A Space for Practitioners: May 14-17, 2026 in New York City

Invitation and Registration Survey

This May Woodbine will host a 4-day gathering out of our new meeting space in Manhattan, “Lifehouses, Resilience Hubs, and Dual Power: A Space for Practitioners". Our goal is to meet and think with those currently involved in movement and world-building, as we prepare ourselves for uncertain years ahead.

It’s been generations now since people have found their political lives and horizons organized out of either labor union halls or political party headquarters. In our present era of rapidly advancing virtualization – where our private domestic spaces now double as places of both work and leisure – everyone is spending more and more of their time home alone looking at screens. Membership in groups and associations is at an all-time low, and collectivity today can often mean little more than being on a group-chat, mailing list, or web-forum.

At some point in our movement history, the space became a replacement organizational form to the sect, cadre, party, or union. During this gathering we want to think through the meanings and potentials of this experience and orientation – to brainstorm and strategize about what form of networking or confederation could become the scaffolding for a revolutionary movement. What is the organizational consistency that might give shape and stakes to our localized efforts and disparate projects?

Our spaces today might be free schools and farms, worker coops and group houses, hacker spaces and health clinics, social centers and DIY venues, bookstores and squats, infoshops and galleries, and much more. In each of these cases we want to ask, how does the reproduction of our projects connect to a broader movement, political horizon, and strategy? 

To the extent that people find themselves mobilized today, how – and crucially, where – does that process happen? What are the contemporary in-person opportunities for social engagement, civic participation, and political radicalization? What are the shared practices and innovations we might learn from each other, as we simultaneously take to heart the difficulties and problems others have experienced, such that we don’t repeat and relive all the same errors for eternity? 

How and why did these spaces start? How do they grow or shrink in creativity, energy, dynamism, labor, resources, outreach, and power? What were the core existential problems that doomed our past projects? How do we cultivate a strategy that links our localized work to regional and global issues? How do we bridge the IRL-work of our spaces with the often digitized work of alliance and coalition-building? How do we maintain a circulation of people, practices, and ideas to resist our work becoming rote and stale, done out of obligation or resentment rather than ambition and purpose? How do we build and maintain a welcoming and inclusive culture, while being honest about the very real and consequential legal, financial, and historical responsibilities of maintaining expensive physical infrastructure over the long-term under capitalism? How do our spaces become bigger than the sum of their parts, bridging a diverse set of people, practices, and projects, while carrying with them a clear and challenging vision against what is otherwise offered to us? How do we remind ourselves and others what the point is of our spaces, connecting their day-to-day to a larger context and theory of change? And at the natural conclusion of any given project, how do we release the energy driving it without rancor or recrimination, so it becomes available for other projects?

We are inviting and hoping to meet with organizers involved in both long-term and newly formed radical spaces; we want to meet with those that were actively involved in historical and long-defunct spaces; and we want to welcome those interested in starting a space to catalyze new activity wherever they find themselves. Together we plan to share a weekend-long gathering or presentations, panel discussions, meals, and downtime socializing in New York City.

Last winter, in response to both the second Trump administration and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory, Woodbine moved to Manhattan after more than a decade in Queens. We felt it was time to start a new chapter for our project, in part to critically reflect on the lessons and strategies of our first dozen years. 

In 2024 writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield published the book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire, which many of us felt provocatively and helpfully captured the essences of what we were already doing. We helped Adam organize a book tour with many partner spaces within our national network, and are now calling for this gathering to reflect on our shared practices for the years ahead.

Four years ago, in May of 2022, Woodbine partnered with Symbiosis to host “A Regional Gathering on Autonomy and Survival”, which was an attempt to assemble in the aftermath of both Covid and George Floyd – to meet in person and reflect on our last two, ten, fifty years of organizational experiments. If the rupture that was 2020 called for us to test and deploy our capacities for localized mutual aid – alongside our energies for street rebellion – the ensuing years have reaffirmed our belief in the necessity of patient and deliberate investments in building autonomy. Now more than ever we understand disaster relief to no longer be a moment in time, but rather an ethical orientation to life itself. By the same token, we want to resist the “community resilience” being advanced by governments and non-profits alike as the solution to state mismanagement and the private sector’s rapacious extraction. As we wrote in our 2022 invitation, “This weekend is not meant to be a space of individualized critique nor of decision making, but rather an assembly of those getting organized with others, putting their lives in common, and trying to build power together.” This is what we mean by “a space for practitioners”.

We are asking all those interested in attending to fill out the registration survey below, so we can learn more about who you are and what you'd like to see this May.

The gathering will be free to attend, but we are asking for a sliding scale contribution of $75-$250 to help cover the costs of food, supplies, as well as travel and lodging assistance for some of the out-of-town participants who may need help to attend. You can contribute as much as you are able here: Venmo | PayPal | Zelle: woodbinenyc@gmail.com