Major funding for this program was provided by the Obadiah Brown and Sarah Swift Benevolent Fund, the Wynkote Foundation, the Evergreen Foundation, Robert Levering, and the Thomas H. and Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

I think this moment is the biggest opportunity I have experienced in my lifetime to make major change for justice.

If you look at history, the biggest positive changes happened in periods of enormous polarization.

I'm thinking about the climate crisis, and there's a reason for standing right here.

Because this bank is financing the development of fossil fuels that's responsible for the wildfires in California, for the floods right here in Pennsylvania.

They are creating the problem right now by financing the problem.

Polarization is a time when we can stop them, because we can build the mass movements that are needed to do that.

George is a force unequivocally committed to justice.

He's big and he's unapologetic.

He is a rebel.

He's got the full jersey and warm up pants.

He's got everything, a headband that says rebel.

I think George wants to see a world where everybody's at peace, that nobody's in poverty or suffering, that everybody can be recognized for who they are and respected for that.

George's big vision is that all the movements get stronger and join together into a movement of movements that's able to ultimately win the day so that we get to live in the world that we want to live in.

We're not slaves to conventional thinking.

People will spontaneously innovate.

Change does happen in fits and starts, but it's the kind of steady year in and year out work that I think George has been doing for decades that has had an impact on the world.

Fighting around disarmament, fighting around civil rights, fighting for LGBTQIA rights.

He's still going strong at 85 today.

You have to be deeply rooted in hope.

And you've got to love humanity enough that you want to see humanity do better.

We don't deserve the United States of America the way it is right now.

We deserve a transformed United States, but we can only do it with huge numbers of people in motion to take on the forces that oppose us.

Let's do it.

Chester was Pennsylvania's first city that was founded.

William Penn came here.

Martin Luther King came here.

They have a rich history, but nobody knows that.

The residents don't know that, because they were told their value is what they see.

And when they see their environment was full of trash, they feel like they're trash.

Chester is a majority black city.

It is a textbook case of environmental injustice.

There's an oil refinery.

There's a chemical plant.

There's an incinerator.

Industry after industry polluting the community.

And when we started to dig into it, we realized that most of them are Vanguard investments.

Vanguard is one of the biggest asset managers in the world.

We want everything that every other human being wants.

The right to live in a clean and decent place.

We are here the very first day of this long walk.

In the tradition of the civil rights movement, we decided to have a walk from the city of Chester to Vanguard's headquarters in Malvern.

A walk not only gets publicity, but it also builds people's confidence in each other and in themselves.

It's a safe and smart way of changing the world.

We're gonna live our lives for justice.

Live our lives for justice.

It takes a leader of a certain kind to actually cultivate and nurture other leaders.

George has so much wisdom.

He has so much experience.

But I've seen him lead by following.

He wants to see everyone lead in their communities in big, bold, visionary ways.

My dad is such a good Quaker.

He's such a good Quaker.

It was just such a funny thing.

What does it mean to be a good Quaker, right?

What I think it means is to have integrity.

To live your purpose.

It doesn't mean that you're a perfect being.

It's not about an ego trip.

It's not about how do I get on the front page.

It's really about what is spirit calling on me to do?

And that's part of his Quaker activist special sauce.

He's lived this incredibly courageous, big life that his parents could never have imagined for him.

So this is the house where I grew up.

Full of memories and a house with a lot of joy in it.

The town I grew up in is a small town surrounded by huge piles of slate.

I come from a tribe of miners.

My uncles, my grandfathers, my dad had all spent at least part of their working lives in slate mines.

Bangor had no black people in its boundaries.

It was all white people.

And so this town had a lot of racism.

Well, my dad believed in racial equality, and he was very argumentative, Dad.

I learned to argue from him.

And one of the ways that he would like to stir things up at the workplace was he would say, I have an idea.

I want Ralph Bunch, who was the best-known black person in American political life at that time, to run for president so I could vote for him.

Everybody would turn on him and really, really rag on him for the very preposterous idea that a black person should be in the White House.

And he came home very proud to tell us all about it, and we were like cheering him on.

This is the church I grew up in.

