Shared Vocabulary

​Terms often carry different meanings across contexts. This glossary provides a common language based on definitions from YWCA,[1] Lewis & Clark College,[2] Trinity Repertory Company,[3] Beautiful Trouble,[4] and other foundational sociological sources.[5] [6] [7]

 

Anatomy of Power

• Collective Power (Power With): Gathering influence through collaborations, allies, and relationship-building.

• Governing Power: Building community power to set agendas and exercise influence over governance by developing members to be decision-makers.

• Hidden Power: Prevents others from accessing power through hidden agendas and limits access to decision-making spaces.

• Individual Power (Power Within): Orienting individuals to their own agency through leadership development, public engagement, and capacity building.

• Institutional Power: The power to create and shape the rules and policies of a specific institution, or to be a decision-maker within it.

• Invisible Power: Influences belief systems, cultural shifts, and commonly held beliefs; it contributes to stereotyping and shapes what people perceive as normal.

• Personal Power: An internal power, independent of cultural values, built from self-knowledge.

• Power: The capacity or ability to influence — through individual action or by contributing to collective efforts — the behavior of others or the course of events.

• Power Elite: A closely knit alliance of military, government, and corporate officials perceived as the center of wealth and political power.

• Power Imbalance: A relationship where one person or institution has control over another and is in a position to grant or deny benefits or advancement.

• Power Over: A ‘traditional’ view of power that relies on control and authority (e.g., a manager or board chair).

• Power Pool: A collective group or network that shares and exercises power collaboratively to influence decisions and achieve common goals.

• Power Structures: A system of influence and control over individuals, organizations, governments, or other spheres of life. Power structures exist in every human relationship, in families, and in organizations.

• Power To: The individual and collective agency to shape and change the world.

• Power Within: Linked with self-worth and self-knowledge; the capacity to recognize individuality, respect others, build hope, and affirm dignity and fulfillment.

• Power Without: Refers to powerlessness or the state of having no resources, leading to stress, humiliation, and lack of agency.

• Social Power: Power that social groups possess or build among themselves to determine and shape their collective lives.

• Structural Power: The ability to create and shape the rules, policies, and actions that govern multiple intersecting institutions or an entire industry.

• Visible Power: Operates in plain sight as formal rules, established structures, and official decision-making bodies.

​

Spaces and Realms of Action

• Claimed Space: Created by informal groups to challenge the legitimacy of closed/invited spaces and engage on their own terms.

• Closed Space: Controlled by an elite group; neither transparent nor open to public participation.

• Created Space: Autonomous spaces where activists and changemakers control the agenda and participation.

• Intimate Realm: The deepest personal realm concerning an individuals’ self-esteem, confidence, dignity, and bodily autonomy.

• Invited Space: Created by those in power to engage stakeholders in consultation, usually under tightly controlled agendas.

• Private Realm: The world of the household, family, and intimate networks, governed by its own set of norms.

• Public Realm: Open, shared spaces where people encounter strangers and engage in collective social and political life.

​

Stakeholders and Influence

• Activist (Advocate/Organizer): An individual who takes direct action to achieve political or social change.

• Authority (Position): A person or body in whom legal power is vested, or an accepted source of information and advice.

• Bureaucrats: The body of officials and administrators working within a government department.

• Competing Interests (Conflicts of Interest): When an individual’s or group’s judgment of a primary interest is influenced by a secondary interest like financial gain or personal relationships.

• Electorate: The body of people who are entitled to vote in an election.

• Exclusionary Network: Social or professional relationships that restrict access or participation to consolidate power and resources within dominant members’ networks.

• External Actors: Any person, group, organization, or country not part of a specific system but involved in influencing it.

• Gatekeepers: Those who control access to information or spaces, acting as arbiters of quality or legitimacy.

• Influencer: A person or thing that influences belief or action (e.g., direct experience).

• Powerbrokers: Entities that hold significant influence and use that power to negotiate deals and shape outcomes behind the scenes to achieve private interests.

• Underlying Interests: Fundamental needs, desires, and motivations of individuals or groups that may not be immediately obvious but drive social behavior, conflict, and the exertion of power.

​

Identity and Lived Experience

• Agency: The ability of an individual or group to act independently and make their own free choices. Agency can be limited or influenced by discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity, race, disability, social class, etc.

