Grounding Concepts
Why this report
People across Canada face significant threats and challenges, and yet are building social movements capable of offering collective visions backed by collective action. The climate movement is one valuable example.
We wanted to identify the strategies and the practices that grow movements today. We wanted to understand how and why collective demands generated in movements surge at certain moments, creating tectonic shifts in society, particularly in a Canadian context.
Our inquiry needed to be focused on one such instance to capture the complexity of one such surge and look at how it was propelled forward, so we dove into where we saw a rich story to hear, capture, and tell.
We also understood that movements have no one leader or spokesperson able to tell the story of an effort that is by definition collective and plural, bringing together disparate groups for one objective. We applied this principle to our inquiry, from researching collaboratively to our approach to interviewing movement builders to writing this report.
As a result, this report features many voices who speak to the experience and insights of many sectors, coalitions, organizations and collectives. While recognizing that our interviews did not include everyone or every group involved, we offer these voices who operated and collaborated in an ecosystem which gave the historic Montreal climate protests of 2019.
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Learning moments of the whirlwind
Learning from moments of the whirlwind
Nicholas Von Hoffman, who worked with Saul Alinsky, dubbed moments like the Maple Spring, the 2019 climate movement and the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 as “moments of the whirlwind”. At such times, multitudes take to the streets to participate in dramatic shows of force and moments of civil disobedience that capture our attention and collective imagination. The movement and the social issues it raises suddenly receive an unusually high amount of press coverage and public attention. The status quo is challenged, and the average person must reckon with the question, which side are you on?.
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