Gathering Ground’s 2025 Movement-Building Call to Collaboration, held over two days at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), brought together over 125 organizers, activists and changemakers for two days of powerful community-building, deep dialogue, and concrete strategizing. Attendees represented a wide spectrum of sectors — from grassroots organizers to institutional leaders — working across issue areas such as immigrant justice, labor, environmental justice, reentry, public health, education, housing, and racial equity.

Participants came from every corner of the state, reflecting the rich geographic, cultural, and professional diversity of New Jersey’s organizing ecosystem. With statewide representation and several participants from New York and Pennsylvania, the Movement-Building Call to Collaboration served as a rare and vital space to bridge silos and activate cross-sector solidarity.

Our Call to Collaboration utilizes a modified version of Open-Space Technology – a dynamic and democratic way of meeting used worldwide as a tool to tackle complex problems that require diverse viewpoints to solve them. Gathering in this way allows participants to collaborate and strategize in a manner that calls for the input and leadership of all, moving away from the hierarchical manner in which decisions tend to be made, and leading to concrete actions and solutions.

Together, we discussed the Central Question: