Thank you for your interest in Community Alliance for Global Justice!  We are a grassroots, membership-based organization in Seattle.  CAGJ’s dedicated volunteers contribute their skills, time and money to work for a just local and global economy.  CAGJ has three programs: Food Justice Project, AGRA Watch and Trade Justice - please see each program’s page for more information!  CAGJ is led by a Steering Committee that meets every other month, and we have one part-time staff person.

CAGJ History

CAGJ was founded by Seattle-area activists who helped to organize the historic shutdown of the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999.  We strive to carry on the protests’ legacy of effective and creative collective action for global justice.  We aim to work in solidarity with the powerful social movements of the Global South who continue to inspire us with their growing resistance to the corporate-driven economic model - a model pushed by the US, Europe, and a transnational corporate elite.    Organizing across the hemisphere, together we defeated the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) thanks largely to the mobilization of huge numbers of Latin Americans who answered with an emphatic No! to an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement. CAGJ played an important role in nearly defeating the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) when we helped to build the coalition in WA State that succeeded in getting all of WA’s Democratic Representatives in Congress to vote against the deal.

While we continue to monitor the institutions promoting corporate globalization, today CAGJ is focusing on building positive alternatives to corporate control by supporting the movements for healthy local food economies here and everywhere.  In 2007 we began this work by organizing the Strengthening Local Economies, Everywhere Fair and Dinner, a successful event repeated in 2008.  Our next major project is to co-convene a Food Politics Teach-in at Seattle Central Community College in December of 2008.  We welcome everyone to help us build this movement for global justice!

CAGJ Vision

Community Alliance for Global Justice is an alliance of individuals and organizations working in Seattle and the region who believe the global economy should embody the core values of social justice, environmental sustainability, democracy and self-determination.

CAGJ Mission

We aim to transform the global economy by identifying local and global impacts of trade and monetary institutions, by using education, grassroots mobilization, media and legislative strategies, and by building solidarity across diverse movements.

What We Do

Community Education

Organizing workshops, guest speakers, film screenings, and study groups, we offer the community information about corporate globalization, its local impacts (including on the food we eat!), and the economic and agricultural alternatives we have as resources for resisting it. We seek to connect folks in the Puget Sound area with their local farms and food producers by organizing farm tours and our annual community gathering, the Strengthening Local Economies Everywhere Fair and Dinner.

Grassroots Organizing

We build solidarity with allied organizations, mobilize locally through citizen outreach and consultation, and train new leaders to enact social change in their communities. We seek to empower individuals and communities to create and participate in alternative economic and agricultural models.

Research and Analysis

We are involved with ongoing research in the areas of corporate globalization, local economies, sustainable agriculture, food justice and access, immigration and labor rights, and trade policy and fair-trade alternatives.  Together with our allies, we are currently involved in the exciting project of crafting an analysis of the local foods movement by connecting it to specific issues of global injustice and out-sized corporate power.

Media Outreach

By providing a thoughtful analysis to journalists and writing op-eds and letters-to-the editor, we give voice to an alternative vision of local and global development.