How can older Americans strategically and effectively meet this current moment? Come learn more about the link between the fossil fuel industry, US imperialism, and authoritarianism. Additionally, gain a deeper historical perspective on anti-war activism and hear concrete Third Act ideas on how to engage fully and effectively right now to make a difference.

About this event

Presenters: Daniel Hunter, Freedom Trainers; Rebecca Solnit, activist and writer; Bill McKibben, Third Act co-founder; Kafia Ahmed and Mike Johnson, Third Act staff.

Daniel Hunter, Educator and Activist

Daniel is the Director of Freedom Trainers, a role he stepped into after leaving his position as Global Trainings Director at 350.org when, drawing on years of training work in authoritarian regimes, he recognized that his skills would soon be urgently needed in the United States. A strategist, trainer, and lifelong organizer, he helped lead the direct-action campaign that stopped a politically connected $650-million casino project, chronicled in his book Strategy and Soul. He has trained movements around the world using popular-education methods and has organized campaigns against the USA PATRIOT Act, fossil-fuel expansion, and for housing and public-sector workers. He also co-founded Choose Democracy and wrote the choose-your-own-adventure guide What Will You Do If Trump Wins? to help people prepare for authoritarian threats.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist, and the author of over eighteen books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark. Rebecca has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian.

Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson is Third Act’s Democracy Campaigns Manager, focusing on mobilizing Third Actors to engage in our political process through coalition building, advocacy, and elections. With a background in municipal politics and public policy, Mike spent his career working with grassroots groups, organized labor, and independent political movements to build power from city hall to state legislatures and win elections. A student of social movements, he is inspired to fight for a better world every day, building on the promise of the leaders and elders who came before him.

Kafia Ahmed is Third Act’s CEO. She’s been organizing for nearly 20 years in marginalized communities on issues ranging from housing, carceral abolition, racial justice, and immigration. In between years organizing stateside, Kafia worked in international development, working alongside pastoralist communities in East Africa affected by climate change and survivors of gender based violence. Her passion and pride for her Somali culture and family are part of her driving force for creating a better world – when she isn’t organizing she’s a voracious reader, an avid baker and a lover of chasing waterfalls.

Bill McKibben, Author, Educator, Activist, founder of Third Act

Bill is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, and a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written more than twenty books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, and his latest book is Here Comes The Sun.