About Us

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 month, and we currently have one full-time staff, our Executive Director, Heather Day.

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 (SLEE!) Dinner, a successful event repeated annually. Our next major project was to co-convene a Food Politics Teach-in at Seattle Central Community College in December of 2008. Many of CAGJ’s volunteers and projects today stem from that amazing event!

CAGJ Mission

Community Alliance for Global Justice strengthens the global food sovereignty movement through community education and mobilization.

We build solidarity across movements through grassroots, community-based organizing, and a commitment to ending all forms of oppression. We work to transform unjust trade and agricultural policies and practices imposed by corporations, governments, and foundations. We promote alternatives that embody values of racial, social and environmental justice, collective liberation, solidarity, community self-determination, and ecological health.

CAGJ Strategies

CAGJ organizes for food sovereignty using a racial equity framework prioritizing those most impacted through:

  • Movement building by mobilizing, building leadership, and building relationships through grassroots organizing and international solidarity;
  • Shifting the narrative about food systems to uplift food sovereignty and agroecology through community education, research, analysis, and media outreach.

Check out CAGJ’s 2020 Theory of Change.