• Cultural Default: The status quo; taking the preferences, practices, and policies of a ruling elite and universalizing them so that they feel natural social norms.

• Dominant Culture: Organizational culture heavily influenced by the leadership of those in power (usually as defined by White, cisgender, able-bodied people), promoting assimilation over integration.

• Intersectionality: The lens through which you see where power collides and interlocks across race, class, gender, and other social categorizations. “It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.”[8]

• Lived Experience: First-hand knowledge gained through direct personal involvement.

• Majoritized or Dominant Population: A community whose access to power is structurally guaranteed, regardless of size. As a result, the community routinely disenfranchises and disempowers the most vulnerable communities.

• Minoritized or Nondominant Population: A community whose access to power is severely limited, regardless of the population's size. As a result, the community is constantly disenfranchised and disempowered by the majoritized population.

​

Group Dynamics and Collaboration

• Advisory Group: A body that provides recommendations to an organization but lacks final decision-making authority.

• Caucus: A group organized to further a special interest or cause.

• Collective or Coalition: A combination or alliance, often temporary, between people, factions, or states.

• Commission: A group entrusted with supervisory power for a particular function.

• Domination (Power Over): Social power over others involving asymmetries and imbalances.

• Grassroots Organization: Community-based groups working toward a common cause, frequently reliant on volunteers and citizen power.

• Informal Norms: Unwritten rules and expectations that govern everyday behavior within a group. These norms are enforced by social pressure and community expectations. Also known as informal social control exercised through family, peer groups, community expectations, public opens, and social norms.

• Initiative: A goal-oriented effort to solve a problem, usually made up of smaller projects that work together.

• Relational Trust: The understanding that people and systems are dependable, honest, and have our well-being in mind.

• Working Group: Individuals brought together to focus on a specific task or project, with the goal of producing a deliverable or recommendation.

​

Systems and Mechanics of Oppression

• Bias (Explicit/Implicit): Positive, negative, or neutral orientations toward something or someone (Explicit is conscious; implicit is subconscious), affecting how you understand and engage with them. It may be formed by a previous experience and maintained by one’s given privilege and social location.
  
  Example: Distrust of the U.S. Government by Native American communities may be considered a rational bias rather than prejudice because historically and contemporaneously, Indigenous people have valid reasons not to trust the government: desecration of sacred land, genocide, forced relocation, biological warfare, and broken treaties.

• Black Tax: Racial dimensions that perpetuate inequality such as lower pay and a lower educational standard for Black people. It creates fewer opportunities to save for the future, reach financial goals, or build generational wealth.

• Classism: Attitudes or institutional practices that prevent social and economic mobility by subordinating people based on socioeconomic status (income, occupation, education, and economic status).

• Colonialism: Exploitative historical, political, social, and economic systems established when one force takes control over a colonized territory; creating an unequal relationship between colonizer and the colonized

• Colorism: When people are treated differently based on the social and cultural meaning attached to skin color, traditionally from members of the same race.

• Cultural Appropriation: Dominant groups claiming ownership of, or the right to, symbols, dress, and ceremonies of less powerful groups.

• Cultural Bias: Judging phenomena based on the values, beliefs, and societal characteristics of the community to which one belongs. This may lead people to form opinions and make decisions about others in advance of any actual experience with them.

• Cultural Imperialism: One nation asserting its power over another's culture.

• Cultural Racism: Messages conveying that behaviors and values associated with ‘Whiteness’ are automatically better or normal than those associated with other racial groups. It maintains systems of internalized supremacy and racism by influencing collective beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior, what is seen as beautiful, and the value placed on various forms of expression.

• Demonizing: Distorted portrayals of racial groups leading to problematic attitudes (e.g., equating Blackness with criminality).

• Discrimination: Actions or thoughts, based on bias, that favor one group over others.

• Disenfranchisement: Depriving a person of the right to participate in any community or the opportunity to influence policy or vote.

• Disillusionment or Apathy: The loss of idealistic beliefs or the absence of passion/excitement.

• Disparity: A lack of equality or similarity.

• Ethnocentrism: Privileging one’s own ethnic group by judging other groups according to your group’s values.

• Exclusion: Denial of full participation in society due to systemic barriers or discrimination based on factors like income, health, education, religion, or other social identities.

