During its existence, the organization waged a campaign to convince the board and executives of the Honeywell Corporation to convert their weapons manufacturing business to peaceful production.
Marv Davidov, founder of the organization, says that in 1968, Staughton Lynd wrote an article calling for anti-war activists to oppose the Vietnam war by taking the struggle to the corporations that were profiting from it.
The group formed to challenge Honeywell's participation in the Vietnam war specifically, but also to oppose the corporation's military contracts in general.
In its early days the Project sponsored cultural and educational events coupled with large demonstrations outside of Honeywell's corporate headquarters in south Minneapolis.
The Honeywell Project had no formal membership, but the base of the organization was a coalition of secular and religious pacifists, socialists, anarchists, and activists from the anti-war, labor, solidarity movements.
Davidov and a few members of the Catholic Worker Movement began to meet and plan a nonviolent civil disobedience action for November of that year.
The cultural component of these events included musicians and authors such as Utah Phillips, Meridel Le Sueur, Dean Reed[1] and Robert Bly.
The following day the group would hold a mass action at Honeywell's corporate headquarters with places for people risking arrest and supporters.
The largest of these demonstrations took place on October 24, 1983, when thousands of protesters blockaded the entrances to Honeywell's corporate offices for over twelve hours, resulting in the arrests of 577 people.
Honeywell Project members worked in Minneapolis to support a group of white ranchers and Native Americans that called themselves the "Cowboy and Indian Alliance" or "CIA".
Some of the activists that once worked on the campaign against Honeywell, and others, became involved in AlliantACTION, a similar group that conducted weekly vigils outside of Alliant Techsystems' headquarters in Hopkins, Edina, and Eden Prairie, Minnesota, from 1996 to 2011.
AlliantACTION conducted its final weekly vigil on October 5, 2011, after Alliant Techsystems moved its corporate headquarters to Arlington, Virginia.