.

Meet the Panelists:

Rachel Gilmer brings 15 years of experience in grassroots organizing, policy development and advocacy. Prior to joining Grassroots Power Project, Rachel was a leader with the Dream Defenders, where she served as the organization’s Co-Executive Director for 6 years. During this time, she led the development of the organization’s political program, helping build out their C4, statewide PAC and super PAC; oversaw the organizations’ local and statewide campaign work and led the development of the Healing and Justice Center, a community-based public safety program in Miami working to reduce violence without the carceral system. Rachel has also held roles with the African American Policy Forum, the Oregon Health Authority, the Portland African American Leadership Forum and the Oregon Bus Project and was a 2023 Soros Justice Fellow. Rachel serves on the boards of Jewish Voice for Peace, Sunrise Movement and Imagine Black. She is the Co-Author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women.

Ginny Goldman is an organizer and political strategist focused on advancing racial and economic justice. She’s spent her career working to create transformational change in political and governing systems through movement-based power— particularly in the south and southwest. Ginny co-founded the Texas Organizing Project in 2009, and has remained firmly committed to driving national change rooted in local and state level power-building. In 2021, she started Organizing Resilience, a nationwide initiative backing talent and ideas to drive structural change in the face of climate disasters. She has served as a senior advisor to Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and a strategic consultant to a number of political campaigns, labor and philanthropic institutions. Ginny has an unusual ability to work across the disciplines of electoral politics, movements, organizing, and governance.

Harmony Goldberg has been providing political education and strategic facilitation for social movements in the United States for more than 25 years. She cut her teeth in California’s youth and student movement in the 1990s, where she helped to found and lead SOUL, the School Of Unity and Liberation. Then, she worked closely with the domestic workers movement and other low-wage workers organizations as the workers center movement was coming into its own. Harmony completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where her research focused on the promising forms of worker’s struggle and class politics that were emergent in domestic worker organizing in New York City. At Grassroots Power Project, Harmony works closely with People’s Action, and she leads the development of strategic education programs. In each step of her political journey, Harmony has been driven by her family’s struggles with downward mobility and her standing rage at racial injustice, which have motivated her in her search for ways to build meaningful multi-racial class power in the United States.