WHAT WE DO? WELL, IN SHORT:
IN SHORT SHORT:
We plant seeds of radical change
We work through horizontal structure where we put our efforts into causes, people, and places that we identify as important and where we may put our modest and earnest efforts to plant seeds for radical change. At a given moment of time, we have members doing work to support our unhoused neighbors, using art to raise awareness of violence, and creating networks of care to prisons, which are epicenters of white supremacist violence.
Connecting Projects & People
Bridge Engineering Vangaurd
We actively discover and develop the ideas, energies and productive capacities of labeled human beings and connect them to larger circles of contribution.
Bridge Engineering Vanguard is A Theory of Change's inclusion army.
What we want to do is mobilize individuals and associations to recognize and act on the conviction that there is no one that we don't need. First, we have to recognize who is or is at risk of being left out. Then we're helping individuals find ways to say to disconnected people that we care, we need you, you're welcome, and this is yours too.
Our challenge and opportunity is to engineer and build bridges to larger circles of contribution. We win when what we do allows more excluded and disconnected people to contribute their genius, act as citizens, and become more highly valued producers in a thriving community.
how we do
Record
We record to create physical and digital artifacts of creativity and events that evidence possibilities beyond the box of oppressing or being oppressed. We are building a portfolio that documents our story. We are capturing the essence of our ideas and work products to help shape the mind, body and heart of our collective future.
Press Play
We press play to connect to what is currently out there to be heard, seen and experienced; to immerse ourselves in the content of our reality and to advance from interest into action. Pressing play is how we actively engage in hearing, seeing, sharing and contributing to the causes, concerns and contributions delivering liberation and justice-centered change.
Search
ATOC is making a difference today, with our tomorrow in mind. This means there should be evidence of our impact in the short term and long term. We are committed to doing the research, monitoring and evaluation of the effect and effectiveness of our change efforts. Searching provides us with the opportunity to stay inquisitve and learn from ourselves and from others doing the work and changing the game.
AT OUR HEART
We are a social justice generation organization emerging as a product of the work and story of currently incarcerated Mr. Rhidale Dotson, and the current social justice climate.
We are a growing cooperative of scholars, warriors, and creators, forwarding a vision of a free, just, and equitable world experiencing universal dignity and action.
Initially established in 2018 as a vehicle to mobilize resources needed to translate Rhidale’s story into a biopic for the big screen, our small collective of inspired talents resolved to take action, unifying and organizing fellow misfits to rewrite the ending of our unfinished story.
Today we are a fast-becoming and action oriented, unified network of scholars, warriors, and creators doing more and more each day to prototype an “impossible” future.
A message from Rhidale Dotson:
“So let's make this really practical. The first step is simple: I would love to have a learning conversation with you. A Theory of Change and I are currently focused on growing our capacity to find resources and organize them to work together for the benefit of historically oppressed people and communities.
In advance of all those "how" questions that people want us to answer, our outreach and our organizing efforts are being centered around creating incredible relationships that will ultimately forward our ambitions to pull together and to develop community leadership assets, and then exercise our motivation and our ability to act in different and creative ways.
That's what the learning conversation is all about, we want to have a conversation with you about creating new opportunities and new possibilities in 2021. As we continue in our endeavor to help reveal the hidden assets and connections that exist among us, I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to meet and to discover what we have and can potentially do that would grow our collective capacity to join together and to make meaningful progress toward the source of our most meaningful action and motivation in advance of discovering how we're going to get it done in 2021.”