(Last updated: 2002, a work in progress)
WoGAN was founded in the winter of 2000 in solidarity with the broad-based movement that had coalesced against the World Trade Organization's meeting held in Seattle at the end of 1999. We formed a network of existing student and activist organizations in order to concentrate our efforts, support each other, and bring about greater change.
WoGAN interconnects people, communities, and organizations in order to inform, challenge, and mobilize around issues of socio-economic injustice, human freedom, environmental protection and animal rights. WoGAN is committed to working with local groups toward a just and sustainable community. WoGAN acts in solidarity with unions, social service agencies, community organizers, neighborhood groups, and environmental organizations to create a local culture of mutual respect that embraces the full dignity of human beings and the natural world, both locally and globally. We believe a different world is possible.
WoGAN rejects all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including patriarchy, transcultural violence, workplace violence, transgender violence, violence toward children, violence toward animals, violence upon the environment, militarization, war, and the violence associated with global institutions and trade agreements.
The people of WoGAN are feminist, partner preference supportive, anti-imperialist, anti-classist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist as well as being respectful toward all forms of life, all religions and the diversity of human experience and culture. We believe that all should have equal access and equal voice in the global community. We believe direct action is a viable method to decentralize control and to establish autonomy.
WoGAN exists to ensure that all who are systematically silenced by corporate globalization and neo-liberalism's attempts to own and commodify everything are assisted in their ability to speak out, be heard, organize, and be free from the burdens of oppression. As such, WoGAN acts to oppose transnational corporate forces that attempt to increase their control over the media, the world economy, our imagination, and our personal space. WoGAN provides a forum for envisioning and constructing local alternatives to global capitalism that are informed by knowledge of power imbalances in the Worcester area and throughout the world.
The Worcester Global Action Network is made up of organizations and individuals who embrace these ideas and is affiliated with groups and individuals in this country and others. We do not embrace a single ideological position or practical approach, but instead aim to support one another in a spirit of respect for our differences, our shared purpose, and our hope that we learn how to construct a world of peaceful coexistence.
