Issue 47 | August 2026

Earlier this year, we gathered with hundreds of artists, organizers, and cultural workers for Artists Against Authoritarianism, a training led by USDAC and our friends at Beautiful Trouble.

Together, we explored a simple question: What role can artists play in resisting authoritarianism?

Of course, there isn’t one single tactic, but a whole constellation of work we can do: build courage, shift public imagination, and prepare people to act together.

Now, we’re gathering to build on that conversation and ask “what can artists do as the election approaches?”

This workshop takes place at Tuesday, August 18, 7:00–9:30 PM ET and will focus on five strategic roles artists and cultural workers can play in the months surrounding the election: 1. Fight, 2. Win, 3. Prove, 4. Enforce, 5. Sustain.You will learn specific tactics artists can use to build these strategies in your own community.

There is no easy way to begin this, so I will begin directly.

Greaterthan Collective — seventeen members, spread across four continents, doing work we deeply believed in — has been in a process of composting for the past months, and will formally cease to exist as a global collective. We are sad. We are also, in the way that comes when something long-unresolved finally finds its form, relieved. Both things are true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

If you are reading this and this is news to you, that is by design — we have been living inside this process while continuing to show up to the world, which has not been easy. Greaterthan has been part of many of your networks, your thinking, possibly your work. It shaped ours. What we owe you, and ourselves, is honesty about what happened and what is continuing.

In 2025, after more than a year of the partners investing significant time and energy to find a path forward, Greaterthan sought external support from Miki Kashtan and the Nonviolent Global Liberation community. The process they facilitated — Convergent Facilitation — held the collective in something different from what we had been able to hold for ourselves: the experience of every member's truth being genuinely heard before any decision was made.

What emerged from that process was a shared understanding that Greaterthan as a global collective could not continue in its current form. The decision, reached with grief and with care, was to compost.

From this transition, two new regional collectives have emerged: Common Ground in Europe, and Greaterthan Aotearoa in New Zealand. Others are continuing ventures Working Together and with Intention Studio, and many of us are continuing independently, in informal collaborations. The work lives on, in different containers.
Over the next weeks you’ll see a number of shifts in our space - including the shift of the website with associated links to the work being carried forward and the new emerging. One thing will remain as is - this newsletter, The Weekender. Ashish and Susan have committed to continuing to write weekly, occasionally with some guest voices from other spaces.