• Extractive or Exploitative: Institutions designed to benefit the elite class that holds societal power.

• Gender Oppression: Individual acts and systemic patterns of violence/control against women, girls, and gender expansive people.

• Gentrification: Demographic shifts where economically or racially privileged individuals and businesses move into historically oppressed neighborhoods.

• Hegemony: One group holding authoritative power or dominance over other groups in a given society, geographical region, and/or political system.

• Heteronormativity: The assumption that heterosexuality is the natural norm from which all other sexual preferences deviate; the assumption that everyone identifies as heterosexual until shown or proven otherwise. 

• Historical Trauma: Cumulative, multi-generational emotional and psychological pain experienced by a group as a result of large-scale traumatic events and sustained oppression. Collective trauma influences mental and physical health, social well-being, and the cultural identity of descendants leading to ongoing cycles of suffering and disparity.

• Homophobia: Irrational fear/animus or structural discrimination against people who identify as homosexual to prevent access to resources, opportunities, and social safety.

• Horizontal Hostility: A divide and conquer strategy placing two or more oppressed groups in competition with each other.

• Ideological Oppression: The core idea that one group is somehow better than another and retains the right to control other groups. The dominant group identifies positive qualities within itself: harder working, stronger, chosen, and more intelligent, capable, noble, deserving, advanced, etc. They attribute negative qualities for nondominant groups: unintelligent, lazy, weak, incompetent, worthless, less deserving, backward, inferior, etc. 

• Institutional Racism: Policies and practices that create different outcomes for racial groups, even if the policy never mentions race. Its goal is to create advantages for White people and disadvantage people of color.

• Institutional Oppression: Systematic mistreatment and dehumanization based on an individuals’ social identity group and enforced by institutions.

• Internalized Beliefs: Integrating social norms, values, and attitudes from society, culture, family, or media into one’s self-concept.

• Internalized Oppression: When a target group believes the lies and stereotypes about themselves are true. Individuals alter their attitudes, behaviors, speech, and self-confidence to reflect the stereotypes and norms of the dominant group. Internalized oppression creates low self-esteem, self-doubt, and self-loathing that when projected outward creates fear, criticism, and distrust of your own identity group. 

• Internalized Racism: Acceptance of racist tropes about one’s own race. Individuals simultaneously hate themself and/or their own race.

• Internalized Resignation: Adopting the norms and beliefs of an oppressive or dominant system and subsequently giving up hope for upward mobility or social change.

• Levels of Oppression: Personal (values, beliefs, feelings), Interpersonal (actions, behaviors, language), Institutional (rules, policies, procedures), and Systemic/Cultural (beauty, truth, justice).

• Marginalization: Systematic disempowerment by denying access to resources, enforcing prejudice through society’s institutions, and/or not allowing for that individual or community’s voice, history, and perspective to be heard.

• Microaggression: Subconscious actions or remarks that convey an unconscious bias and hurt the person on the receiving end.

• Misogynoir: A specific form of misogyny rooted in racism and hatred of women of color.

• Misogyny: The hatred of women; manifests as social exclusion, sex discrimination, hostility, androcentrism, patriarchy, male privilege, belittling of women, disenfranchisement of women, violence against women, and sexual objectification.

• Oppression: The systemic use of institutional power and ideological and cultural hegemony resulting in one group benefiting at the expense of another.

• Othering: Treating a group as an ‘object’ or defining them only in relation to the dominant group. This objectification allows dominant actors to rationalize or justify the subordination of individuals and groups of people based on arbitrarily defined characteristics.

• Patriarchy: A structural force of male dominance that maintains the status quo and class, gender, racial, and heterosexual privilege through reliance on oppression, violence, and laws to perpetuate inequality.

• Poverty: Lacking financial resources for a minimum standard of living; a person’s earned employment income is so low that basic human needs can't be met.

• Prejudice: A preconceived, normally unconscious, negative judgment.

• Privilege: Unearned access to resources and advantages (social power) based on social group membership. Privilege can be inherent (e.g., race or gender) or gained through time (e.g., economic class, age, education).

• Psychological Exhaustion: Depletion of emotional and mental resources due to chronic social/environmental stressors.

• Race-based Traumatic Stress (RBTS): Mental/emotional injury caused by encounters with racial bias and ethnic discrimination, racism, and hate crimes. Stressors may include the indirect traumatic impacts of living with systemic racism and individual racist actions.