This window is really central for me because it was a totally caring presentation of Jesus.

That was what I wanted, a God who cared about all of us.

At age 12, I stood out as a particularly religious boy who also liked to talk.

Some of the elders in the church thought I might have the makings of being a child preacher.

And so the minister told me, "George, a month from now, you're going to be in the pulpit and you're going to deliver a sermon."

I prayed earnestly for a theme, a message that God wanted me to bring to the congregation.

And what came to me most clearly was that God wanted me to tell people that it was His will that there should be racial equality in the land.

And so that was the sermon I wrote.

My heart began to pound when I opened the tall doors to the sanctuary and walked to the front, the organs swelling on the early notes of the prelude.

God, I preached, wants racial equality.

I cited biblical references and what I thought was common sense.

I couldn't tell from looking at the faces of the grown-ups how they felt about what I was saying.

As the nervousness lessened, I thought to myself that the sermon was coherent, persuasive, an airtight case.

After the final hymn, I went with the minister to the door of the church to shake hands as people left the service.

Did I pass my audition?

Would I be encouraged to become a boy preacher?

No one commented on the sermon, except in the most general and condescending ways.

The message was clear.

"Don't call us.

We'll call you."

I couldn't understand what was so objectionable about the nature of the sermon that I preached.

And figuring that out was an important part of my adolescence, realizing, yes, God does want racial equality, but that doesn't mean that all his people are ready for that.

When I was 19, I spent the summer with a Quaker work camp.

It was in Lynn, Massachusetts, which has a wonderful beach, and I loved walking on that beach.

When I needed alone time, something that was very much on my mind was, "What's my life about?"

And it really came to a head one night.

I walked for hours and hours, back and forth, looking at the sea and asking God, "What am I really to do?"

And the message became clear as crystal.

My life was to be about social change, about moving society toward justice.

That was to be my mission.

No more fossil fuels.

No more fossil fuels.

Keep it in the ground.

Keep it in the ground.

I've been on a grandparent's walk for climate justice.

The environment is connected to everything.

There's no economic justice without climate justice.

Yes, that's right.

The grandparents among us, and in some cases great-grandparents, like I'm a great-grandparent, are just thrilled to be on this particular mission, being out front about how deeply we care about the young ones having a future.

So there are a couple of ways I feel like people come at protests, and some it's really about stopping a harm, and we have to do that.

There's another piece though, and that's about the hope.

What do we want to create as a society?

It's also about love, and about vision, and about what does liberation for all of us look like.

I expect that at 105 I'll be here with my wheelchair doing something because I think everyone's responsibility is to continue to be a citizen until we die.

Why not?

We can die I really love my country and I so much want for it to live up to its potential.

When I was in college, I went off to a summer youth project.

One of the first things I did was fall in love with another college student, a woman from Norway.

He was tall, gangly, had a very short crew cut, and he played the piano, and he admitted that he didn't even know where Oslo was.

I was still, I was still that small town boy.

But I forgave him pretty soon.

- Barrett and I had a marvelous summer together, getting to know each other.

- By that time, it started to be real clear that this was not a fly-by-night relationship.

So he proposed.

I thought about it for a minute and I said, "Yes."

- So we settled in Philadelphia so I could go to graduate school.

- George was studying and I was working.

We decided that we should consider children.

But we went through that trying period of trying to conceive and it wasn't happening.

We got eager and so we went to an adoption agency.

We got to adopt a delightful three-month-old and we named her Christina.

I'm Esther Christina Lakey and I'm George's oldest daughter.

My memories growing up were really happy ones.

We traveled a lot, which really shaped how I viewed the world.

I thought everybody's parents were activists.

I didn't know, you know what I mean, because that's all I knew.

He's a very principled person.

He's very loving.

And I think that he genuinely cares about society as a whole and wants the world to have a good way of being.

[music] The latest in Chester's year-long racial troubles came yesterday when officials ordered all public schools closed indefinitely.

That action was prompted by a new round of sit-ins on the school steps.

Thirty-six demonstrators were arrested.

Overnight, more than 200 others were picked up after a series of violent street demonstrations.

