Both of us have been shaped by years of organizing the young, homeless people, and working-class African Americans and Latinas. After each spending more than a decade building different organizations in San Francisco, we teamed in 2012 up to interview more than 150 organizers and activists in some of the most active social-movement struggles across the country. One of the themes that emerged from our conversations is that although movement activists often use the same words, what we mean by those words can vary from person to person.

No wonder we have a hard time communicating with each other.

Strategy is one of many words with conflicting definitions. The word with which strategy most often gets intertwined is tactics. Sometimes these two words are used interchangeably. Sometimes strategy is seen as little more than the accumulation of tactics. Other times, strategy is seen as one front in a larger campaign. While we are not proposing that Webster’s Dictionary deploy observers in movement spaces to rule on semantic conflicts, any process of developing movement-wide strategy demands a shared agreement on the meaning of the term. For the purpose of this article, we offer the following definition of strategy: a plan to navigate shifting terrain to accomplish defined objectives which create openings to achieve a larger goal.