Power Shift 2023 will be a massive national youth convergence in Bvlbancha from April 6-8, 2023. It will be a space for building relationships, trainings, workshops, panels, and actions, AND having conversations around radical multi-issue work because all justice organizing is climate justice organizing.
Coming out of a three year pandemic that shifted everyone’s organizing strategy (from the far left to the far right), three days of the Power Shift 2023 convergence is the stepping stone for youth to knowledge share while deepening interpersonal kinship alongside the resilient communities that continuously survive climate apocalypse.
As a queer, trans, Black, brown, Indigenous staff, we are thought leaders in the climate movement space, bringing in an intersectional multi-issue lens while creating the spaces necessary to build an inclusive movement. Power Shift 2023 will continue to center and uplift the people most affected by environmental degradation and the climate crisis who have always been on the frontlines of this work— Black, Indigenous, poor, queer, disabled, and marginalized folks who have been protecting their homes on the frontlines, their territories, their kin— remembering that this will benefit all climate justice work.
The heart of Power Shift 2023 will be interweaving audacious joy in the face of apocalypse.
Why Bvlbancha?
We were very intentional in selecting Bvlbancha as our host city and are working closely with local activists to co-create PS23. The Gulf South is the belly of the beast of the petrochemical industry in the United States, and Bvlbancha and the surrounding region are ground zero for the effects of climate change and destructive industry practices on the USA's mainland. If the goal is to have an impact on the industries most harming our planet, making meaningful change in the Gulf South is vital. Fossil fuel industries are deeply embedded into the economy of this region, and being able to shift the balance of power and address industry created harm in the Gulf South will create ripple effects that will impact the world.
The name Bvlbancha comes from the Chata (Choctaw) and Yama (Mobilian trade) languages, translating to “Place Where Many Languages are Spoken” or “Place of Many Tongues.” Building power in this region is part of a long-term strategy toward dismantling the grip fossil fuels have on our world.
Bvlbancha is regularly rocked by routine storms that dump four or five inches of rain an hour causing city-wide flooding. The Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians have become the nation’s first climate refugees due to land loss from erosion and sea level rise. Petrochemical infrastructure chokes historically Black communities with the highest cancer rates in the country, and wetland ecosystems are eroding by the football field an hour due to Big Oil industry practices. By grounding our work in the Gulf, we are meeting the fossil fuel industry head-on “in their own house,” offering a generation of young people a way to combat their feelings of futility, paralysis, and despair.
Power Shift 23 will work towards fostering the radical imagination our communities need.