• Racial Anxiety: The fear of being judged based on race during interactions with people of other races. White people fear the assumption of racism, while people of color fear being the victim of discriminatory behavior and violence.

• Racial Prejudice: Discriminatory or derogatory attitudes based on assumptions derived from perceptions about race and/or skin color. 

• Racial Profiling: Systemic targeting, surveillance, policing, and harassment of people of color based on the assumption of criminality. In the U.S., African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Arab-Americans, report being unfairly targeted by police using race, ethnicity, national origin, religion and even gender when choosing which individuals should be subjected to stops, searches, seizures, and frisks on the streets, during routine traffic stops, at national borders and in airports.

• Racially Coded Language (Dog Whistle): Race-neutral language that disguises racial stereotypes without the stigma of explicit racism.

• Racialization: The process of manufacturing the concept of race and racial identities to treat groups unequally.

• Racism: Discrimination and prejudice based on the socially/politically constructed classification of race at individual, cultural, and systemic levels. It serves to privilege certain racial groups over others.

• Redlining: Discriminatory and illegal practice of refusing mortgages, credit, or insurance based on race/ethnicity.

• Resource Deprivation: Encompasses both the unavailability and inaccessibility of services. A lack of income alongside unequal access to essential services and opportunities due to a person’s social context and systemic factors.

• Respectability Politics: When marginalized groups are told (or teach themselves) that in order to receive better treatment from the dominant group, they are obligated to ‘behave better.’

• Reverse Racism: A term used by a dominant group to describe prejudice against them by a nondominant group. Frequently used by White people when people of color call out systemic disadvantages or create spaces for themselves that White people aren’t a part of. Assumptions and stereotypes about white people are considered racial prejudice, not racism, because they hold systemic power.

• Settler Colonialism: Colonizing powers creating permanent settlements, typically by force, on land owned or occupied by others. It typically includes oppressive governance, dismantling of Indigenous cultural forms, and enforcement of superiority codes (e.g., White supremacy). Examples include white European occupations of land in what is now the United States, Spain’s settlements throughout Latin America, and the Apartheid government established by White Europeans in South Africa. 

• Sexism: Discrimination based on sex, fostering social role stereotypes. It manifests in the discrimination of women and gender expansive people on the basis of sex positive behavior, conditions, or attitudes.

• Silencing: Inhibiting certain groups’ voices to prevent their perspectives, experiences, and histories from being heard.

• Social Exclusion: Multiple ways people are excluded from full participation in society, based not only on material deprivation, but also on noneconomic factors such as mental health, gender, physical ability, caste, sexual orientation, and age.

• Social Inequality: Unequal access to the benefits of belonging to a society. In a purely equal society, every citizen is equally able to contribute to the overall well-being of that society, and they are equally able to benefit from their membership within that society.

• Social Location: One's position in history/society defined by identity markers like gender, race, social class, age, ability, religion, sexual orientation, and geographic location. Each group membership confers a certain set of social roles and rules, power, and privilege (or lack of), which influence your identity and how you see the world.

• Socio-economic Status: Social position as determined by income, wealth, occupational prestige, and educational attainment.

• Stereotype (and Stereotype Threat): Widespread, socially sanctioned assumptions about groups of people. Though they can be positive and negative, all stereotypes have negative effects because they support institutionalized oppression by validating oversimplified, nonfactual beliefs. "Threat" is the risk of internalizing and confirming others’ negative biases towards your social group.

• Structural Barrier: An obstacle rooted in societal systems that hinders access to resources, opportunities, or services for certain groups of people.

• Structural Racism: Compounding effects across institutions that systematically privilege White people and disadvantage people of color.

• Supremacy: The superiority of one group over others through a system of domination and subordination.

• Survival Script: An internal, unconscious narrative developed in response to systemic pressure, power imbalances, or trauma. These scripts are mental shortcuts designed to keep an individual safe within a hierarchy, but act as a barrier to collective agency.
  
  Common survival scripts include: "If I don't name the problem, I won't be seen as 'difficult' or lose my seat at the table" (silence); "I am the only one who can fix this; the community is too broken to lead themselves." (savior); "I will do exactly what the funder wants, even if it harms the mission, so we can survive another year" (compliance).

