Every day since the election, we are seeing a grassroots surge of love, outrage, and determination in action! If you’re new to PJALS, hello! We need you and welcome you in our intergenerational grassroots movement for peace & justice.
PJALS has a 40-year track record of engaging everyday people. This moment is key—we must unite and combine our energy so we can roll forward and rise together!
Will you help power our grassroots surge with a donation today?
People Power Must Be Visible. We need to keep mobilizing, connecting, and growing! Our commitment is deep and unwavering: We will stand up against hate. We will speak out and show up! We will challenge our own fears. We will be true to our values! We will act with courage, passion, and strategy!
We reject fear, hate, apathy, white supremacy, homophobia, patriarchy, militarism, narcissism, Christian supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, economic exploitation, violence, apathy, and despair.
We are rooted in and moving toward love, respect, community, peace, justice, youth, intersectionality, compassion, equity, dignity, equality, safety, empathy, understanding, graceful defiance, collective action, and liberation.
The power of our grassroots movement comes with every hour volunteered and every dollar given. Every donation makes a difference!
How can we best struggle together now? Here are six steps forward:
1. Connect with each other! Please invite your friends, family, faith community, and/or book club to come with you to PJALS events and actions!
2. Make our circles bigger! Let’s build our movement with strategic engagement beyond our current circles to reach newly aware folks, as-yet-undecided people, or those beginning to feel buyer’s remorse.
3. Commit right now to long term action. We’re not going to move toward LOVE and EQUALITY and SAFETY enough today, or next week, or in year 1 of the Trump presidency. We’ve got to commit NOW to keeping our eyes open, our ears open, and our hearts & bodies in motion permanently.
4. Take action on your priorities. Our PJALS commitment is to stand with Muslims and the undocumented as people under immediate assault, as well as standing with all immigrants, refugees, Black people and other people of color, LGBT people, and minoritized religious communities; we will stand against Trump’s promise to re-institute torture and speak out against escalated or expanded wars.
5. Work with a STRATEGY – A goal without a plan is just a wish. Learn who is already working on what you want to tackle. Listen with respect and accountability to folks who are directly affected by the problem you want to work on. Identify who can say yes to what targeted folks want. How will you influence that person so it’s in their self-interest to say yes? “Some policy makers need to see the light, and some need to feel the heat,” as the saying goes! Time spent planning is good cultivation and fertilizer to bring fruitful efforts.
6. Systematize your self-care! No one can pour from an empty cup!
Our grassroots movement gives me hope. Thank you for being part of our PJALS community!