Aaron Goggans
Template:TOCnestleft Aaron Goggans is the owner of Emergence, Transformation and Consulting. Lives in Washington, District of Columbia.
He has over a decade of organizing, activism and transformation work guiding him in this work. A decade of organizing has instilled in him the value of recognizing the emergence of new tools for addressing complex problems and the need for personal transformation in people who want to create social transformation.
Aaron believes that change is not only necessary but inevitable. This means that organizations have to constantly reassess their mission and structure to fit the current context of their field. This is why visioning plays a crucial role in his process. Without a shared vision–a clear North Star–flexibility and adaptiveness can tend towards aimlessness at best or reproducing oppressive systems at worse.
Born to a social justice oriented Black family and raised in rural Colorado, Aaron has been doing work around racial transformation since he became a youth organizer in middle school. After years of interfaith and multicultural organizing in the South-West, he moved to the South Side of Chicago. While attending the University of Chicago, Aaron began organizing around public housing and in the labor movement. After college Aaron began doing organizational development work as a support group facilitator then later as an educator in a school on Chicago’s South Side.
After a number of years in Chicago, Aaron moved to DC and focused on bringing visionary organizing to local housing and labor campaigns. Since moving to DC Aaron has done contract work for the Latino Economic Development Center [LEDC] and the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development [CNHED]. He was also co-facilitated strategic planning sessions with the Baltimore harm reduction coalition. Aaron then spent two years working for the Employment Justice Center as a campaign coordinator where he co-founded the anti-oppression change team. At the EJC Aaron worked with the legal department to merge an anti-racism analysis into their community lawyering and legal clinic. Aaron left EJC to con-found the consulting firm, Transformation, Liberation and Consulting in 2016.
In addition to his professional work, Aaron is deeply involved in the Movement for Black Lives. Aaron helped start Black Lives Matter DC in 2014 and has been working to build Black led, multi-racial campaigns for justice ever since. To that effect, he is founder of the Well Examined Life, a collaborative social justice project that seeks to analysis and synthesize the emerging analysis of today’s social movements.
Over the past 4 years, Aaron has led dozens of trainings on overcoming white supremacy and anti-Black racism through the lens of political informed healing. Aaron has also led workshops on radical visioning and anti-racism. In addition, Aaron helped bring together several organizations in DC to begin to address how organizational racism and white supremacy show up in progressive organizations. Through this work Aaron has worked closely with Bread For The City, the Washington Peace Center, Fair Budget Coalition in different capacities supporting their internal anti-racism processes.
From his home base in DC, Aaron has continued pursuing his dual passion of art and social justice. He believes that organizational transformation begins with telling honest, empowering stories about who we are, where we are and how we got here. Armed with these stories and a critical analysis of the social context in which those stories exist, we can begin the process of deciding where we need to go and how we want to get there.[1]
Career
- Former Campaign Coordinator at DC Employment Justice Center
- Former Organizing Consultant at Coalition for Nonprofit Housing & Economic Development
RoadMap
Aaron Goggans is a consultant with RoadMap, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization affiliated consultancy group .[2]
Revolutionary Strategies to Beat the Rising Right Wing
Revolutionary Strategies to Beat the Rising Right Wing, was a nationwide conference call organized by Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Sunday October 30, 2016.
- What's the nature of this right-wing threat? What has this election cycle changed about the political terrain we're fighting on? How do we need to prepare for whats coming after the election? Hear about these crucial questions from our panel of top political strategists, including Nelini Stamp, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Linda Burnham, and Sendolo Diaminah.
Those indicating they would attend, on Facebook included Aaron Goggans.[3]
Black Ideological Struggle Webinar
Black Ideological Struggle: Radical, Liberal, Conservative Public · Hosted by Sendolo Diaminah and Cazembe Jackson
Thursday, August 31, 2017 at 8:30 PM
Created for Black August Practice Group
- Join Sendolo Diaminah for a conversation about why Black radicals can and must learn how to effectively engage liberal and conservative ideologies among our people.
- September 2, 2017. Hey family! Here is the final recording from the Black August webinars! Sendolo Diaminah took lots of patience and creativity breaking down Black Ideological Struggle for us.[4]
Those invited Invited on Facebook included Aaron Goggans.
South Korea
Report on a May 2018 delegation of US trade unionists, Black Lives Matter, and other social movement activists to trade unions in Korea, sponsored by US Labor Against the War and the Korean Trade Union Confederation.
Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) executive director Michael Leon Guererro reports on a delegation of US trade unionists, Black Lives Matter, and other social movement activists to trade unions in Korea, sponsored by US Labor Against the War and the Korean Trade Union Confederation.
Delegates included Aaron Goggans.