There was a major civil rights struggle going on in Chester in the early 60s, inspired by the civil rights movement of the South.

I was reading every day about the unfolding story of this struggle in Chester near Philadelphia, and thinking there's something very wrong about this because everybody who's being arrested to deal with racism was black.

So I thought it was really my responsibility as a white person to get out here to Chester and join the movement.

The Civil Rights Movement had things really organized so people who were volunteers like me could go to a dispatching center, it was a storefront, and be dispatched to wherever the action was that day.

My name was called, and the person said, "You will go with those four people, and you'll all go together in your car to City Hall.

Go inside and sit down, and you'll be arrested."

So we set off for City Hall, which was full of the media and the police and demonstrators.

And so I said, "We have to go find a parking place."

And they said, "Well, let us out, let us out, and then you go find a parking place and join us."

It took a while to find a safe parking place.

We knew how long I was gonna be in jail.

Then I get back here, and I look, and I didn't see my comrades.

I was very scared of being arrested alone.

I'd never been arrested before.

The police were all over the place, but they didn't try to stop me.

I think because I was white, and I was wearing a, you know, nice shirt, I think they figured I came to pay my water bill or something.

[dramatic music] I came into a very large, quiet, and darkened lobby with a series of office doors around its edges.

I was alone, except for three police officers hanging out in the far corner from me.

The trio of officers sauntered over to me.

"Can I help you?"

inquired one of them.

"I'm looking for the sit-inners," I said.

"I've come to sit in."

The three smiled incredulously.

"All right," he said.

"Now you can go home and tell your friends you're a hero."

He paused as I continued to sit.

"Go on now.

Go home."

"Oh, no," I said, my voice getting stronger.

"I'm serious about this.

This is about civil rights.

I'm sitting right here."

"Okay," he said, turning to the other two police officers.

"Arrest him," he said.

"You want to walk him over to the station to book him or call the wagon?"

one asked the other.

That's when I made my second mistake of the day.

"I don't mind walking," I said.

Calling attention to myself triggered their fatigue and resentment.

One of them started to beat me.

I took a deep breath, unlocked my knees, opened my hands, and prayed.

After a bit, the other officer spoke up.

"Let's use the bus," he said.

"Let's get this over with."

And with that, the bus took us to the county jail.

I realized that coming out here to do this would be the biggest risk that I had taken so far.

And I thought I was up for that.

Because if we don't risk, we don't gain, really.

And being outside our comfort zones, we grow in our power as people.

[MUSIC] We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome someday.

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday.

Thank you.

( applause ) Let's do this.

Good evening.

This is my first time meeting George in person, but I feel like I have known him for the decade that I have been organizing.

He is a movement and mentor grandpa to me.

He has mentored my mentors.

He, for me, is an example of what it means to take action even if you're scared.

And to not let your fear hold you back from taking your place in history.

Thank you so much to that beautiful, beautiful choir.

Virg and I were just standing backstage listening to it.

How did that feel?

Very emotional.

We were holding hands.

Because, you know, we sang that a million times in the Civil Rights Movement, and we never did it without holding hands with somebody.

And usually a circle or a thousand people or, you know, a hundred thousand people.

And it was the soul of the movement expressed in music.

and supported us to risk our lives for racial justice.

The summer of 1964 will be marked in history as the summer of civil rights.

First because of the Civil Rights Bill which has passed the Senate, and because of a program, the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.

The Negroes there are subject to a reign of terror.

In the southwest corner of Mississippi, there were what amount to modern-day lynchings, which are shootings of Negroes at night on the roads.

This has been by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Civil Rights Movement knew that it's very tough to face a gun or a knife or a noose on your own.

So the solidarity of acting with others is very important, but also very important is training to know how to face the threat.

I had the privilege of joining the training staff for Mississippi Freedom Summer, the time when about a thousand Northern students were recruited to go to Mississippi and work alongside black people to break open that segregation.

This is a meeting of Freedom Summer volunteers.

They were warned their mission will not be pleasant.

When people want to turn back, they can turn back now without understanding the tremendous dangers that are involved.

People should be expected to get beaten, they should expect to spend in jail, and they should expect possibly somebody to get killed.

