A new democratic structure will empower collaboration and expansion.
CELDF just celebrated its 25th birthday. Now, we’re investing in the next 25 years.
For decades, our staff have spearheaded issues few others would touch. CELDF was years ahead of the curve on Rights of Nature and a structural demand for local community self-determination to counteract corporate power. We’ve helped successfully advance these movements.
At its core, these issues are about communities deciding for themselves how to protect themselves from corporate exploitation. We’ve been on the side of democracy, against the corporate state. But our own internal organization still remained in a rigid hierarchical corporate form. With the departure of management that favored the old structure, CELDF is moving forward implementing fresh ideas more in line with local community needs and requests.
As we have peeled off the layers of the corporate state, it has become necessary for us to transform how we work to ensure that we are practicing the change we wish to see in the world.
We are now adapting to expanded needs and gearing up to accommodate locally-specific organizing and legal strategies through a toolbox of approaches, as organizing for this fundamental political and legal change proliferates and takes unique forms.
That’s why we are excited to announce internal changes to our organizational structure to facilitate greater horizontal collaboration between CELDF and other groups and communities. We are tacticians in a shared struggle for democracy, not outside experts with all the answers. As we have peeled off the layers of the corporate state, it has become necessary for us to transform how we work to ensure that we are practicing the change we wish to see in the world. This restructure will help us better support movements for democracy.
Thus, we are moving toward a worker-directed organizational governance model in order to facilitate greater democracy, flexibility, and collaboration. A worker-driven model will allow for our historical analysis of law and power, community organizing support, legal services and communications to take new creative forms as an uncertain and ever-changing future unfolds.
We exist within a vibrant, accelerating movement. Throughout our work, we are committed to prioritizing solidarity, diversity, and equity. Whether that’s through recognizing and defending the rights of ecosystems and complementary human and civil rights on settler colonial-controlled land, supporting and elevating the expansion of traditional and customary indigenous law, connecting Rights of Nature recognition to Truth and Reconciliations, to advancing new participatory shadow and conventional government structures….
Read the full article in addition to staff bios HERE.