This “Voices from the Field” webinar occurred on Wednesday, May 24 from 12-1 p.m. EST.
Watch the webinar below:
Webinar summary:
This webinar will discuss ongoing struggles in Uganda, including successes in organizing and training peasant farmers, as well as the role of activists and leaders from the informal transportation sector. These campaigns are led and waged by the most underprivileged groups in society, with counterparts across the global south. These budding and sustained movements are evidence that marginalized community-led movements add longevity and effectiveness to broader struggles for change.
Presenters:
Phil Wilmot is husband to Suzan Abong Wilmot. Together, they co-founded Solidarity Uganda with a group of Ugandan activists. The organization aims to train social change and environmental advocacy groups throughout Uganda in the skills, methods, and concepts of nonviolence. Phil and Suzan reside in Lira, Uganda with their daughter Aceng Nadia. They have been working with a number of campaigns and movements around the country, including informal transport workers, farmers, urban activists, and others to teach nonviolent resistance, strategies and tactics and to build people’s power to improve people’s lives in local communities in Uganda. He has trained hundreds of people in nonviolent strategy and movement building, especially in East Africa. He writes for Waging Nonviolence and Mobilisation Lab and recently published a book on his 2014 detainment in a Ugandan jail called, A Wolf Dressed in Sheepskin: A White Guy’s Dilemma in a Ugandan Jail Cell. He is also an advisor for Beautiful Rising and one of the LIN 2016 Fellows, along with Suzan Abong Wilmot and Daniel Tulibagenyi.
Scovia Arinaitwe is a director and trainer of Solidarity Uganda. An organizer with the Women’s Movement and The Jobless Brotherhood, Scovia works with people of all social classes in Kampala. She ran an activist-centered rapid response system for political prisoners which also functioned to build bridges between movements.