I got to be in the training of these students and teaching them the most essential skills that they would need when they went down and faced the Ku Klux Klan and the rest.

They are taught how non-violently to protect themselves when attacked.

You can hit the right head and pull yourself across a little bit more.

The only place you The whole idea of preparing and acting out through role play the possible responses that would be most effective was put on the map by the civil rights movement.

A group of shitholes portraying an angry mob.

They are supposed to jeer and curse.

We also want the white students who are playing the mob to get used to saying things, calling out epithets, calling people niggers and nigger lovers.

Without the training, it's very hard to get a lot of people to do the right thing when the pressure is on.

In the civil rights movement, we see extraordinary strategic smarts that enable people to make the most of that situation.

They face the longest running terrorist organization the U.S.

has ever experienced.

And we can use the experience of the civil rights movement in order to understand how to overcome the opposition and be able to make progress.

[applause] Ladies and gentlemen, this evening I came here to speak to you about Vietnam.

America has entered with its material power and with its moral commitment.

The U.S.

empire was totally out of control, dropping more bombs on Vietnam than had been dropped on Europe during the Second World War.

Just amazing slaughter going on, being paid for by U.S.

taxpayers not realizing those were human beings.

And as I watched it escalate, I joined others in organizing a Quaker group that would focus on direct action.

We needed a media story that the mass media are attracted to.

Yacht Phoenix, a self-ordained mercy ship manned by a crew of determined American pacifists.

Its mission?

To bring medical supplies to the North Vietnamese port of Hai Phong despite Red Cross warnings and without State Department clearance.

The plan was to get a small sailing ship and a crew to sail through the United States' Seventh Fleet, which was blockading the Vietnamese coast, and get to Vietnam with a boatload of medical supplies.

Totally crazy thing to try to do.

How do you get through the might of the American Empire?

And yet, I found myself led by spirit to join the voyage.

It felt like God was tapping me on the shoulder.

And so I went to Hong Kong and we sailed to Vietnam.

We did indeed find ourselves in a war zone, locking horns with gunboats that wanted us out of there.

They send boats out to harass us.

Shoot bullets parallel to our ship.

We were partially disabled.

Our mast was broken.

I'm human.

I want to live a long life.

And certainly not die in my 20s in an ocean halfway around the world.

We finally got through the 7th Fleet.

Thanks to the tremendous concern among Americans about what's going to happen to this little ship and the realization on the part of national leadership in Washington that it would not look good for the Phoenix to be bombed out of the water.

It was a wake-up call for Americans.

Look at what you're doing.

You are supporting a government which can't even bear to have Vietnamese civilians get some medicine when they are inadvertently bombed by our bombs.

And you need to do something about it.

Anti-war demonstrators protest U.S.

involvement in the Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations.

Which, of course, eventually did happen.

Finally, the American people did stand up to the war establishment.

(soft music) - Barrett and I wanted to keep our family growing.

And so Christina had a sibling who he also adopted, Peter.

So we thought this is our perfect two child family.

And then we were delightfully surprised when we made a baby anyway.

I grew up in a really beautiful family and I'm grateful.

I'm sure for some people, like your parent goes off to a nine to five job.

You have no idea what they did all day.

I actually did have a pretty good concept of what my dad did because he included me in a lot of it.

So I grew up as an activist in an activist household.

There were very many demonstrations and protests that I went along.

This is about my son Peter at age six.

I found myself wanting six-year-old Peter to try his hand at activism.

Some friends were helping out in the growing consumer boycotts of lettuce that had been called by the United Farm Workers.

They were going to start picketing at our neighborhood supermarket.

I explained to Peter that the aim of the boycott was to improve the lives of children like himself.

He immediately volunteered for the picket line.

He walked up to somebody and said, "Don't go in there and buy that scabbage lettuce!"

I guess Peter had heard us talking about scabs, who are strike breakers, who are being hired by employers.

"Scabbage lettuce."

She kept walking, and Peter kept backing up in front of her until he backed right through the doorway and into the store.

Hardly a minute later, the store manager came outside, pulling Peter by the hand.

