Who, What, Why: USCPR’s Campaigns Camp
An interview with Leah and Celine from the USCPR Organizing & Advocacy team
We recently sat down with our teammates Celine and Leah, who run USCPR’s Palestine Local Campaigns Convening. They shared powerful reflections about why this convening is critical to the movement for Palestinian rights and our fight to end U.S. military funding to Israel, which you can read below.
Read our interview with Celine and Leah below to learn more about how USCPR’s Palestine Local Campaigns Convening is “key to rejuvenating organizing in local communities and building critical connections among organizers.” Thank you for being part of the USCPR community of support and helping make this work possible!
Before you continue reading: This September marks our fifth convening, and as we plan for our biggest “Campaigns Camp” yet, we can’t do it without your support.
For those who might not be familiar with USCPR’s “Campaigns Camp,” can you tell us more about how it came about?
Leah: In 2022, we were a couple of years into the horrors of COVID. There had been uprisings against the police and for Palestinian liberation. There was a lot of energy at the time and we saw the need for local to national strategy. We increasingly realized that in order to move Congress, we needed to win locally.
So, we had our first convening in Texas in 2022 with 28 people. Everyone was energized and grateful to be in a space where we could rigorously focus on both short and long-term strategy. We organized a slightly larger convening the following year, and in 2024, we expanded to meet the power of the movement. That year, we convened 100 grassroots organizers in Minneapolis, which has been a site of learning about intense Black-led struggles against state violence.
Through our “Campaigns Camp,” we’ve created a sustainable way to convene organizers annually to study and focus on arms embargo, divestment, and corporate pressure campaigns we think can win.
Celine: And it’s a unique space where local Palestine solidarity organizations, and people who’ve been newly activated around Palestine, can come learn both about campaign strategy and how to form a sustainable organization while building relationships with other organizers across the country.
How has the “Campaigns Camp” grown over the years?
Celine: After October 2023, there was such a huge growth in people who were politicized and activated around Palestine. They wanted to take action in solidarity with the Palestinian people but didn’t have a place to strategize about organizing beyond their local organization. So we expanded the convening to accommodate new grassroots groups. We made sure to bring in new organizers taking on creative strategies and different campaigns, including arms embargo campaigns, Israel Bonds, and Boycott Chevron. We help them become not only politicized and mobilized around Palestine, but also more organized around it.
How has USCPR’s “Campaigns Camp” helped strengthen local grassroots campaigns?
Leah: USCPR’s annual Campaigns Camp has been key to rejuvenating organizing in local communities and building critical connections among organizers. And we help people understand when it’s opportune to push certain demands—we’ve seen this in North Carolina with the big win on Israel Bonds, and we’re seeing it now in Albuquerque, where our convening helped kickstart campaign work led by a current fellow.
Celine: It’s hard, because we’re not going to see an immediate impact, but like Leah said, our convenings equip organizers with the skills and training needed so that when the opportunity presents itself, they’re able to move on it. Even if the tools we provide don’t immediately result in a campaign win, they do help strengthen campaign strategy. And we’ve seen that since we began our convenings—multiple campaigns have launched from organizers who’ve attended.
If we could double or triple the funds for our “Campaigns Camp,” what would that look like? How would additional funding allow us to expand our programming?
Celine: Scale up. Bring more organizations! In terms of programming, we could have more tracks, which would allow us to address different types of campaigns and levels of strategy. Right now, we’re focused on organizers with advanced campaigns, but with additional funding, we could include organizers who have an assessment of what’s going on in their locale but are still trying to build things out.
Leah: What you said is perfect, Celine. I would also offer that we would run Campaigns Camp twice a year in different regions!
What would you tell people who are curious about supporting this work? Why is the “Campaigns Camp” critical to the movement for Palestinian rights and our fight to end U.S. military funding to Israel?
Leah: We owe Gaza and the Palestinian people strategy. A lot of people describe the 2010s as a period of mobilization that deeply lacked the strategy and organization needed to win. For the 2020s to look different, we absolutely need to back moments of mass mobilization with organizing, which means building these critical connections.
It’s a lineage, you know, Rosa Parks didn’t just get on a bus and resist segregation alone. She was trained at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee. And lunch counter sit-ins weren’t totally organic. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was meeting in key sites in the South.
There’s political analysis behind these kinds of spaces that is an attempt to build on winning moments in U.S. history and combat a continuation of the 2000s and 2010s, when we had mobilization without wins.
What is your hope for Palestine through the “Campaigns Camp”? What does this convening mean for the greater movement for Palestine?
Celine: More people who can weaken Zionism in their locales through these campaigns, and a movement that is sustained beyond this moment through these local organizations.
We’ve had nearly three years of massive activation. How do we sustain that? We are going to need an organized solidarity movement that also understands the international Palestinian liberation struggle, their role in it, and how to execute on these campaigns to weaken Zionism’s different fronts.
Leah: I cosign. That was beautifully said.