Chicago
Thank you to all who joined us at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago on May 10, 2025. With our partners Healthy Hoods Chicago, the Chicago ANSWER Coalition, The Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America, and the Chicago Liberation, doing mass and personal outreach, we were able to gather almost 200 people. Attendees represented sectors from faith communities, labor, the Black liberation struggle, campaigns to end police violence, the women’s liberation movement, student activists, and beyond. We held open strategic discussions that were kicked off by speakers from the Chicago Teacher’s Union, the Chicago Torture Justice Center, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and immigrant justice organizations. We engaged in focused sessions of political education and organizing training. The community came to vend, perform, and exchange.
Here are the resolutions we collected from a full day of gathering:
“We are in a moment of crisis, of political, economic, and social crises affecting working and oppressed people across the nation and around the world. While we face grave threats to our democratic rights, won through mass struggle, we know that where there is repression, there is resistance. We have convened today to learn, strategize, have bold vision, and build bridges across our movements, organizations and communities, and it is out of this goal that we have written the following resolution built out of a synthesis of our discussions.
1. We need long term strategy, goals and vision.
2. We must continue to build bridges across our organizations, movements and communities. This process does not occur in one day. It requires the ongoing work of building trust, engaging in struggle, and developing principled unity.
3. We must strengthen our ties to the communities we are in and integrate ourselves and our organizations within our neighborhoods and communities.
4. It is not enough to talk to people who agree with us or who already have arrived at the same politics. We must reach communities currently misled by the republicans and the democrats. We have to meet people where we are at and bring them with us.
5. Our struggles have been severed from past movements and divorced from revolutionary theory and lessons. We have to build class consciousness, dispel ignorance, and engage in popular education. We have to study the past to struggle in the present for a better society in the future.
6. We need to foster existing “third spaces” and continue to convene to strategize, share lessons, and build unity.
7. We must be bold, brave, and audacious. We cannot allow ourselves to be complacent within what is comfortable.
8. The Midwest is no stranger to struggle. Chicago is home to Internatjonal Workers Day. The Midwest sparked the 2020 uprisings against police violence and white supremacy. Christian Marxist’s across the Midwest in the early twentieth century built class consciousness and socialist organization across the region. We must continue, now, to mobilize, organize, build coalitions, and win power and liberation.
9. We need to treat our people with the justice they deserve, and we need to serve justice to our enemies as well.
10. Religion comes from the people and the god(s) of the peoples’ religion condemns this system.
11. People are hungry for change, hungry for socialism, and hungry for liberation. Now is the time to act. It is our duty to fight for ourselves and for one another and we have no time to wait.”