• Systemic Discrimination: Patterns or policies where the alleged discrimination broadly impacts an industry, profession, company, or geographic area.

• Systemic Injustice: Deeply ingrained, widespread unfairness within social, economic, and political systems that disadvantages certain groups while advantaging others.

• Tokenism: A perfunctory or symbolic effort to include marginalized individuals without providing real support, influence, or power to enact meaningful change thereby legitimizing existing power structures.

• Trans Misogynoir: The oppression of trans women/feminine people of color. It exists at the intersection between transphobia, misogyny, and antiblackness. This oppressive force is caused by a combination of cisnormativity, the gender binary, white supremacy, and other forces.

• Transphobia: The fear, hatred, disbelief, or mistrust of people who are transgender, thought to be transgender, or whose gender expression does not conform to traditional gender roles. Transphobia functions as a systemic barrier that prevents transgender and gender-nonconforming people from living full lives free from harm.

• Wealth Inequality: The unequal distribution of assets among residents. Wealth is defined as net worth—the sum of assets (residences, cash, stocks, retirement accounts) minus liabilities (student loans, mortgages, credit card debt).
  
  Data Highlight: As of 2024, the top 1% of households in the U.S. hold approximately 30% of the total household wealth, while the bottom 50% hold roughly 2.5%. Furthermore, the median wealth for white households is approximately $285,000, compared to $44,900 for Black households and $61,600 for Hispanic households.[9]

• White Fragility: A state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering defensive moves. These include outward displays of emotion (anger, fear, guilt) and behaviors (silence, argumentation, or withdrawal) that function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and shut down equitable dialogue.

• White Guilt: The feelings of shame and remorse some White people experience when recognizing the legacy of racial injustice and perceiving the ways they have personally or institutionally benefited from it.

• White Supremacy: A historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent. Its primary purpose is to maintain and defend a system of wealth, power, and privilege.

• White Supremacy Culture: The ideology that White people — and their specific ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions — are inherently superior to those of people of color. This functions as the cultural default in organizations, rewarding assimilation to white norms.

• Xenophobia: The unreasonable fear or dislike of things, cultures, forms of expression, or people perceived as foreign or strange. An aversion to that which is different from oneself and one’s own everyday experiences.

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Systems of Change

• Bilateral or Two-Party System: The electorate gives its votes largely to only two dominant political parties. At any point in time, one of the two parties holds a majority in the legislature.

• Consensus Building: An egalitarian and inclusive method of reaching agreement based on the active participation and consent of group members to collectively reach a decision. Consensus is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

• Consultation: A series of planned in-person and/or online processes seeking engagement and feedback on how to advance an agenda. A feminist consultation is structured to be non-hierarchical, culturally responsive, and empowering. More broadly, consultation can range from formal to informal, and active to passive.

• Democratic: In a direct democratic process, the people have the direct authority to deliberate and decide rules or policies. In a representative democratic system, the people choose governing officials through competitive elections to then deliberate and decide rules for the people.

• Feminist: Describes an approach that places the transformation of power relations, and especially gendered power dynamics, at the heart of all social change processes. It centers on the empowerment of women and marginalized genders and the advancement of gender equality.

• Human Rights-Based Approach: Describes an approach that applies human rights principles such as non-discrimination, participation, and accountability, making the fulfillment of human rights a key priority in every program.

• Inclusive: Supporting a sense of belonging for others, whoever they are. Inclusive spaces are achieved when individuals have agency to share opinions, make decisions, and feel respected and valued, regardless of their identity.

• Independent Governance: A system where decision-making and oversight are conducted by individuals or groups that are not influenced by the organization’s management or external pressures, ensuring accountability and objectivity.

• Justice: The establishment or determination of rights according to rules of law and standards of equity; the process or result of using laws to fairly judge crimes and criminality.

• Liberation: The conscious or unconscious state of being in which one can freely exist, think, dream, and thrive outside of traditional systems of oppression. A culture of solidarity, respect, and dignity that does not bind people to disparate systems or outcomes.

• Liberatory Leadership: Rooted in the vision of individual and collective liberation; an anti-oppressive approach that moves from transactional change to embodied transformation using collective learning, decentralized power, reciprocity, and care.

• Movement Building: A process of organizing and mobilizing communities to respond to common problems. It includes a shared analysis, a common vision for change, and defined principles for communication and roles.

