Community Alliance For Global Justice

Community Alliance for Global Justice educates and mobilizes with individuals and organizations to strengthen local economies everywhere. CAGJ is grassroots, community-based and committed to anti-oppressive organizing as we build solidarity across diverse movements. CAGJ seeks to transform unjust trade and agricultural policies and practices imposed by corporations, governments and other institutions while creating and supporting alternatives that embody social justice, sustainability, diversity and grassroots democracy. CAGJ was founded by Seattle-area activists who helped to organize the historic shutdown of the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. We strive to carry on the protests? legacy of effective and creative collective action for global justice. We aim to work in solidarity with the powerful social movements of the Global South who continue to inspire us with their growing resistance to the corporate-driven economic model ? a model pushed by the US, Europe, and a transnational corporate elite. Organizing across the hemisphere, together we defeated the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) thanks largely to the mobilization of huge numbers of Latin Americans who answered with an emphatic No! to an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement. CAGJ played an important role in nearly defeating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) when we helped to build the coalition in WA State that succeeded in getting all of WA?s Democratic Representatives in Congress to vote against the deal. While we continue to monitor the institutions promoting corporate globalization, today CAGJ is focusing on building positive alternatives to corporate control by supporting the movements for healthy local food economies here and everywhere. In 2007 we began this work by organizing the Strengthening Local Economies, Everywhere Fair and Dinner, a successful event which has been repeated yearly since then. We welcome everyone to help us build this movement for global justice!

CAGJ works to accomplish its mission through three different projects at this present time. 1) The Food Justice Project: Through community education, political action, and anti-oppressive organizing and community-building, CAGJ's Food Justice Project seeks to challenge and transform the globalized, industrial, corporate-driven food system and promote existing alternatives as we join the global struggle for food sovereignty for all. 2) AGRA Watch: Concerned citizens and activists have begun a CAGJ program called AGRA Watch whose objectives are to monitor and question the Gates Foundation's participation in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Upon researching this initiative and its historical precedents, AGRA Watch finds the current approach politically, environmentally, socially, and ethically problematic. We support sustainable, socially responsible, and indigenous alternatives in Africa, and connect these movements to those occurring in our local communities. 3) The Trade Justice Project: CAGJ seeks to reform the current trade model that prioritizes profits over people and the environment, while offering viable alternatives through democratic engagement.