"Whose boy is this?"

he demanded.

I raised my hand proudly.

"He's mine."

For him as a parent, my dad is good at listening to what is it inside you that is ready to come out.

My experience of him as my dad, so much of it was about like, "Come on Ingrid, you can do it.

You can do that street speaking in the park when you're 10, telling Ronald Reagan you're worried about nuclear Armageddon.

Go for it."

And supporting me to get through the fear that I had about that.

But never in a way of like, "You must and you should and you have to."

It was all about like, "It's in you."

How can we live at home on planet Earth?

The human race groans under the oppressions of colonialism, war, racism, totalitarianism, and sexism.

Corporate capitalism abuses the poor and exploits the workers while expanding its power through the multinational corporations.

The environment is choked.

What shall we do?

We now declare ourselves for nonviolent revolution.

I grew up in a house with my parents and my big brother and big sister and about eight other people.

We were part of a group called Movement for a New Society which was like an urban commune and we were part of this larger collective of several houses in West Philadelphia really trying to live in a different way.

At its height we had 22 households all scattered right here in this neighborhood and we had 125 people.

We wanted to center on life.

Opposition to the death that was going on under this capitalist imperial military operation that was not a good way for America to keep going.

I had been radicalized by the Vietnam War and was really angry at the way things were going in my country and I'm looking for a community of people that are doing really good things.

The promise was support because everybody was feeling kind of raw and also the ability to be more effective than we could be as individuals in making change for justice and peace.

We all had the same goal of changing how society works.

We had a training program to help people become community organizers and people came from all over the world.

It was really to learn together about the world around us and act in a political nonviolent direct action way.

We lasted almost 20 years which I think is a long time considering the kind of cookery it was bringing raw young people in with stage older people and lots and lots of changes women's movement was happening in those days the gay movement and so We had a mission of working for freedom and justice, but we would also discover beautiful things about ourselves the idea wasn't to homogenize but instead the idea was to glory in our diversity.

As a boy I had a sense that there was tons inside me that I didn't understand but that would have to do with my future and how I could contribute to the world but I was in mystery about so much of it.

In 1974 there was an annual Quakers National Gathering.

Over a thousand people were there and the organizers of the conference had asked Barrett and me to talk about community.

So she spoke first.

She's a wonderful speaker.

It really held the attention of the thousand people.

And then it was my turn.

And then I finally told the truth about my sexuality, that I can love men as well as women.

The place was shocked.

I don't remember it, I was three.

But to this day, I will still run into Quakers who were there, for whom it was like a huge moment.

This was not a time where there was a lot of people coming out, certainly not a lot of married people, and my dad was becoming a pretty well-known Quaker, a leader at that time, and he was risking a lot.

The impact on my life was enormous in terms, personally, of feeling freer and feeling more powerful because I'd done this really hard thing.

There was never a change in my relationship with my dad, because to me he's my dad, and he was always a gay man.

But one of the really wonderful experiences for me was being able to go to gay pride parades with him and with all these uncles and aunties around, just loving me up and feeling at home.

Feeling at home.

- Just as the Civil Rights Movement found the tactic of sitting in, in lunch counters and buses and other places which were segregating against black people, also, we found a tactic, that tactic was coming out.

Homophobic oppression depends upon our cooperation by hiding.

And when we refuse to cooperate and instead come out, it is a contradiction.

Using that tactic over and over and over, people in pulpits in churches, right, coming out.

People in leadership positions coming out.

Every time that's non-cooperating with the bigotry, and it opens a conversation.

It keeps changing people's minds because they can't look away from the reality.

Feel the power of this moment and carry the message to the Capitol.

We will have full human rights for lesbian and gay people.

I've had beautiful relationships since and one of the things that made them more beautiful is that they could be open and people could deal then not with a bogey like homophobia is, a scary scary goblin, but instead the reality of two men who love each other and I'm upset can we really be about people loving each other I love that he sees me as a person who is still growing and he sees himself as a person that's still growing and we need love we need patient attention we need forgiveness but mostly we need each other.

George is good at dancing with history.

He pays attention to what particular issues are happening and then thinks about how social change campaigns can take advantage of that.

