What is Roadmap?
Unity, Strategy, and Nonviolent Power for an Unstoppable Movement
ROADMAP is a way of making the movement of movements visual. It is also a set of tools activists (and those who wish to get active) can use to:
- Build Community
- Train in Nonviolence Principles
- Create and pursue strategic thinking toward the realization of campaign goals.
USING ROADMAP: PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS
- Find yourself in the picture: what issue(s) are you working on, or would like to? (The 18 sub-wedges are just examples).
- Ask yourself with whom you need to connect to make an impact with the issue you choose. Using Roadmap, identify: Whom have you tended to work with on this issue and whom might you add to make your strategy more robust?
- Articulate the “new story” central to your issue. E.g. Mass incarceration: “we do not get security from locking people away; we become secure by helping others to be secure,” etc.
- Build a strategic campaign to address your issue using the Mandala as a guide to full participation and big-picture thinking.
- Participate in the creation of a long-term STRATEGY for a “movement of movements.”
Peace from within approach:
Integral to Roadmap is a “peace from within” empowerment model based on Gandhi’s famous concept of svadeshi, or ‘localism:’ we work on ourselves, work with colleagues, and then use that energy to work against oppressing systems (but not the persons operating them!). For some of us this will be more a set of priorities than steps in time.
New Story Work:
The topmost wedge of the MANDALA is “New Story.” We must outgrow the low image of the human being and the ruling idea of a meaningless, material world that is the dominant paradigm of industrial, collapsing societies. All of us can adapt the key points of the emerging “new story” (it has actually been around from time immemorial) for our own use, and share them wherever we can to explain where we are heading.
These points include:
- we are body, mind, and spirit
- as spirit, we are deeply interconnected: if I injure you (or any living thing), I injure myself
- we can never be fulfilled by the consumption of external things, but by deep relationships of service to the sacred life within and around us
- we have inner capacities, largely untapped, that liberate us from dependence on consumption and competition. They include our human capacity for nonviolence.
