Frustrated by their failure to achieve this end, AQAG members including Scott and Quaker George Willoughby, refashioned the group as the Movement for A New Society in 1971.
Other founding members included Bill Moyer, Berit and George Lakey, Phyllis and Richard Taylor, Lynne Shivers, and Lillian Willoughby.
During the 1970s and early 1980s Philadelphia was the base for weekend, two-week and nine-month programs that trained US and international activists in direct action organizing, group process, consensus decision-making, liberation/oppression issues and more.
MNS members were also active in the anti-nuclear weapons movement, the Pledge of Resistance[2] (anti-US intervention in Central America), feminism, LGBTQ, civil rights, community organizing, and food and worker cooperatives.
MNS was unusual in combining feminist group process, broad analysis of interrelated people's struggles including class and culture, and personal empowerment techniques ranging from music and street theater as political organizing tools to Re-evaluation Counseling.
In turn, MNS was greatly influenced by its association with academics and authors, notably Gene Sharp, nonviolent action theoretician, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution (Cambridge, Mass.
[7] George Lakey, as founder of the Philadelphia-based Training for Change organization, continued to promote nonviolence as a powerful technique for resisting injustice, along with other MNS members Betsy Raasch-Gilman and Erika Thorne.
[11] Other former MNS members (Felice Yeskel, Chuck Collins, Betsy Leondar-Wright, Jerry Koch-Gonzalez,[12] Anne Slepian Ellinger, Christopher Mogil Ellinger) were key in founding and sustaining organizations focused on class issues, such as United for a Fair Economy, Class Action,[13] Bolder Giving,[14] and the Program on Inequality and the Common Good of Institute for Policy Studies.