Alliance for America Forward is a not-for-profit, political organization founded by a group of people from diverse communities in Dallas in 2022. Rooted in the spirit and tradition of the Athenian democracy and modern day concept of direct democracy, Alliance for America Forward intends to promote a self-governance and self-managing direct democracy agenda that includes the ongoing fight for equality, justice, and equal opportunity for all. This is an independent, progressive coalition of individuals and organizations committed to empowering communities through civic engagement, community mobilization, and campaigns that turn our issues into policies that change people’s lives.  We champion fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our communities. We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do.

The idea of America Forward expands the concept of politics based upon peoples’ democratic organizations and decision-making power. In this experimentation, there are two determining factors: the notion of democracy as people’s power in society (rather than as a form of government), and the non-dependent relationship with the government. America Forward is a social and political movement based upon developing people’s autonomous competences. It can be called democracy in action: learning self-government by doing it, and by taking direct responsibility for one’s life and the place in which one lives. We might refer to such initiatives as projects in which autonomy is striven for by means of experimentation. When an entire community organizes itself toward self-development, affective relation gets privileged over the dominant power relations, marginality becomes a privilege position, and sovereignty understood as a dominant power is reduced to a symbolic level with more or less signification over people’s lives. We believe people’s struggle for self-organization and self-growth opens up the discussion of the power of the nonpower—self-sovereignity of the nonsovereign. This discussion is extremely important in our model of politics for the generations to come! We thank you in advance for your  potential contribution to our common vision of self-governing and self-managing democratic commune and its signature community-run kitchen project!

Creating a cooperative-run self-organizing economy is primary aim of Alliance for America Forward  because that directly relates to the comprehensive changing of existing social relations and taking people away from poverty, injustice, hatred and discrimination to a hopeful political future. Based on the above premises laid out above, Alliance for America Forward will be launching two–economic and political—projects.

America Forward is structured differently. Our organization is organized horizontally. We reject static centralism, insisting that decisions for welfares for community must be made by the base. Popular participation generates a politicization of society, in which each person may become an autonomous political actor. Unlike traditional organizations, we consist of leaderless, horizontal, participatory and open organization that is not stifled around any structurally center entity. In other words, our organization has no president, vice president, secretary, or treasurer. Anyone can facilitate this organization with no title or position, and the organization is under the custody of the community. But we formed a watch body independent of day-to-day facilitators. We will form an alliance of self-governing and self-managing democracy and try to expand its influences. Our assemblies are leaderless. They lack a chair/president or similar such categories. In our councils, everybody has equal status. A few people can facilitate this initiative, but none assumes themselves as a leader. The organization is based on the idea that society can be run truly democratically through networks of grassroot collectives without any center. The main political question we try to answer is: Is an organization which is not modeled on the apparatus of any centralism possible?  In addition to that, in our model of community, the kitchen is placed in the custody of the local people, and thus neither collectivized nor privatized, it is made common.  Everyone is its owner and custodian.