Nonviolent direct action is not just something that you're born knowing how to do.

So one of his big passions has been helping people to see that this is something they could step into.

Being an activist a big part is about your heart.

It's about your yearning for justice.

But there are real skills that are really important.

There's a craft in social change.

We become way more powerful, way more effective as social changers when we learn those skills.

So he created a training center called Training for Change.

Training for Change really was a place for him to channel so much of the tools and methodology that he and others around him learned about leading groups and doing training for social change.

And when we turn on to the intentionality inside ourselves and the resource in each other, there will be nothing that can stop us.

For far too many people, they think the world happens to them, as opposed to them happening to the world.

And training helps them to understand that they can flip the script on that and be able to own their own agency and be able to create the changes they need.

Training for change was set up as a series of workshops.

And people came to this house, you know, from all over the world.

They would take all of these trainings and then go back and train their community.

George was often times going to countries in Europe or responding to the most grassroots organizers that wanted training for some of the most radical change work going on in the world.

I don't understand what you're doing.

You're taking over my city.

This is not a real argument.

These are protesters learning how to deal with police and others who may confront them while demonstrating.

We're encouraging people to be their nonviolent best when they're on the streets, even when the pressure's on.

Everywhere I look, it's protesters, protesters, protesters.

George Lakey has been training demonstrators since the 1960s.

We think it gives people some inner confidence so that they can deal non-violently with the events that we haven't thought through in advance so that they can inject as much of spirit as goodwill as possible into that confrontation.

He was really part of helping to think about how do we go to the deeper level?

What's the personal growth that people need to do to take on authority?

A train that goes off the rails can just go off the rails.

And with activists, that's like triply so.

Because we're assholes.

We're rebels.

The goal of training is to increase our learning, not just to practice being a-holes to each other.

The first time that I heard about George, I was still in college at the time, I got invited to go to George's training.

And it was the first time in my entire life that any teacher or educator had ever taught me how to be a better rebel.

George has a fundamental belief that everybody has a role to play and that everyday people can do extraordinary things and it's just a matter of inviting people into their power.

The coal mining industry had chosen in Appalachia to level entire mountains in order to get the coal out of the mountains because it's cheaper for them to dynamite a mountain than to pay workers to do the traditional thing of tunneling into the mountain in order to get the coal.

The amount of destruction and nasty stuff that gets into the streams and the rivers and into the atmosphere.

It was a disastrous course of action that was being financed by banks.

PNC had Quaker roots that it liked to brag about and it claimed to be a green bank.

That really clicked as a thing that we could take on, a financing of this terrible practice.

And the goal was to get PNC to stop lending money to the companies engaged in this.

We borrowed from the Civil Rights Movement the strategic concept of you get something done by campaigning.

We took advantage of a national Quaker conference to recruit Quakers from around the country and then offered trainings in their region so that people could lead their own bank actions.

We had to grow from being able to invade their banks in Philadelphia to several counties, to several states, till by year five we were able to do simultaneous bank actions in 13 states.

DNC has a choice to make.

Invest in the future.

We ended up doing 125 actions.

Do not want to get locked up.

Leave now.

The bank got the message.

This is a group that may be a small group, but they are tenacious.

And they will not let go until we give up.

And we did indeed force PNC Bank to give up this lucrative source of income.

And they even acknowledged that it had to do with the pressure that we put on them.

My mission in life was social change.

But this family, which I thought could comfortably work out alongside this mission, people have a job and people have a family, turned out to be way, way more than that.

Well what didn't make my family unique?

My dad is gay.

My mom is from Norway, so she's an immigrant.

My parents adopted my brother and sister.

They're African American.

My parents are white.

We're Quakers and we lived in a collective household.

Almost every issue of American families got expressed in our family and each of us I think had our own part of seeing that or experiencing that.

When George and I put in an application to adopt we said we were quite willing to take a child of color and we thought we're not prejudiced and we live in a mixed community and that would be alright.

In retrospect I realized that we didn't really understand what that was going to be like for the children.

Christina was a happy child and then had a very very hard time as an adolescent so we went through a lot of the kind of turmoil that that generates.

