A Matter of Survival

Greater Birmingham Ministries and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice are bringing together organizers, faith leaders, artists, and community members from across Birmingham to spend time together training, studying, and strategizing in an effort to bring all our people into community around our shared commitment to human rights, dignity, and democracy.  

In July, we will host a Survival Revival, a convening of diverse people and organizations in the Birmingham area, coming together to:

1) Meet people’s material needs through a mass distribution or survival project;

2) Host a revival event, including cultural and spiritual expression that helps build community, make meaning, and offer grounding and inspiration; and

3) Take an action that connects the “survival” and “revival” pieces to our vision and demands for political/economic transformation.

We’re living through a moment of compounding crises and many communities are already responding: through mutual aid, deportation defense, sanctuary, and collective care of every kind. This is survival organizing.

GBM and the Kairos Center come out of a tradition of grassroots organizing that includes practices of meeting the material needs of those who were being organized. These practices are projects of survival.  They are not charity or even mutual aid. They are oriented around providing for the needs of the community, so as to enable collective struggle and long-term movement building. The goal is not just to help each other get by. The goal is to help each other get by as we build the power needed to fundamentally change the conditions we are living under. 

Survival Revival
Saturday, July 25, 2026
Titusville Neighborhood

The Network of Survival that will be created will be people of faith, clergy, people impacted by systemic injustice, artists, song leaders, and more, that could have the potential to become a moral and political movement that builds power from the bottom up.

The Survival Revival itself – and the process of organizing toward it – is an opportunity for leaders and groups in Birmingham to envision and take steps towards building mutual support and a survival organizing network that can serve as supply lines for a mass organizing drive of the poor. This will link up similar networks across the country into an incipient infrastructure of a national network that can continue to promote, support, and build this model of organizing that we believe will become all the more necessary in the days to come. 

For more information, email survivalrevival@gbm.org