William Moyer - Further Social Movements

Further Social Movements

Over the next decade, Moyer was involved in the SCLC's 1969 Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., nonviolent blockades of arms shipments to Bangladesh (1971) and to Vietnam (1972), support for the American Indian Movement occupation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota (1973), and a nuclear power plant blockade at Seabrook, New Hampshire (1977).

It was during the nonviolent blockade of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, which involved the arrest of 1,414 individuals (most charges were later dropped), that Moyer recognised the need for social change activists to understand the dynamics behind movement success. In particular, the need to openly address the contradiction that activists often perceive the normal signs of campaign progress as signs of failure.

Moyer developed the Movement Action Plan (MAP) to achieve this end. Since its development it has been used to train hundreds of activists, most notably in the United States, Australia, Canada and Europe.

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Moyer participated in many workshops in Eastern Europe about nonviolence and social change. In the mid-1980s, he moved to San Francisco, California, where he began to explore Transpersonal psychology and continued his participation in the Friends meeting there. He also developed a workshop called "Creating Peaceful Relationships" based on his realizations regarding dominator cultures.

Moyer's book Doing Democracy (New Society Publishers), co-authored by JoAnn McAllister, Mary Lou Finley and Steven Soifer, summarises his theories of social change with case studies from the anti-nuclear, civil rights, gay and lesbian, breast cancer and Global Justice movements.