What is the Re|Organizing School? 

The Re|Organizing School is an annual assembly of activists, community thinkers, changemakers, co-conspirators, and researchers who gather together to practice and strengthen the interdependence of community-based work in our collective movement ecosystem.

The Re|Organizing School is tuition-free and open to community organizers. It was conceived and led by Community Fellows within The New School’s Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence. Community Fellows have been selected based on their creative, intellectual, and community organizing works and impact without consideration for academic markers of success [i.e. degrees, publications], disrupting the restrictive pathways to participating in an academic institution’s intellectual community. The Community Fellows birthed the Re|Organizing School to re-imagine how The New School can hold space for essential movement building work through the redistribution of resources and access.

The Re|Organizing School’s scope of study and ways of learning are rooted in the legacy and principles of popular education and cooperative values, contesting the ways structural inequality – intersecting structures of power especially viz race, gender, indigeneity – shape social and economic relations, culture, and daily life.

Participant Contributions

The Re|Organizing School’s participants apply their gifts, expertise, lessons, and inquiry to exercise re/learning, re/assessing, re/membering, re/building, and re/organizing our collective movement ways in order to generate sustainable, transformative change. With experiences that reflect a spectrum of grassroots initiatives, academic inquiry, and professional affiliations, Re|Organizing School leaders and stewards invest their research aptitudes, creative capacity, grassroots practices, and ranges of knowledge toward the work of addressing current community issues–meeting needs of both the moment and greater life of our movements. The Re|Organizing School is also an intergenerational and interdependent space for building cross movement solidarity rooted in a mutual need for healing and liberation.

The Re|Organizing School gathers annually around a theme. The theme for 2024 was Mapping (Local) Resistance in a Global City, and the guiding question was: Where and how are we re/imagining and re/building the communities that we envision?

R|OS 2024 Re/cap Video