Buffalo Organizers United

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you can hear more about our vision for organized movement workers creating a sustainable movement on on Spotify!!
06/09/2021

you can hear more about our vision for organized movement workers creating a sustainable movement on on Spotify!!

Environmental Justice is one of the heartbeats of our organizing work at Clean Air. This work is hard. Like, really hard...
05/19/2021

Environmental Justice is one of the heartbeats of our organizing work at Clean Air. This work is hard. Like, really hard. We are organizing against massive, multi-national, multi-billion dollar companies who see our suffering as a byproduct of their bottom lines. We are organizing to move the needle and shift governmental agencies that are rooted in racial capitalism closer to justice and accountability. We build everyday with people who are facing devastating grief, health issues because of pollution exposure and whose voices are repeatedly drowned out by the lobbying dollars of the same corporations who are poisoning us. I’m not going to lie, sometimes it feels like real environmental justice is just impossible. But then, we keep going. We keep strategizing, building, telling our truths, inviting poor and working class people and BIPOC communities to join us on the long road towards justice. And they come, each and everyday, they come along with us.

Author, facilitator and Emergent Strategist Adrienne Maree Brown teaches us that we need to build and practice the world we want now. That we need to get messy and experimental, leaning on the strength of our relationships with one another and the earth, as we try on being in different and more just formations together. Buffalo Organizers United’s fight for a union at Clean Air is one of the ways that we are getting messy, experimenting and leaning on our relationships to build and model the world that we really need. One of the main tenets of the environmental justice movement is the burning truth that those of us closest to the problems are always the ones closest to the solutions we need to thrive. We believe the same to be true in our movement organizations.

Our movement ancestors spoke to the heart of our fight for radical unionism over 100 years ago during the 1912 Lawrence Textile strike; “We Want Bread and We Want Roses, Too.” BOU sings loudly alongside generations of union organizers; we want to do our work in service of collective liberation and we want to be cared for, too.

Three years ago, I was hired as Clean Air’s Grassroots Development Organizer to organize people and their relationship w...
05/17/2021

Three years ago, I was hired as Clean Air’s Grassroots Development Organizer to organize people and their relationship with money to be a mechanism for change and a driving force behind our fight for justice. We are intentionally transforming our organization’s development strategy to align with the world that we are fighting for. We do this because we believe that to win liberation for our people, we must shift the rules and constraints of capitalism and wealth to be more just. The path to liberation requires a fully funded movement for justice that is defined by and for us. The work to transform our development strategy has been slow and intentional, but it has made us more powerful and grounded in our convictions. Because we know that if we want to win, we need to build the world that we want and need. 
 
We believe that our liberation begins within our own organizations and practices. Buffalo Organizers United’s unionization effort with IWW is exactly this. The heart of our union organizing is our commitment to structures and frameworks that meet our needs while simultaneously shifting the rules of capitalism that have been placed upon us. Our partners at IWW refer to this as “revolutionary unionism,” because this is not just about us—this is about winning the revolution. — Julia White, Clean Air Staff & BOU Member

My name is Linnea and I am proud to be a member of Buffalo Organizers United. I’m also proud to work for Clean Air, and ...
05/07/2021

My name is Linnea and I am proud to be a member of Buffalo Organizers United. I’m also proud to work for Clean Air, and of the larger movement for justice I have both worked to help hold and been held by. At BOU, I aim to offer others what I’ve found along the way: the hope, resilience, and joy in cultivating a shared sense of home, huddled around a glowing vision for a better world, as we work to build that world together in real time.

Organizations provide containers for our movement: places of focus, clarity, power building, caretaking, and space to try on new practices. They can function as shelters from the swirling storm of cruelty and exploitation that form the larger system of racial capitalism. While they can offer us a great deal, the structures of organizations matter: in their role as containers, they can contain us too. Powerful critiques of the non-profit sector have been made clearly and concisely by others, so I won’t try to reiterate them, but instead offer that I believe scaled unionization of the non-profit sector can be part of a larger strategy to challenge the organizations we care and invest so much in to be bolder and more visionary, AND to be a more powerful challenge to the limitations imposed on us by both the state and corporate power systems.

At BOU, I hope we can provide inspiration, resources, and active support for other movement workers to unionize their workplaces. Our work makes tall demands of us: fully and accountably living our values means taking risks, diving into discomfort and uncertainty, finding room to breathe in tension. But when we commit to each other in principled struggle, experimenting, and centering joy along the way, we have what we need to make it through.