The way we view the world is totally different I think.

He adopted biracial kids because he doesn't want to have racism in the world but he doesn't understand what it is to be black in America.

He never will.

It's impossible.

He's a white man.

There's no way that that can happen.

Peter did not have a good start in the family that had him first, the foster family, and never got over the anxiety that he brought to us.

He had a very hard life.

He was-- he was a damaged child.

So he had a hard time.

That upsets me to talk about him.

Peter became addicted to alcohol and cocaine.

We got a place for him at a treatment center in Maine.

We got friends to help us pay for it.

It cost an arm and a leg.

But it was like, "Okay, this is gonna have to do this to save his life."

He couldn't hold it together.

Our family has cried and cried and cried over losing my brother.

And we continue to, and it's been, you know, more than 30 years since he's been gone.

I think one of the things that was really important is the way that my parents supported each other.

Even though they had divorced, they were still really good friends, and they were able to support each other in grieving their boy.

Being able to listen to him now as a parent myself and talk about what it was like to to try to figure out what to do for this boy who was suffering so so much and Not being able to save his son It's just such a searing pain that doesn't ever go away This is how I feel about parenting overall with most folks.

You do the best you can with what you got at the time.

There's no book that says, "Hey, when this happens go to page 8, chapter, you know, paragraph 9 and there's the answer."

You just do the best you can.

I think my father made some mistakes with Peter as he has with me as well.

However, he did the best he could do at the time.

I know that he loves us.

You know, I know that he loved Peter and he still has a lot of guilt and grief over Peter's death.

But it was nothing that he could have did one way or the other that would have stopped him from dying the day that he died.

So after my brother died, we decided to plant a tree for my brother in our local park.

It was so beautiful.

And we sang around the tree and we planted some of his ashes with the tree.

And then at Christmas time, we as a family would go and decorate the tree.

We'd put tinsel on it and like, you know, little Christmas balls and stuff as part of our, like, remembering my brother.

There's something powerful about having a living memorial, because it keeps growing and changing, as we do too, even though we've lost this incredibly important person in our lives.

So it's been a real blessing to have that.

[bells ringing] There are alternatives to the paradigm in most cultures that violence is the only way to exert power.

The theory that if you want to win, you have to be willing to hurt people is so incorrect.

as the Flat Earth Theory was once.

Well, we've gotten rid of the Flat Earth Theory.

Now we need to get rid of the violence theory and instead understand that nonviolent power is actually more powerful than violent power.

I first met George when I was a student at Swarthmore College.

He was a visiting professor there.

And I enrolled in his course researching case studies in social movement campaigns that were using nonviolent direct action.

In the U.S.

civil rights movement is kind of, you know, key period that we know some, you know, collective action happened.

But in terms of opening our eyes to the rest of the world, George wanted to show the successes of nonviolent collective action throughout history and across the globe.

I asked them to write up cases for a publicly available database that we would create and put on a website.

And what their job would be, would be to take a case of struggle somewhere in the world, where people went after something or defended themselves against something that was coming at them non-violently.

Every week we each researched and then wrote one case study.

And I remember I did a case study on the apartheid divestment movement from the 80s.

I wrote about case of the occupation of Alcatraz Island by indigenous folks.

I wrote about non-violent action in the Middle East.

Cases about like taking down dictators in different countries.

So it's sort of went across the gambit.

Case after case after case in which people won hard fought struggles non-violently.

We ended up with a database of 1,400 cases from around the world.

The work really exposed social change is happening all around us all the time.

And it offers a really dramatic competing narrative that the world only moves forward with violence and the world only moves forward when people in authority say it's time to change.

It's so empowering to know that the people can act in ways that aren't hurting and killing other people and win.

What's better than that?

[laughs] Being in the spaces that George has created and is part of in the broader movement showed me that, "Oh, there's actually a science and an art to this."

What do we want?

Freedom!

What do we want?

Now!

The crew of us who were part of those experiences at Swarthmore moved to Philly together, and when there was plans to expand fossil fuels in Philadelphia, we got to work knocking on doors and talking to neighbors, and we shut down the largest oil refinery on the East Coast.

