What is the US Social Forum?
The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.
We must declare what we want our world to look like and we must start planning the path to get there. The USSF provides spaces to learn from each other’s experiences and struggles, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, build relationships, and align with our international brothers and sisters to strategize how to reclaim our world.
Building a new type of Social Forum Centered in Peoples’ Movement Assemblies (PMAs) and Polycentric Movement Building Hubs
In the current context, USSF3 is a movement building tool. The process facilitates our movement going from defensive to offensive, to reorganize society to meet human needs and protect the earth, and to connect with global movement forces. It facilitates systemic analysis, visioning the world we need, developing political program and action agendas, and building political cohesion, alignment and independence for collective power from below to win it and hold it. USSF3 will be a social forum of a new type. As a polycentric movement building process, it is rooted in PMAs across a three year time frame and movement schools
Assemblies to Build Momentum towards the 3rd US Social Forum
PMAs are foundational to accomplishing the US Social Forum strategic goal of moving toward political alignment and movement cohesion to transform society and protect the earth.
The National Planning Committee of the US Social Forum has agreed that PMAs will be used as the primary outreach and political education tool in 2014 and 2015 as we build towards convening civil society in June of 2015 in Philadelphia, PA and Jackson, MS and San Jose, CA for the
third US Social Forum!
And all these local and regional PMAs (and the PMAs that happen at the polycentric social forum sites) will culminate in an Assembly of Assemblies being planned for 2016 where we will collectively create and present a coherent set of “Movement Demands.”