• Mutual Accountability: A partnership dynamic where all parties — regardless of their funding, size, or social status — are held to the same standards of transparency and performance. It shifts the power from top-down oversight to a lateral system where the most powerful partners answer to all stakeholders from grassroots members to funders. This is operationalized through the shared decision log and regular mutual accountability sessions to ensure dominant partners don’t bypass the collective's goals.

• Mutual Aid: A cooperative system where people work to meet the needs of everyone in the community. Unlike charity, which is a one-way relationship, mutual aid is an act of solidarity that builds sustained networks between neighbors.

• Neoliberalism: A set of economic and political theories favoring a free-market system where market forces, rather than governments, determine the economy. This includes privatization, deregulation, and reduced government spending on social programs.

• Participatory: A process using techniques to share power and ownership over an agenda. It aims to articulate the perspectives of marginalized groups and foster collaboration with those in positions of authority.

• Participatory Democracy: A system facilitating the active involvement of individuals in all important decisions affecting their lives, including in families, schools, businesses, and the media.

• Partnership: A mutually beneficial relationship between two or more individuals or institutions joined around a common objective where each retains fully recognized agency.

• Racial Equity: The condition achieved if one's racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares. It involves addressing root causes and eliminating policies that reinforce differential outcomes.

• Racial Justice: A proactive reinforcement of policies, practices, and actions that produce equitable power, access, opportunities, and outcomes for all.

• Reparations: A concept arguing for compensation (money, land, housing, healthcare, etc.) from the U.S. government for the free labor rendered during 250 years of slavery; the making of amends for a wrong done by major institutions.

• Resistance: The act of challenging the dominant power structure, ranging from everyday acts like calling out discrimination to organized collective forms like strikes or boycotts.

• Restorative Justice: A theory of justice emphasizing repairing the harm caused by conflict by placing decisions in the hands of those most affected (victims, offenders, and community) to heal relationships and address underlying causes. It emphasizes individual and collective accountability.

• Righteous Anger: When individuals channel reactive emotion over mistreatment into activism. Examples include prophetic rage sparked by systematic violence or holy indignation at political disenfranchisement.

• Safe Space: Spaces in which people, particularly marginalized groups, can share their experiences without fear or judgment.

• Shared and Intergenerational Leadership: The creation of safe spaces for empowering dialogue accompanied by the redistribution of power and inclusive engagement across different age groups and levels.

• Social Justice: The practice of allyship and coalition work in order to promote equality, equity, respect, and the assurance of rights within and between communities.

• Solidarity: Unity or agreement based on shared interests and objectives; long-term mutual support within and between groups.

• Tolerance: Allowing or accepting an action, idea, or person which one dislikes. ‘Toleration’ refers to social or political practices, while ‘tolerance’ refers to a set of attitudes.

• Transformative Justice: An approach to violence that seeks safety and accountability without relying on punishment or state violence (incarceration/policing). It seeks to transform the conditions that allow violence to occur and repair harm for individuals, communities, and society.

• Truth and Reconciliation: Commissions focused on paying attention to mass violations of human rights, typically focusing on crimes carried out by a government against its own citizens.

 

Engagement Tools

• Abolition: A fundamentally different approach to safety calling for the elimination of traditional forms of punishment and confinement, instead investing in communities to center people over the state.

• Accountability: The responsibility held by a person or group for a particular action or task. It requires trust and is coupled with an enforcement mechanism or consequences.

• Action Logic: Creating powerful stories that move hearts by allowing actions to speak for themselves (e.g., a sit-in violating an unjust law to highlight the injustice).

• Advocacy: Strategy and action to engage stakeholders in decisions affecting them; typically involves incremental actions like lobbying.

• Affinity Group (Caucus): Spaces for people to work within their own shared identity groups. Affinity groups focus on personal experiences and emotional support related to identity, and caucuses are structured to address systemic issues and promote action.

• Al Faza’a (A Surge of Solidarity): A phenomenon where supporters join a campaign at peak moments in response to an external event; movements must be ready to utilize this temporary engagement.

• Budget Tracking: Monitoring the allocation and spending of public or organizational funds to ensure transparency and alignment with stated goals.

• Capacity Building: Improving an individual’s or organization’s ability to fulfill their mission by strengthening infrastructure, skills, governance, or human resources.

