Happy New Year family! Here's our slightly belated but hopefully exciting plans for the year ahead and esp our Winter Season over the next couple months - we'll keep this updatey without much of the reasoning behind choices, as that will come out soon in our Autumn Zine, which is on all things RYSE Story and Strategy. So for now, let's have at it:
Celebrating 2022
Before we jump into 2023 we first wanted to say a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who supported our Winter Crowdfunder – it was incredible to see the support as we reached our target of 13k with just a few hours to spare!
This generosity has fired us up for 2023 and is the platform we need to really kick on from all we began with The RYSE last year – which as always you can find in our Seasonal Zines, the Summer one is out now and is the ‘go-to’ place a proper run through our work, check the Zine Gallery here to get reading.
Grounding in the Now
So then, 2023. To begin we want to ground in the now by sending power and love to our siblings and their communities fighting for justice in Peru, to all those striking across Britain for living wages and workers power; to the youth of West Afrika who are calling time on puppet regimes; and all peoples rising in these times of crisis to create a world of justice, peace and solidarity. They, we, are many. We are those who know more than ever that only we can save ourselves from an elite who will never be satisfied in their traumatised lust for power.
This, and more, is the ground into which our plans are planted, here’s what we’re growing:
The Plans!
> Firstly, we’ll be continuing our monthly Dinner and Discussions for the Friends of The RYSE. These went from strength-to-strength last year and will continue being our regular space for wider community/inter-generational interaction. So, keep inviting people and we’ll bring the food + a more focussed educational/call to action element to co-inside with the rest of our work this year – especially as links with our forwarding of the PRALER (see below).
> Secondly and this is a big one – it’s time for us to get our first space, the first true home of The RYSE. This has always been central to our plans, the need for a physical space where youth can stand and feel powerful, ground of our own from which to act. We’re pursuing this, supported by our family at Earth Protector Communities, by trying to secure a meanwhile lease on one of the many empty properties in town – so first support needed is to help us get our work in-front of some landlords, if you think you could help them do email us at: theryse@riseup.net. Once secured we’ll work hard to make the space as open and accessible for all Youth in Stroud who want to start learning together about the world and how to change it. We’ll run film screenings, drop-in sessions, reading groups, support campaigns and more to build The RYSE into what we all need it to be – watch this space!
> Next, we’ve got the other major aim of the year, the mobilisation of our siblings here in Stroud. Where as last year we focussed on building out our Community of Affinity with youth organisers around the country, this year we’re going Community of Place based and want to engage as many youth in Stroud as possible. To do this we’re going to put our backing behind the upcoming campaign: School is a Crime Scene - which will finally take our mis-schooling as seriously as it deserves and skill up our youth and community to investigate these so-called ‘Schools’ as yes, crime scenes.
We’re super excited to support this work as its only so many times an ex-teacher can tell us that ‘what’s happening right now in our schools amounts to nothing less than child abuse’ without us actually taking in those words. So, we’ll be providing educational sessions, space and publishing the School is a Crime Scene zine – which will come out in a few weeks – to get the campaign going. Anyone who is a current student and wants to find space to connect with others around the state of your so-called ‘education’ is super welcome – as is any teacher/parent whose as angry as us and wants to support the campaign’s development. We’ll keep you posted when the zine is out and go from there – 2023 is the year we take mis-schooling seriously.
> With all this Stroud focussed work, we’re also going to be ramping up our Media output this year through (fingers crossed) launching a proper Podcast and re-working our seasonal zine to learn from last year. This is all part of a ‘show not just tell’ energy which we’ll be experimenting with to stay connected and learning with our Community of Affinity while prioritising our power base building locally. As such, if there are any young folks locally who are keen on media and communications then do let us know by email or a DM on the Insta – and we’ll see how you can get linked in!
> Finally, we’re super excited to say that this year The RYSE will be putting all our weight into the PRALER – the Planet Repairs Action Learning Educational Revolution – a grassroots inter-community process for radically challenging and redefining education away from the current ‘manufacture of ignorant consumers’ and instead back in line with its true meaning, summarised concisely by the late Dr Amos Wilson as: ‘the ultimate function of education is to secure the survival of a people’.
A truth that we believe here has been almost completely forgotten this/beaten out of us, but that Communities of Resistance across the world have never lost - and instead have been working for generations to both create the education they need and to challenging the extractivist life-destroying nature of colonial society that mainstream mis-schooling serves. Within the PRALER booklet are numerous examples, including the beginnings of our work here in Stroud (see SISTER), of these powerful community actions – the exact actions that we as The RYSE will be amplifying and seeking to learn from in all our work going forward. For now, please do check out the PRALER Linktree where you can sign onto the Glocal Declaration and look through the growing library of resources/work. We’ll be bringing this to Stroud in particular through our Dinner and Discussions as we seek to understand more deeply, and bring into action, a Planet Repairs based framework for our work - so do come along and get involved!
Get Involved/Support!
If you made it this far then big up, we need all the support we can get this year and so as we’ve said throughout do come get involved and if you missed the Crowdfunder but are able to support financially then please do head over to our Open Collective where you can always donate to the work - and as always you can find us on theryse@riseup.net
Love and Power to y’all – let’s have at it!