Affordable housing, increased funding for public transportation, healthcare for all, gay marriage — we all have our pet issues, but many of us work on our issues because we see them as part of a larger systemic transformation. We are hungry for an alternative way of doing life, a way characterized by mutuality, deep relationships, love for all forms of life, joy, honesty and wonder. In other words, we are hungry for a way of living outside the systems of empire characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, hoarding, defensiveness, and extreme self-interest.

By focusing on individual pieces of this larger transformation, we miss the interconnections among them. As Pastor Lynice Pinkard likes to say, we are pulling at the individual bootstraps of the boot of imperial domination. In doing that, we not only miss that there is a whole boot there, but we inadvertently work at cross-purposes to each other, competing for media airtime, funding, and the public’s attention.

We also miss opportunities to enter into relationships of love and solidarity with people who aren’t just like us. For example, gay marriage advocates have little contact with those working to end economic oppression, and then are shocked when working class people fail to support their marriages at the polls, just as labor activists are shocked when queer people don’t necessarily support workers’ rights to organize.

This scattershot approach will not bring about the systemic transformation we long for, and yet there are relatively few models of organizations working in a different way. Here are three very different organizations — past and present — with more holistic approaches:

1. The Gay Liberation Front: Unabashedly confrontational, this organization formed right after the Stonewall Riots and combined gay rights activism with critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. They collaborated with such diverse partners as the Black Panthers and the antiwar movement. The organization no longer exists.

2. The Network of Spiritual Progressives: The NSP has published an eight-point Spiritual Covenant with America that covers issues from homeland security to personal responsibility, but the real thrust of the organization is to work for a “new bottom line” in America, one that measures the effect on our capacity for love, kindness, generosity, awe, wonder, and radical amazement alongside the effect on profit and power.

3. The Simple Way: Shane Claiborne, one of the founders of this intentional Christian community cum movement, suggests that rather than choosing issues, we choose people and ally ourselves with them, standing in fierce solidarity with them against anything that thwarts the healthy flourishing of their lives. Claiborne and his friends moved from their college dorms into inner city Philadelphia and have committed themselves to serving their neighbors, a task that has led them to city council, zoning boards, the state legislature, Wall Street, and prison.

Seminary of the Street is, among other things, a think-tank dedicated to devising ways of organizing that embody the changes we want to effect in the world. If you know of organizations that are doing interesting work that transcends issue-silos, please let us know!