Agents of Change: Communities Collaborating to Solve Complex Problems
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 2022-09-25

A panel with Paul DeMain, Greg Armstrong, Marcy West, and Elandria Williams discussing community responses to environmental justice issues.

The event was co-sponsored by the Evjue Foundation, the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison, and the 4W Initiative. 

Seeds of solutions to humanity’s intersecting crises of climate, economy and democracy are all around us. If they are nurtured and spread, they will form the foundation of a more democratic, just, and sustainable system. This is precisely what Beautiful Solutions seeks to do: spread the seeds that will help us imagine, and create, a future that supports people and the planet—and develop the resources to help them flourish.

Beautiful Solutions pairs systemic critique with real solutions that point the way toward a new system. It lifts up creativity and innovation in communities that are fighting back against the root causes of injustice and working to build something better. Rather than prescribing one way of doing things, Beautiful Solutions works with practitioners to spotlight the strategies that are working and replicable. These strategies—delivered online, in an upcoming book, and through grassroots popular education and training—can build democratic leadership in communities, strengthen our resistance, transform public policy and help shift the broader culture from extraction and dependence to creativity and interdependence. Beautiful Solutions is a collaboration of the Highlander Research and Education Center, the New Economy Coalition, and Beautiful Trouble.

Elandria Williams is the Director of Training at PeoplesHub. She also provides development support to cooperatives, mostly in the Southern United States, and is a co-editor of Beautiful Solutions. For the last eleven years Elandria worked at the Highlander Research and Education Center, first as the youth/intergenerational programs director and then helping co-coordinate Economics and Governance programs such as the Mapping Our Futures Curriculum and the Southern Grassroots Economies Project. Elandria also serves on the boards of the Southern Reparations Loan Fund (SRLF), US Solidarity Economy Network, Appalachian Studies Association and the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, and is one of the Co-Moderators or Chief Governance Officers of the Unitarian Universalist Association.