Watch: The Revolution Is Love by Ian MacKenzie

Occupy Vancouver, and the larger Occupy Movement of which it is one expression, is a grassroots movement for social, economic, and political change.

Born out of the realization that the global economic and ecological order is eroding everywhere, and that governments appear to be powerless or unwilling to find workable solutions; that inequality is growing rapidly everywhere, and that corporations and the super- rich (the 1%) have achieved almost unfettered power and influence to continue extracting their profits at the expense of the vast majority of working people (the 99%) and global ecosystems—Occupy Vancouver, in solidarity with the global Occupy Movement, seeks fundamental and wide-sweeping change.

While the movement works towards concrete solutions to the problems shared by all the 99%, it offers as a means to this end an open and inclusive process of problem solving and direct democratic exchange via a decentered structure of committees and general assemblies.

This process is dependent upon a public space or “agora” where face-to-face discussion can be engaged in by everyone, at any and all times (the reason for the occupation of public space as the movement’s hallmark). It is the free assembly for meeting each other as equals, and meeting the problems we all face together, that this movement holds at its core (and which its corporate and governmental opposition is most set against).

Working from a place of love and solidarity, the movement recognizes that the only place to begin is with each other.

- Stephen Collis & Ian MacKenzie