SiX National Conference 2024

States have long been on the front lines of protecting and advancing our most fundamental rights and liberties. That’s why we’re bringing our powerful network of state legislators and advocates together for the first time in Atlanta, a city long known as a beacon of movement-building for racial and economic justice. In our opening session, we’ll root down in the rich tradition of organizing and power-building in our host state. Long before the 2020 presidential election, Georgia organizers paved the way to victory with a robust civic engagement strategy through a multi-racial and multi-issue coalition that continues to deliver historic voter turnout numbers across the state, while fighting back an onslaught of voter suppression efforts. In this panel, we will ground in the work that is underway here in the state of Georgia and across the South to create a vision for building durable power by starting with organizing in Black and brown communities.

Beverages and Bites

We’re gathering just weeks after one of the most consequential elections of our lifetimes. While much of the national attention has been focused on control of the White House and Congress, some of the most important races of the year have been at the state level—from protecting abortion rights on the ballot to breaking up minority rule through state legislative and judicial races. This panel of leaders will reflect on what the election results mean for the future of governance and power-building in the states, and discuss the work that lies ahead of our movements.

Democracy is in danger—and not just here in the United States. All around the world, authoritarian regimes are seizing power even in countries once thought to be strong democracies. In state legislatures, extremists have taken pages straight from an authoritarian playbook to quash political dissent by silencing duly elected state lawmakers. From Montana to Oklahoma, to the Tennessee Three, state lawmakers have been practicing new models of resistance in legislative chambers to stand firm alongside their communities and against power grabs. As state legislators continue to be subjected to anti-democratic abuses of power by their colleagues, what can we learn from global movements in our continued struggle for democracy?

Beverages and Bites

Our work together to build a new world where all people have power and agency over their lives requires that each of us can access hope with a generational lens. But amidst the continued erosion of our democracy, normalization of political violence against elected officials and our communities, and unrelenting attacks on our most basic civil and human rights, it can be challenging to keep the future that we are working towards in focus. In this fireside chat, the SiX Co-Executive Directors will discuss their own journeys of moving from impossible to inevitable by centering love and healing, transforming our relationships with one another, and building a new world by living it with those around us.

State legislators and advocates are on the frontlines of defending our democracy. But successfully defeating authoritarianism also requires worldbuilding strategies as much as it requires defensive tactics; we must actively build broad, multi-issue coalitions and build out an affirmative vision for a people-centered democracy. It’s our imperative, in this pivotal moment in our nation’s history, to show that states can deliver a clear path to a better future—one that will become irresistible to others when they see their own hopes and dreams in the future that we unfold. In this session, we’ll discuss what it will take for each of us to bring our vision into view and to collectively move towards a vibrant, multi-racial democracy.