My name is Julia and I am a proud member of Buffalo Organizers United. I love working at Clean Air because we always tak...
05/06/2021

My name is Julia and I am a proud member of Buffalo Organizers United. I love working at Clean Air because we always take on the hard fights while holding on to our deep respect for each other, our conviction to our values, and our unwillingness to accept less than what we’re worth. Our fight to unionize Clean Air is no different. BOU’s struggle is a commitment to ourselves, our organization, and justice movements everywhere to boldly and unapologetically live out our values. If we want to win, we need to internally model the world that we are organizing for—a world that centers workers' rights, collective decision making, and economic justice. If we don’t do it, how can we expect others to? This is why we are asking Clean Air’s Board of Directors to voluntarily recognize and support BOU as part of a pro-union and progressive non-profit with a commitment to justice.

My name is Emily and I am a proud member of Buffalo Organizers United. After organizing in Buffalo for over ten years, I...
05/05/2021

My name is Emily and I am a proud member of Buffalo Organizers United. After organizing in Buffalo for over ten years, I found my true political home in Clean Air and began working as a full time environmental justice organizer at CAC in March of 2020. I believe in organizing; the power of everyday people to come together, see a world beyond the present and push the powers that be to prioritize our health, dignity and joy. I am excited to be a part of BOU and to organize with my colleagues to build up the strength of our movements for justice by getting into our visionary practice now. I know that when we center care, we win. BOU is the mechanism for our movement workers to center care and be in the world we need now

We are employees of the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York. We are a group of resilient, visionary humans who belie...
05/04/2021

We are employees of the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York. We are a group of resilient, visionary humans who believe we can work beyond binaries to build the world that we need by using and creating the tools to get there.

Over the coming week, you’ll hear from each of us about why we made the decision to unionize. We bring our whole selves into this work and getting to know us as individuals will show you more about our drive, brilliance, and dedication to the long haul work of organizing for our collective liberation.

Buffalo Organizers United (BOU) is a home for movement worker power. Yes, we are fighting for a union at Clean Air, and ...
05/03/2021

Buffalo Organizers United (BOU) is a home for movement worker power. Yes, we are fighting for a union at Clean Air, and in the coming days, we look forward to telling you more about Clean Air’s bargaining unit and who we are as individuals.

But our vision for BOU goes beyond our bargaining unit. We aim to be a space for organizers and movement workers in Western New York to support each other with resources, care, and rigor. Organizing is hard and, too often, isn’t a sustainable career. We hope to build a community of care and love that will allow organizers to remain in this work for the long haul.

If you're an organizer or a movement worker interested in learning more about BOU, either to unionize your workplace or just to find a loving and supportive spot to land, you can reach out to us directly, or email us at [email protected]

We are organizers. We know we need structural change and deep and broad transformation in order to create a world where ...
05/02/2021

We are organizers. We know we need structural change and deep and broad transformation in order to create a world where all of us can thrive. And we believe that organizing, bringing groups of people together around mutual interest to build power and caring relationships, is how we change the world. We see unionization as both an essential strategy for winning transformative, structural change, and an opportunity to live into our commitment to organizing in a deeper and bolder way.

We believe all workers should have rights and dignity at work, including the right to form a union. We believe in organized workplaces, and are excited to translate those beliefs into action, by unionizing our own workplace. We see every unionized workplace as a further step in an ongoing, important, and permanent trajectory of building worker power, and that every union contract makes it more possible for other workers and workplaces to organize. We are grateful and proud to be one small step on that path.

Happy May Day! We’re the staff of Clean Air, and we’ve formed a union! We've organized with Industrial Workers of the Wo...
05/01/2021

Happy May Day! We’re the staff of Clean Air, and we’ve formed a union! We've organized with Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and are called Buffalo Organizers United.

Our union is rooted in a political vision for a world where all worker power is recognized and valued. We believe that all workers should have a say in the material and political conditions of their workplaces, including ourselves. We are guided by deep love. Our aim is to create a space for organizers and movement workers in Buffalo to build worker power, deep relationships, and a culture of care, sustainability, sharp and effective strategy, and a healthy movement ecosystem. We’re starting small, with our three-person staff, but we welcome all organizers and change-makers to join our movement.

This is only the start. While we are disappointed that, after two requests for voluntary recognition, our Board of Directors has still not recognized us, we are excited to be going public about our unionization process, which has been underway for nearly two years!

We are deeply proud of the work we do, and we are committed to building a world and systems rooted in justice, equity, transparency, and celebration. We do this work knowing it is complex, difficult, and exhausting, yet unbelievably important for our collective wellbeing and the health and future of our planet. We believe in modeling the world we are fighting for, and that begins with the culture, environment, and budget of our own institution.

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Buffalo, NY

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