• Civic Participation: Engaging in the systems of governance, including elections and appointments of judges, commissioners, and lawmakers.

• Commissions: Committing or entrusting a person or group with supervisory power for a particular action or function (e.g., a parks commission).

• Counter-Narratives: Alternative stories that challenge dominant mainstream narratives, highlighting marginalized voices to reshape understanding of history or literature.

• Decolonization: The active resistance against colonial powers and the shifting of power toward political, economic, and psychic independence.

• De-escalation Tactics: Methods taken to decrease the severity of physical or verbal conflict to resolve concerns safely.

• Emergent Strategy: A way of describing adaptive, relational leadership that accounts for constant change and relies on the strength of relationships to grow a compelling future.

• Empathy: A learned skill allowing one to recognize and deeply listen to another’s experience and connect it to common emotions; differs from sympathy.

• Executive Order: A directive issued by the head of state or government that manages the operations of a federal administration.

• Formal Rule Changes: The process by which administrative agencies create or amend regulations, usually including public notice and comment periods.

• Human Rights Mechanisms: Systems established to promote and ensure the realization of human rights, including treaties, national laws, and institutions.

• Invisible Labor: The unquantified and habitually unrecognized work required to maintain a collaboration’s health. This includes trust-building, emotional support, conflict mediation, and administrative tasks. Because invisible labor is historically performed by minoritized and feminized individuals, neoliberal economic models frequently undervalue it.

• Legislative Change: The creation or modification of existing laws and legal requirements enacted by a governing body.

• Litigation: The process of settling a dispute or contesting a legal action in a court of law.

• Lobbying: Attempts by individuals or groups to influence the decisions of government or the votes of legislators.

• Mobilization: Organizing and activating individuals to work toward a common goal by coordinating resources and fostering participation.

• Nonviolence: A strategy stressing social and political change through acts that do not involve physical violence; includes language that does not perpetuate inequality.

• Opposition Tactics: Strategies used to undermine change efforts, such as deflection, discrediting, or delaying actions.

• Participatory Consultations: Active community engagement in discussions and decision-making to ensure impacted voices are heard in policy-making.

• Policy Advocacy: Using advocacy to accomplish change in laws, programs, or norms within bodies that hold power.

• Policy Proposals and Alternative Research: Developing data-backed suggestions and independent studies to provide options for systemic reform.

• Power Mapping: A tool to identify who holds power, who influences them, and who needs to be targeted with direct actions.

• Public Protest or Demonstrations: Collective group actions (marches, rallies, sit-ins) to express objection toward specific issues and influence public opinion.

• Resource Mobilization: The process of raising or leveraging resources (funding, expertise, people) to accomplish a goal or maximize existing assets.

• Self-Advocacy: The act of individuals speaking up for their own interests, popularized by the 1960s disability rights movement to ensure personal decision-making power.

• Shared Decision Log: A transparent, accessible, and permanent record of every major decision made within a collaboration, including those made between formal meetings.

• Transparency: The quality of being open and honest in communication, allowing individuals to access and understand information easily to foster trust.

• Trusted Messengers: Individuals who hold high social power and credibility within a specific community, regardless of their formal titles. They serve as the primary bridge for counter-narratives because they possess the deep relational trust necessary to combat hidden power agendas or external disinformation.

 

[1]  "Glossary," World YWCA, accessed July 27, 2025, https://worldywca.org/glossary/glossary.html.

[2] “ABC’s of Social Justice,” Lewis & Clark College, accessed July 27, 2025, https://www.lclark.edu/live/files/18474-abcs-of-social-justice.

[3] “Social Justice Glossary,” Trinity Repertory Company, accessed July 28, 2025, https://www.trinityrep.com/app/uploads/2021/02/Trinity_DEI-Glossary.pdf.

[4] “Toolbox,” Beautiful Trouble, accessed July 28, 2025, https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/theory.

[5] “The Sociology Dictionary,” accessed July 28, 2025, https://thesociologydictionary.com/.

[6] “Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia,” accessed July 28, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.

[7] “Dictionary.com,” accessed July 28, 2025, https://www.dictionary.com/.

[8] Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later, Columbia Law School, 2017.

[9] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2024). Distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1989: Net worth by race,  https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:144;series:Net%20worth;demographic:race;population:all;units:levels