While many of us have been at membership meetings that went sideways, the NRA’s this past week was a fiasco, and we can all thank their grassroots opposition for bringing the sunshine in.
The constructed dearth of gun violence research in this country is a national scandal that equates to a Congressional will to keep the country in ignorance about the dynamics of one of the country’s most acutely painful social and cultural characteristics.
Nieman Lab looks at how staff at four nonprofit news organizations harnessed NewsMatch to achieve fundraising success at the end of last year. With the help of toolkits and other resources, these journalists experimented with fundraising and the discomfort that can come with highlighting your own work.
We find too little journalism that allows those involved to report their own truths with humanity and immediacy.
In the face of growing political polarization, spaces for thoughtful dialogue across ideologies have all but disappeared. Spaceship Media seeks to fill this void by bringing people together to talk about contentious issues. In this conversation, an NRA member and an anti-violence activist discover they are not as different as they once thought.
Just days before the midterms, we are faced with a frightening scenario of our own making because, in the end, we cannot expect to be protected if we do not work hard to protect one another. Armed guards won’t do it; organizing, voting, and coalescing around a common future will.
While law enforcement approaches to reducing gun violence in the US have been lacking, neighborhood-based nonprofit approaches show promise.
Even as students all over the country are subject to mass shooting drills in schools, where they have every right to feel safe, due to a 20-year-old NRA-backed amendment there has been no federally funded public health research on the topic of gun violence. The Arnold Foundation is now stepping up with a leadership grant of $20 million to make that research happen.
As student organizers in the anti-gun violence movement have learned, just saying you want to engage in multiracial organizing doesn’t mean you’ll achieve it.
Those who are thrust into leadership roles in social movements face a difficult balancing act: Maintaining a self-reflective attitude, even when goaded by personal attacks, is critical.
