Where Do We Go From Here?
Boggs Center was founded in 1995 by friends and associates of James Boggs (1919 -1993) and Grace Boggs (1915 - ) to honor and continue their legacy as movement activists
and theoreticians.
Our aim is to help grassroots activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers who can devise pro-active strategies for rebuilding and respiriting our cities
and rural communities from the ground up, demonstrate the power of ideas in changing ourselves, our reality, and demystify leadership.
Board members engage in diverse community building activities: youth leadership development, urban agriculture, environmental justice and more.
Boggs Center is a 501.c3 non-profit community organization. Please send a tax deductible contribution with your ideas for future projects to.
Boggs Center 3061 Field St. Detroit, MI 48214 boggscenter@boggscenter.org
This is our time, our opportunity, to discover what it means to be a human
being and a citizen in the twenty-first century.
”Technological man/woman developed because human beings had to discover how to keep warm, how to make fire, how to grow food, how to build
dams, how to dig wells. Therefore human beings were compelled to manifest their humanity in their technological capacity, to discover the power within them to invent tools and techniques which would extend their material powers.
We have consentrated our powers on making things to the point that we have intensified our greed for more things, and lost the understanding of why this
productivity was originally pursued. The result is that the mind of man/woman is now totally out of balance, totally out of proportion.
“That is what production for the sake of production has done to modern man/woman. That is the basic contradiction confronting everyone who has lived
and developed inside the United States. That is the contradiction which neither the U.S. government nor any social force in the United States up to now has
been willing to face, because the underlying philosophy of this country, from top to bottom, remains the philosophy that economic development can and will resolve all political and social problems.”
Ch. 6 - Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century by James and Grace Lee Boggs
"All over the world today we are obviously living in that in-between period of historical time when great numbers of people are aware that we cannot
continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. I am constantly impressed by the number of people from all
walks of life who once they take time to think about it realize that community is the key to our survival as individuals and as a nation and who also suspect that our communities are being destroyed by the global economy"
"The alternative is to build resistance to the global economy by producing for our own needs, growing our own food and producing our own clothing and
shelter in environmentally-friendly worker-owned and cooperative enterprises, thus setting an example of productive work for our youth and at the same time creating community and empowering people."
"Thus quietly but unmistakably out of the devastation created by de-industrialization and years of grasping at straws by an administration
unprepared for corporate abandonment, a new concept of economics as if people, communities, nature and spirit matter is emerging in the center of the
First World as it is emerging at the grassroots level in Africa and Bangledesh."
Ch 9 - Living For Change, Grace Lee Boggs Autobiography
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