Staying Power for the Long Haul
Windcall Institute supports and sustains labor and community organizers, particularly people of color and women through our signature Residency experience and Staying Power programming. Windcall believes that when our organizations are more life sustaining, imaginative, and visionary, our people and movements will:
- More profoundly contribute to dismantling of all forms of oppression.
- Collaborate with greater ease.
- Attract broader participation.
- Focus on what we want instead of what we oppose.
- Develop new ideas and alliances that advance us in substantive ways.
- Be positioned to change the policies and political structures to be more just.
Because we believe that:
…To dismantle all forms of oppression, we must make central to our work the liberation of all people from the effects of that oppression;
…Organizing takes courage, creativity, commitment and risk and deserves to be celebrated;
…Organizers contribute significantly to the invisible labor that builds and sustains movements for social change;
…The creativity, health and resilience of organizers are vital to the systemic change we are capable of;
…Organizers are more effective, grounded in their vision and a spirit of collaboration, when they are able to step back and refresh their life purpose and work;
…The place to start to transform our movements is from the inside out;
…To create the social justice we seek, we must learn to become more just in how we treat ourselves as well as others;
…Organizers deserve to sustain themselves in movement work, with dignity and health, for a lifetime;
We have created Windcall Residency and Staying Power Program.
Windcall offers organizers:
- Time and space for new ideas and ways of being to arise within ourselves;
- Rejuvenation and mental, emotional, physical and spiritual balance;
- Practices that keep us connected to our core motivation and sustain us;
- The opportunity to reflect on and release the effects of oppression on our own lives;
- An invitation to transform our sense of life purpose, vision and work;
- An exploration of how and what we perceive, enabling us to see new possibilities, and to act with greater creativity and courage;
- Support to bring those practices into our organization and movements;
Staying Power Program fosters:
- A vibrant network of organizers, centered by Windcall alumni, seeking to sustain and develop themselves as they sustain and develop their work;
- Ways of building organizations and movements so that maintaining vision, resiliency, humanity, and a collaborative stance is central to what we do;
- Our connection to the bigger picture and long term systemic change;
- Longevity in organizers so we can build for the long haul;
- The support, inclusiveness and relationships that make our movements more resilient, life sustaining and strong.
- Staying power for us, our organizations, our communities and our movements!