We union activists know things and have done things about making change. Many of us have been doing change work for decades. Most of us don’t talk enough in RC about what we do. 


Would you like to know how to do the following? 


• Organize a rally with hundreds or thousands attending
• Get arrested on purpose to push an agenda
• Build relationships behind the scenes with people in power who are opposed to your agenda and get them to move on your agenda
• Get a state government to commit millions of dollars to move something forward that is important to you
• Connect organizations that have never connected, when you now need them to work together
• Keep a mission-focused group going for twenty years
• Research regulations in your area and increase enforcement of current laws
• Get a new law passed
• Get a group of working-class people, who have never done it before, to lobby elected officials
• Write a play (and get it produced) to bring attention to your issue
• Build “bridges” in a group across race and gender
• Discharge about making big change, face your significance, and move discouragement
• Bring a disparate group together, release initiative, and make measurable change in something that’s been stagnant for forty years
• Talk with someone completely opposed to your mission then move them over time to support it
• Call a strike
• Stay in the fight, right in the belly of capitalism

For everything listed above, I can name a union activist in RC who has done it.


We’re not the only ones who know these things, but we do know a lot. We’ve done a lot. Talk to us, especially those of us who work for unions as full-time organizers. We’ve taken action and accomplished a lot with our own heavy loads of despair, discouragement, and other big early challenges, so we also know something about moving in spite of the feelings.


And to my union activist buddies: Speak up! Tell your stories! Lead on making change! Climate change and the planet need our skills and experience!