The precursor to the MNS was
A Quaker Action Group (AQAG), founded by Lawrence Scott (Quaker) in 1966. Dissatisfied with the response of the mainstream
Quaker church to the
United States involvement in the Vietnam War, Scott founded AQAG with the intention of sparking a renewed commitment to the Quaker
Peace Testimony. Frustrated by their failure to achieve this end, AQAG members including Scott and Quaker
George Willoughby, refashioned the group as the Movement for A New Society in 1971. Other founding members included
Bill Moyer, Berit and
George Lakey, Phyllis and Richard Taylor, Lynne Shivers, and
Lillian Willoughby. The members of MNS consciously sought to develop tools and strategies that could be employed to bring about revolutionary change through nonviolent means. The three-part focus of MNS included training for activists, nonviolent direct action and community. The main location for MNS activity was in West Philadelphia. Other locations included Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis, Ohio, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Tucson, Western Massachusetts and more. During the 1970s and early 1980s Philadelphia was the base for weekend, two-week and nine-month programs that trained US and international activists in
direct action organizing,
group process,
consensus decision-making,
liberation/
oppression issues and more. Activist training also happened in other locations and through traveling trainers programs. MNS did not focus its energies exclusively on one issue or injustice. Its members were involved in working for social change on many fronts, most notably in the movement to end US involvement in the
Vietnam War, and during the citizen-led opposition to the expansion of the US nuclear power industry in the mid to late 1970s. MNS members were also active in the
anti-nuclear weapons movement, the Pledge of Resistance (anti-US intervention in Central America),
feminism,
LGBTQ,
civil rights,
community organizing, and food and
worker cooperatives. MNS was unusual in combining feminist group process, broad analysis of
interrelated people's struggles including class and culture, and personal empowerment techniques ranging from music and street theater as political organizing tools to
Re-evaluation Counseling. With their group process skills, MNS members often played roles of facilitating meetings and training peacekeepers for large protests. Many MNS-developed techniques, including small-to-large-group
consensus decision making, an action structure based on
affinity groups, and the idea that proper training was key to successful actions, were widely adopted and adapted by numerous social change campaigns and movements. Prominent among these was the
Clamshell Alliance occupation of the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction site May 1, 1977, continuing through the network of affinity-group-based alliances that took direct action for safe energy nationwide and worldwide. MNS also heavily influenced later movements such as the 1999
World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and the
Occupy movement of 2011-2012. In turn, MNS was greatly influenced by its association with academics and authors, notably
Gene Sharp, nonviolent action theoretician, founder of the
Albert Einstein Institution (Cambridge, Mass.), and a major global influence on the nonviolent liberation of
South Africa, the
Arab Spring and other social justice movements. The sense of community and the quality of interpersonal relationships was important to MNS members and many lived in cooperative households, practiced Re-evaluation Counseling, and addressed issues of race, class, gender and sexual orientation in their activist training and lives. In West Philadelphia MNS members established a land trust incorporated as a nonprofit "Life Center Association", initially comprising several land trusted buildings to provide training spaces and an organizational office, then expanding to include about 20 cooperative houses at its height. It survives to this day, though far smaller. Through the cooperatively owned and managed New Society Publishers, MNS members published numerous pamphlets and guidebooks, as well as republishing important works on nonviolence (e.g.
We Are All Part of One Another a Barbara Deming Reader in 1984). NSP's cooperatively authored
Resource Manual for a Living Revolution (known affectionately as the “monster manual”) and similar publications inspired and guided activists on every continent, even the
Tasmanian Wilderness Society’s campaign to prevent the damming of the
Franklin River in southern Australia. NSP also published
Marshall Rosenberg's
Handbook on Nonviolent Communication which became the basis for Rosenberg's work with the Center for
Nonviolent Communication. After several years of decline, MNS membership decided to disband in 1988, due to internal differences regarding priorities, lack of success in becoming
multicultural, and the decline of its training programs in Philadelphia. However, its most skilled trainers and organizers redirected their efforts, joining or founding a range of organizations and campaigns across the U.S. Many believed MNS had achieved its primary goal of furthering the understanding and use of
Gandhian style
nonviolent action to effect significant change. MNS records are archived at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. ==Legacy==