Our Issues

DemilitaRISE

GGJ brings together grassroots organizations who are organizing people impacted by U.S. militarism at home and globally. This includes organizing people from war-impacted communities, people impacted — by police violence and the violence of the immigration enforcement apparatus, by the occupation of Indigenous lands, racial profiling, mass incarceration and detention as well as veterans enduring grave trauma.

Our DemilitaRISE work builds  shared alignment across our members and grows our collective political power to divest our economy from institutions of harm — moving resources away from police, prisons, the Pentagon, and war — and to invest in an economy of care, Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led restorative justice, reparations, community leadership, and collective healing. The work of demilitaRISE is a core pillar of GGJ’s shared work toward building a Feminist, Anti-racist, Regenerative Economy.

DemilitaRISE Programs

• The People’s Care Agenda: a set of popular demands for and by our communities to withstand authoritarian attacks, protect our communities, and continue to fight for a resilient and healthy future for all. It is a vision to build power to resist authoritarian attacks, take back governing power, and advance local legislation that invests in real solutions for the crises we face. Read the People’s Care Agenda. 
  
• Funders for Demilitarization: GGJ is a founding partner of Funders for Demilitarization,  a funder organizing project and pooled fund that seeks to increase philanthropic resources for work to confront U.S. militarism and strengthen engagement between funders and grassroots movements, and strengthen the capacity of under-funded demilitarization organizations, to advance alternatives rooted in community safety, human rights, peace and justice.
  
• Internationalism: GGJ brings representatives from working class, Indigenous, and communities of color on the frontlines of the climate, gender, and economic crises from the U.S. into international movement spaces to share lessons from our work with global movements. We are building a strategically aligned and solidarity-driven membership to strengthen international movements to advance transformative proposals.

“I believe a future free of prisons, police and militaries is possible if we come together in the years ahead to build on the foundations our ancestors have established and dare to dream and create as much as we resist and dismantle. Abolishing the deep cultural militarism and dismantling the military industrial complex will require us to deeply question and unlearn the same logic that lies at the heart of policing, prisons, anti-immigration agencies and beyond. We must reject this common logic that tells us that violence somehow makes us safe, that cages somehow maintain security, and that wars somehow create peace.”

—Brittany Ramos DeBarros, About Face

Grassroots Feminisms

Grassroots feminism is a worldview and political practice rooted in the realities and interests of women, queer, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people who have been harmed by the intersecting forces of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Grassroots Feminism is explicitly and unwaveringly anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist. 

We believe in solidarity across identities and borders, and in the joy of collective struggle. We fight for a just transition to a feminist economy where every person has what they need to fully realize themselves while being in right relationship with the planet and each other. The liberation of womxn is bound to the liberation of all oppressed peoples.

This is a living definition, created by the GGJ Grassroots Feminism team with input from our members and movement allies. The definition continues to evolve as we deepen our understanding and embodiment of intersectional radical feminisms. 

Grassroots Feminisms Programs

• Feminist Organizing Schools: The Feminist Organizing School provides a space for grassroots leaders to create a shared vision for the grassroots internationalist feminist movement we hope to build. GGJ co-coordinates the International Feminist Organizing School with international allies, and we organize the national Feminist Organizing School in the U.S. These schools explore the intersections of patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy and climate change; and a vision of a feminist future, including development of a feminist economy.
  
• World March of Women: The World March of Women (WMW) is a global feminist action network. The WMW started in 1995 as a call for women to march and take action around issues of poverty and violence in Quebec. In 2000, the World March of Women became a worldwide movement to connect women’s struggles globally. The areas of action are around Peace and demilitarization, Violence against women, Women’s work / Women’s economic autonomy, Common good and public services. GGJ is the 65th National Coordinating Body of the WMW, the national chapter in the U.S.  

Global Well-being

The climate crisis caused by the drivers of colonialism and capitalist extractivism has devastated ecosystems and communities all over the world with natural and man-made disasters. The climate crisis is impacting marginalized communities and peoples in the Global South, first and worst. In the face of these crises, members of Grassroots Global Justice are advancing solutions built by and for communities at the frontlines of climate crisis and pollution. 

Our members have adopted the concept of Global Well-being, drawing from climate justice movements and visions from movements in the Global South such as buenvivir, as our collective vision for societies rooted in care and well-being instead of extraction and violence. Our Global Well-being work grapples with issues at the intersections of energy, climate, environmental justice in the context of Global Well-being. We focus on two core priorities: strengthening the Climate Justice movement nationally and internationally, and actualizing the Just Transition (JT) model on the ground.  

Our air and water are being poisoned by fossil fuel extraction, our livelihoods are threatened by floods and drought, our communities are the hardest hit and the least protected in extreme weather events—and our demands for our survival and for the rights of future generations are pushing local, national, and global leaders towards real solutions to the climate crisis.

Global Well-Being Programs

• Engaging in International Climate Change Meetings, such as the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP).  Since 2009, GGJ has led delegations to the Conference of Parties (COP) organized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The annual COP is a crucial battle ground for us. It is a site where heads of state and world leaders assemble to negotiate the content and implementation of climate agreements, treaties that determine the paradigm of possibility for taking action at a grand scale on the climate crisis. Our delegations are led by women and gender-oppressed people of color and Indigenous peoples on the frontlines of racial, housing and climate justice across the United States. Together with rising social movement formations from across the globe, we push the paradigm of possibility away from false solutions such as carbon market, carbon trading, and offset mechanisms and toward a Just Transition. 
  
• Green New Deal: Frontline communities have long held solutions to the climate crisis. Black, Brown, API, Indigenous, and working class communities in the United States and across the Global South have pioneered Just Transition frameworks to move their communities from forced reliance on extractive economies to regenerative and sustainable ways of living. Our members are advancing Green New Deal policies and solutions that have worked for frontline communities and workers. 
  
• The People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy: We are in a critical moment to make a downpayment on a feminist, Regenerative Economy and prevent future crises, starting with a Green New Deal that invests in frontline communities — Indigenous peoples, API, Black, Brown, and poor white marginalized peoples. The People’s Orientation to the Regenerative Economy is an expansive toolkit offering community groups, policy advocates, and policymakers a pathway toward a feminist, Regenerative Economy based on wisdom and solutions from frontline communities. It lays out concrete steps to implement policy at the local, state, national and tribal levels.