The Flexibility In The Framework

The framework at Shift the Country is a roadmap to help people and groups figure out where they can plug in to make shift happen.  Everything here is designed for flexibility, adaptability, and scalability.  Everything can be evolved and altered to fit what people and groups need for what they’re trying to do.  Mix and match what works. 

The framework:

• 15 Tools for Doing Helpful Things for people, groups, and businesses to use for action.
• 10 Structural Areas For Action Anywhere help point to functional areas of society that will need support, more work, and transformation through this disruption.
• This framework builds on and leverages 4 principles: connection, community, resilience, and problem-solving.
• This approach is designed for the 4-part mission: to hold civil society and institutions together, to help people help each other through several crises happening at once, to get people engaged in doing all of that, and to make transformation along the way. 
• The 5-part strategy is: 1) Do Helpful Things, 2) Get Groups Together To Do Bigger Things, 3) Raise A Ruckus, 4) Spread The Ruckus Through Our Networks,  5) Counter Fear.

More on how people + groups can use this framework:

• Shift the Country tools and strategy can be used in local communities, in neighborhoods, in school districts, for navigating and mitigating coronavirus where people live, for problem-solving, in unions, for regional action, for statewide action, for national action, across interest groups anywhere, for advocacy, for problem-solving, for fighting misinformation, for campaigns, and just for things like keeping more people alive and looked after.
• Everything here can be used in the real-world or online. Engagement is likely to be a combination of both online and real-world efforts in many cases; efforts in one realm can help amplify the other.
• Organizations with robust organizing approaches can leverage relational, distributed, and virtual/digital organizing to activate, facilitate, host, encourage, and lead civic engagement activities, and to share or amplify activity.
• All real-world events should follow appropriate public health recommendations for mitigating COVID-19 spread. Shift the Country will not promote, amplify, or support events that do not follow public health best practices.
• Every event, action, or activity can include a voter registration or voter encouragement aspect. For example, events can open or close with quick remarks about voter registration, absentee ballot processes, early voting, ways to vote safely, having a voting plan (for an array reasons), registering voters, referencing voting or election sources, referencing initiatives working on protecting the vote, talking about why it matters, highlighting what’s at stake, etc.
• Shift the Country will do YouTube videos, Facebook Lives, workshops, podcasts, and social media discussion with more depth on how to make all of this shift happen using the framework here.

Civic engagement is the heart of the work here.  Thousands of people engaging everywhere can facilitate short-term problem-solving and action that help us get through the fall and winter of 2020-2021 with communities, institutions, and the social fabric intact and functioning.  In the long term, this kind of engagement everywhere can help shift the country toward a more equitable, just, sustainable, and resilient future; with transformation of communities, institutions, culture, the economy, infrastructure, energy, politics, government, and the social contract itself.  Americans need to do different things than the paths that brought us here.  We – all of us – need to engage and empower a more diverse array of Americans to get involved in the power and decision structures that make up our institutions and our government.  This framework can be a vehicle for people and organizations to help make that happen.

LINKS.  || Shift the Country || I'm In! Sign Me Up || How Can I Support All This Shift? || 15 Tools for Doing Helpful Things || 10 Structural Areas For Action Anywhere || Printable Shift the Country Framework || FB || Twitter || Videos & Broadcasts || YouTube || Workshops & Scheduled Livestreams ||

MORE.  PATREON and GOFUNDME support help us make more shift happen faster.  This page is an excerpt from the printable Shift the Country white paper.  Help us share this stuff everywhere with everyone you know & totally raise an absolute ruckus.  Thank you.  Good luck.