But the organizers have vested most of their power with the NYC General Assembly , which is a "horizontal," leaderless body that makes decision through consensus.
What's next for Occupy Wall Street? And on Wednesday, liberal group MoveOn. And after that Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer Fact Sheet. Chris Christie takes on Trump. Joel Mathis. Trump reveals he has an 'envoy ambassador'. Criminal justice debates turned upside down. James Antle III. Protests are often seen in contexts where governments support those at the top and disadvantage those at the bottom.
A protest can only bring about valuable policy change, when it is well-planned, focused, and the demands are clear. Protesters must express their displeasure and constructively present their demands as one voice.
Proactive leaders must engage all protesters in a dialogue and find common demands to meet their needs. This way a protest can mirror the way the general public feels about a given policy. You should leverage social media for the benefits of protests. Social media has changed and is continuously changing our lives.
These small actions created a unique sense of global unity, which we should build on when it comes to protests. Creating a campaign, a new group, or even proposing a new overlay for your profile photo are all happening today. These campaigns can go viral and are a great mechanism for creating momentum for your demands for change. It is clear that our actions on social media can lead to positive change.
Protest movements should take the time to create frameworks and mechanisms, to help transform momentum into real positive change in an inclusive, transparent and efficient manner. You should create frameworks for protest participants which work together to approach problems and create inclusive solutions.
These groups gather the concerns of the protesters, sit down to analyse the responses and then develop specific demands and solutions that represent what protesters want. This requires professionalizing a protest movement and will create a reliance on people from professions like law, community organizing and economics, but should be open for any protestor to join. This would enable protest movements to capture varying opinions that enrich the specific solutions being prepared.
The work of these groups would not only pre-empt standard excuses used by governments to avoid change, but would also enable them to project an image of seriousness to the world, an ingredient necessary to secure support for the struggle. You need to professionalize your approach to communicating the protest internationally. Real-time news reporting pushes events to the forefront at lightning speed but replaces them just as quickly. In the world saw many protests met with violence, for example when US militias policed the streets as a response to Black Lives Matter protests or when police conducted violent acts against protestors in Belarus.
We saw these events because protestors themselves provided videos of the violence, but they then quickly disappeared from the world stage of media attention. Through meticulously documenting protests, altercations and human rights violations—harnessing the power of social media to continue to inform a global audience—protestors can inspire public outrage, support and ultimately policy changes once their voice can no longer be ignored. You must engage with social activists in other countries who are also striving for change.
Engaging with international networks composed of social activists who can support your movements and provide you a space to share your experiences, can be very advantageous to your cause.
It is crucial to link up with organizations in your own country which are working towards similar goals, but do not underestimate the value of connecting to other social activists as well. The networking, support and expanded skills resulting from engaging with others can help protests movements put themselves into a position where the authorities are forced to enter a phase of dialogue and hopefully answer the demands given to them. You should make sure to include young people in discussions on citizen action and educate them on protests, policy change and political engagement.
From an early age, people should learn that their voice is important and how they personally can impact politics and policy. The issue is, however, that schools do not sufficiently educate children on how policy works and in failing to do so send them out into the world without the tools to change it. In the United Kingdom there are Personal, Social, Health and Economic PSHE lessons, but neither the statutory nor the optional subjects include political participation, policy change or citizen action.
Yet, as participation is integral to democracy, education on civic and political engagement is essential for creating citizens who understand how to critically participate in a democratic society. At the height of the Great Recession, Weber and his generation saw the climate crisis staring them in the face, along with exploding wealth and income inequality, student debt, and housing and health-care costs. On September 17, , they rebelled.
Polls showed that a wide majority of Americans supported Occupy. Then, almost as quickly as it had arrived, the movement appeared to vanish, leaving behind little except for the language of the 99 and the 1 percent. In the decade since, the wealth gap has only widened.
Rewriting the protest playbook, Occupy introduced a decentralized form of movement organizing that enabled hundreds of city chapters to reinforce and strengthen one another yet remain independent—a sharp break from the traditional, hierarchical structure of protest movements of the past. Pioneering the use of live-stream technology while employing powerful social-media messaging and meme tactics to grow participation both on- and offline, Occupy showed a new generation how to turn social movements into a viral spectacle that seizes control of the public narrative.
Read: The triumph of Occupy Wall Street. More deeply, the movement on Wall Street injected activists with a new sense of courage: Confronting power and issuing demands through civil disobedience is now an ingrained part of our political culture. And in a sense, the protesters have never gone home. Some of the top activists of this generation got their start at Occupy.
It emerged as a direct successor to Occupy, whose activists helped redirect the fight against inequality into a focused, strategic movement to save the planet.
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