Spadework is excited to present to our listeners our first themed “toolbox” episode, called “Getting Started.” Toolboxes are special content where experienced organizers from different contexts provide our listeners with “tools” to help them work through a particular organizational problem. 

In this “toolbox,” we provide our listeners with different tools around the problem of getting your organizing initiative started. There’s a lot of different routes and points of departure, depending on what you’re working with and where you're going. The tools dropped into the toolbox aren’t meant at all to provide definitive and timeless organizational answers. They’re there to be tinkered with, disassembled, and reassembled according to your organizational conditions and environment.

To this end, we’ve brought a number of organizers with experiences that range across terrains and contexts that fought in feminist, anti-racist, environmental, migration, workplace, electoral and community struggles.

Our guests include:

Manuela Zechner is a researcher, facilitator, and situated organizer working across feminism, ecology- and migration-related struggles. Her research focuses on collective care, micropolitics, and processes of organization and subjectivity formation in social movements. You can follow her on Twitter @zanubar

Amrah Salomon J. (she/ella) is a poet, activist, and Assistant Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is also an anti-oppression and community organizing consultant, a co-founder of Rez beats and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice and the O’odham AntiBorder Collective.

Daniel Gutiérrez is a member of Die Linke and co-founder of Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung. A doctoral candidate at FU Berlin, his research generally focuses on worker organization, power, and strategy in the current conjuncture.

Antje Dieterich is a member of Die Linke and co-founder of Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung. Drawing on a long history in student and anti-racist struggles, she is focused on developing strategies for supporting organizational learning and leadership development within and between left organizations. You can follow her on Twitter @_a_dieterich

Robert Maruschke: is a lifelong Berlin-based organizer and political researcher interested in the relation between community organizing and social movements. He is currently working at Die Linke’s party headquarters where he helps coordinate countrywide support of organizing projects for the party. 

Chris Dixon is an educator and organizer in Ottawa, the author of Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movement, and a member of the Punch Up Collective. You can find him on Twitter @withmovements.