Our Story
U HAV POWR came to fruition from one single motivation - being absolutely fed up with witnessing people and the planet suffer under the brutal force of settler colonialism. The story began when a Colombian migrant was driven out of their homeland and forced to seek asylum on stolen Turtle Island at a very young age.
They soon realized growing up in Western civilization comes with its own barriers. Being a witness and survivor of abuse in workplaces, schools, and social spaces for reasons beyond their control, they began to ponder two simple, radical questions.
Why are people and the planet consequentially exploited for merely existing?
Secondly, how can we resist and combat unjustified violence?
These questions turned into a pursuit to understanding the society we live in more critically. These injustices that once felt personal turn out to be part of a global pattern of inexcusable violence. However, it’s been proven time and time again that, collective organization WORKS!
We cultivate power by combatting individualization through centralizing community-led collaboration.
About the Founder
I chose to remain anonymous out of intention - not secrecy. My name and identity are not the story of this initiative, so deviating attention and refocusing it to what really matters is imperative to the mission.
After spending way too long reflecting and letting pessimistic thoughts win, I just couldn’t carry on in my daily life watching people suffer in the most horrific ways for no justified reason. Getting distracted with my own mundane problems like worrying about paying my bills or dealing with medical issues, I found myself justifying my silence and complicity through making excuses that I didn’t have the time, money or resources to make a positive impact on society.
Through critical reflection I realized, this is exactly how processes of individualization perpetuate, and why helping our neighbors seems like such a taboo, self-righteous thing. Those limiting beliefs of assuming I had insufficient time, energy and resources only benefit the same oppressive system that conditioned me and the rest of the world to disconnect and divide each other in such catastrophic ways.
The truth is, you don’t have power because of who you know, who you could be and what you have. You have power because of who you already are. Anonymity is my way of perpetuating and maintaining collective power.
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An ideology and practice centered on conquering, and domination over another sovereign state, nation, or entity through brute force by any means necessary.
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A global economic system built and sustained through consumerism, exploitation, and an imbalanced distribution of power. This system operates and depends on stolen resources, destruction of Indigenous communities, and destruction of the planet.
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The concept that various attributes of a person’s identity such as race, class, gender, and dis/ability shape unique experiences of discrimination and violence. Intersectionality identifies that there is not a single identity that a person attributes to. For example, U HAV POWR are made up of workers. However, apart from being workers, we are daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, students, friends, neighbors, and etc. Recognizing the ways different identities clash is pivotal to the ways we strategically combat colonial institutions.
