Transition Is Inevitable, Justice Is Not: A Critical Framework for Just Recovery

The powerful efforts for Just Recovery across communities – not just this year, but throughout recent years – have reflected the incredible and inspiring reclamation of care and sacredness and the building of collective power. Just Recovery is organizing in communities today to build the right soil of resistance and resilience (literally and figuratively), and to build right relationship with land and each other, so that we are not only ready to just withstand these oncoming shocks, but so that we are prepared to use them in those moments to fuel a revolutionary peoples’ movement. We’ve been inspired by peoples everywhere who are pursuing a Just Recovery by rooting their practice in core principles: creating root cause remedies, practicing revolutionary self-governance, asserting rights-based organizing, demanding reparations, and advancing ecological restoration for resilience.

Guided by the leadership of communities building and re-building home everywhere post-disaster, we humbly offer this framework for a Just Recovery. We offer it to those on the ground who are organizing their people. We offer it to those on the frontlines of all social, economic, and ecological struggles – who are preparing for the possibility of disasters in their future. See that these strategies are everywhere, create conversation within community and across movements. In the midst of instability, people are manifesting.