ChangeMakers

This is the second part of an exploration into how anger can be channelled into powerful actions. Part two comes from Brisbane, Australia where a simple vigil outside a hospital turned into a national flashpoint that overturned a decade of political consensus on Australia’s refugee policy. Remarkably, when they began the organisers of the vigil didn’t know what they were even aiming to achieve. Click the play button above to stream it here. Or listen to the episode on PodcastOne,…

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When a growing movement of young people places itself in harms way to stop injustice, it can be powerful and unpredictable.  Often it is fueled by the white-hot anger of knowing that you’re on the side of justice when those in power have failed to make the change you need. We can see this with the powerful #FeesMustFall student movement in South Africa. This is a two part episode about times when direct action was used to confront an overwhelming…

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Sometimes when you need radical change it helps to not know how things are ‘meant to be done’ In both of the stories in the third episode of ChangeMakers, we see women who had very little experience, entering male-dominated spaces and smashing it. By disrupting the business-as-usual approach, their innovations have had lasting impact. The first story is about mothers who are standing up to the gun lobby in the USA, and the second is about the women on the…

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On 14 February 2018 at about 2pm in the afternoon, a 19 year old former student, armed with a duffle bag packed with loaded weapons, entered Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. In a rampage that lasted 6 minutes he killed 17 people – 14 students and 3 teachers. Like so many, tragic, brutal school gun massacres before, there has been an immediate widespread outpouring of anger, and a desperate plea for tighter gun controls. Powerfully, this clarion call has…

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When the largest rally in human history in 2003 didn’t stop the Iraq War it makes you wonder what does it take for a coalition to win? In the second episode of ChangeMakers podcast we look at Brexit and examine how the types of coalitions used by each side influenced the outcome of the referendum. Then we go to the Northern Rivers in regional Australia look at how a different kind of alliance against Coal Seam Gas sought to organise…

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  The #FeesMustFall movement was very diverse and rich with dialogue and conflict. This is a letter written by a student leader in the heat of the movement from Wits University. He gives a live account of some of the tensions that divided the movement. It talks of the centrality of intersectionality as a core value of #FeesMustFall. He identifies potential ‘saboteurs’ who came into the space seeking to lead the movement in directions that created tension and conflict. And…

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By Keith Kelleher, Founder and Former President of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Healthcare Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Kansas. The First Spark “…On Thursday, May 28, 1981, at or about 11:30 am, a number of off-duty employees, in the company of union organizer, Keith Kelleher,…entered Restaurant 768, …moved toward the back of the kitchen in the direction of the manager’s office. Kelleher asked employees…to join them, and a few, including discriminatee Cynthia Diane Williams …did so. Williams and… employee Luther…

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We are very excited to release Episode One of our new Series the ChangeMakers. You can download this episode from Podcast One in Australia or from Itunes here. The first two episodes of a new original podcast, ChangeMakers hits PodcastOne Monday 9 October. Hosted by co-founder of GetUp, Amanda Tattersall, ChangeMakers is the first podcast of its kind to mix the story-telling form of This American Life with the topic of social change. “This represents a new era of big-budget…

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