Defend Our Communities

Defend Peoples’ Struggle! Toolkit

Welcome to the Defend Peoples’ Struggle Toolkit! This resource was designed to provide tools and share lessons for organizations to be able to link their own struggles to national struggles against mass ICE deportations, emboldened police brutality, expansive military operations, and all forms of heightened state repression and increasing attacks against our people and movements. Join us in organizing and building a mass movement to fight back against these fascist attacks!

If you’re just starting off or even if you’re already waging a campaign and want to figure out how to link it to our DPS campaign, we suggest the following:

• Review our Mass Campaigns 101 page to understand ILPS’ framework on what is a campaign - what purpose they serve in building a mass movement that goes beyond single issues. It also goes over building blocks of a campaign and how to conduct them step by step so the communities we work with are engaged and prepare for the larger fights ahead.

• Read our DPS campaign concept paper with your organization to understand the background, context and analysis for the DPS campaign and unite on why it’s important to take it up and how you can wage it. To ensure we’re marching in step together on a national level, it also covers goals and objectives, targets, demands, alliance work, and major action dates (like International Workers Day on May 1st) through January 2026.

• Check out our Linking Campaigns page to understand why it’s important to link our campaigns to other struggles and the DPS campaign as a national movement and to ultimately expose that our struggles are bound by a common enemy of the majority of the people of the world - US imperialism!

• Visit United Front 101 for more on the strategy and core points of United Front work.

• Here are some questions to help think through your campaign planning:

  • What are potential targets in your area

  • What’s the manifestation of militarism

  • How does it impact the people in your communities

  • What forces are working on this issue that you can work with or link up with (even if they’re adjacent issues)

  • How do you set meetings with these forces