More than a Movement: Building Healthy dynamics in affinity groups, collectives and organizations

The purpose of this is to help facilitate participants in figuring out what he calls 'healthy movement dynamics'. The whole goal is to come up with ways to organize that foster community-building, self-empowerment and positive group interactions that push the movement forward and invigorate us individuals. More than merely looking at things like radical mental health, what causes burnout and alienation in movements, and the importance of consensus decision-making and good facilitation techniques, we are going to explore how to build successful community-organizing and activist communities that best reflect the society and world that we want to live in.

Adam says, "Ironically, my experiences participating in organizing the last APIC was big part of what inspired me to write my zine in the first place, and motivated me to finish through sometimes days (and weeks) of writer's block.
To make a long story short, there was a lot of good, and a lot of areas of improvement. I think we were able to put together one hell of a conference, but I think we might have taken some unnecessary (and possibly avoidable) blows as a group. Feelings of lack of recognition, post-Conference burnout and a myriad of other issues came into play.
Unfortunately, in my six short years of organizing work, I would say my experience is that this is kind of the norm, rather than exception. Often, we are too focused on affecting change on society, that we don't reflect enough on how we can affect change on ourselves, as both individual and as part of a collective. I think we sometimes get caught with the fact that things in our communities and in the world need to change and they need to change NOW that we act on those feelings at the expense of reflection on what we need to do (again as both groups and as individuals) to make sure our struggle is both sustainable and giving us what we need."