David Solnit, world citizen and direct action organizer, will speak at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Sunday, April 10, after a keynote address to the Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice. Unitarian Universalist regular services begin at 10:30 a.m., and a larger presentation on Solnit’s work will run from 12:30-1:30 p.m. Both are open to the public free of charge. Donations for the Unitarian fellowship program fund and Solnit’s work are welcome.
Solnit is widely known for his significant role in organizing the Taco Bell/McDonald’s nationwide and successful tomato boycott which gained fair wages for agricultural workers in Immokalee, Florida. He has also been a pioneer in dramatizing demonstrations for everyday workers and citizens, including the “Battle in Seattle” against the World Trade Organization’s dictating terms of sale to farmers and producers world-wide. He’s also been a principal organizer at the annual School of the Americas vigil.
Solnit has popularized the use of giant puppets in mass demonstrations since the 1990s. “Images have the power to reach people in their hearts,” he says. “Creating art and street theater is a great way to engage activists and the general public,” increasing participation and encouraging people to take control of their own lives.
More than a puppeteer, Solnit has been involved with most mass mobilizations in the United States in the last 25 years. He is a skilled direct action trainer and gives workshops on strategic organizing. Currently he is supporting GI resisters through an organization called Courage to Resist (www.couragetoresist.org) and is involved in actities to defend PFC Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks case.
Solnit challenges his audiences to learn from past social movements like civil rights and farm workers’s movements. He urges creation of replicable models that are not just dependent on non-profits and professionals. “We must,” he says, “couple oppositional organizing with constructive alternatives, because they often end up in separate worlds.”
An editor and writer as well as an activist, Solnit edited Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a better World. He co-wrote with Aimee Allison Army of None: How to Counter Military Recruitment, End War, and Build a Better World. He is the Co-founder of Art and Revolution.