The Vermont Workers' Center is really excited to participate in the Left Forum. We're sending a six person delegation down to New York, and we are participating in three panels. The first panel will be a reflection of our work as part of a collaboration with United Workers, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, the Media Mobilizing Project, the United Taxi Workers Alliance PA and the Poverty Initiative to build a model of statewide organizing that has key components of using a human rights framework, direct organizing, media, leadership development, and political education. It's really exciting to be able to highlight our work with these other organizations, and talk about how we are building a replicable organizing model that can build up to a national movement.
We are also hosting a panel focusing on our major victory last year with the Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign, with Vermont becoming the first state in the country to pass universal healthcare legislation. In this workshop we'll highlight how we were able to use media and storytelling to shift the debate around healthcare and change what is "politically possible." Finally, we are participating in a panel on human rights and media with the organizations in NESRI, MMP and United Workers to look at how media is a crucial organizing tool and the role that it has played in struggles for the human rights to housing, jobs with dignity, healthcare, and jobs with dignity. This spring the VWC is launching the People’s Media Project as the media arm of our organization, and we’ll talk more in detail about how the VWC’s media projects are integral to our organizing.
We're so excited to be on panels with our other MAG-Net members MMP and United Workers, and to meet more MAG-Net members while we're there!
Come check out our panels!
*Statewide organizing strategies with the VWC, Poverty Initiative, Media Mobilizing Project, United Workers & United Taxi Workers Alliance PA (Sat noon-1:50pm):
*Taking the State: Building a People's Movement through Strategic Mass Organizing (Sun 10am-11:50am):
*Human Rights at Home: Media and movement roundtable with United Workers, Media Mobilizing Project, and NESRI (Sun 12-1:50pm):
http://www.leftforum.org/panel/human-rights-home-media-and-movement-roundtable
The Vermont Workers' Center is a democratic, member-run organization dedicated to organizing for workers' rights and living wages for all Vermonters. We seek an economically just and democratic Vermont in which all residents have living wages, decent health care, childcare, housing and transportation. We work to build a democratic, diverse movement of working and low-income Vermonters that is locally focuses and coordinated on a statewide basis. We work with organized labor in moving towards economic justice and in strengthening the right to organize. We are committed to taking action on the full range of issues of concern to working people, and to building alliances nationally and internationally. We believe that the most effective means of change is people engaging in collective struggle to placedirect demands upon those who hold power. For more info, go to www.workerscenter.org