We did that as a group of everyday people, just like, you know, the cases in the database gets the goods, as George says.

I'm an organizer with the Sunrise Movement.

Sunrise is a movement of young people that is organizing to tackle the climate crisis.

We're here to say to our politicians, we need you to back a Green New Deal.

The moment that really sent Sunrise into the national sphere was a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi's office in 2018, right after the midterm elections.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are now able to take one of the young women from the floor.

I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you.

A hundred young people took action and it changed the conversation in US politics and affected things that like presidential candidates and like now President Joe Biden was saying.

As president I have a responsibility to act with urgency and resolve when our nation faces clear and present danger and that's what climate change is about.

That kind of action by a small group can be repeated over and over and over.

We will make bigger and bigger and bigger changes because a change in one area inspires people.

This is my favorite place.

Sometimes I come down at night when it's pretty quiet here and reflect on what this building means for me.

This was a building where tremendous innovation happened.

We announced to the king that we were no longer willing to live under his rule.

The very assertiveness.

They put their lives on the line in order to declare independence.

I've made grievous errors in my life.

You know, I'm a mixed bag like anybody else, and like my country is.

I want to give my country the love and affirmation that it needs and deserves, at the same time as acknowledging that we fall short in many ways.

The people who met here, sure, they didn't create utopia.

Left an awful lot of problems still for the rest of us to handle.

But the degree of change that they started inspires me.

Don't give up hope.

You're not alone.

Put one foot in front of the other And lead with love One foot in front of the other And lead with love Whether you're black, you're white, you're urban, suburban, rural, this earth is your home!

[cheers and applause] We're at the end of a week of walking, and so we now arrive today at the headquarters of an eight trillion dollar corporation and what we're saying is you're taking people's retirement money for their future to safeguard on the other hand you're destroying the future.

They can't say that they're investing for our retirement when there won't be a world for us to retire on.

And we refuse to accept failures from business and world leaders.

I lie down in solidarity with those at risk and with those who resist.

[applause] And when I rise, let me rise up like a bird.

Power flees.

I really believe his approach to activism and nonviolent direct action does what King and others really thought strategically about but also philosophically about.

How do you make the general populace have to make a decision about what's right and what's wrong?

George causing folks to interact with his body that's laying down on the street.

People might be annoyed, people are like upset, but there also might be people who see that and start to ask, "Why is this 85-year-old man laying down in the street?"

The hope is that an action like that helps to catalyze something internal with an individual to actually bring about the change.

I think that's so much part of what nonviolent direct action can do in a society.

♪ And when I stand ♪ - It is important to me to allow the feelings of sadness and anger to be experienced by me.

I can't just wish them away.

And I find at such times, it's easy for me to get shaky unless I go to the source of love, unless I look inside myself and also find in others the love that actually is there in abundance.

- We need George Lakies because if we didn't have we'd all be robots serving some masters that decided they were gonna take on the world and make it their own.

The George Lakies in the world create an imagination about what the world could be.

And then gives us the tools, the training, the courage, the encouragement to go make it happen.

- He's not an optimist.

He looks at the world the way it is and can't be optimistic about how things are.

But he's hopeful.

He talks about his life and how he thinks of the work as dancing with history.

Despite how much there is struggle and conflict and difficulty in the work, there's a way in which he can still find joy in living through it and being a part of change.

I think in some ways the largest impact has been on the number of people he's trained.

He's trained thousands of people who have in turn trained others and led movements and campaigns.

Our generation is ready to take back our lives.

That's a big boulder in a lake to make ripples that we can't even see.

When I was 19, I decided my life was to be about social change, about moving society toward justice.

That was to be my mission.

I think he followed his dreams.

And ultimately, I think that's what matters.

George is knocking on nine decades on planet Earth.

His legacy will be how much he loved, and how well he loved.

Love and struggle, love and connection, love and celebration, love and grief.

I think we'll look back and say that he really loved.

[music] Major funding for this program was provided by The Obediah Brown and Sarah Swift Benevolent Fund The Wynkote Foundation The Evergreen Foundation Robert Levering and the Thomas H. and Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

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