vision. learning. integration. transformation.
We do a disservice to our communities when we don't intentionally create healthy group dynamics and lead with the values we are trying to cultivate. Movement Matters' Advanced Trainings really helped me develop the skills I use on a daily basis to ground my work in an approach that builds rooted, sustainable organizing.
Victoria Gonçalves,
Advanced Trainings & Technical Assistance Alumni.
Advanced Trainings & Technical Assistance Alumni.
Advanced Training Series
Our Advanced Trainings engage seasoned organizers, community leaders, community workers, and advocates. Anchored in Movement Matters' organizing framework (relationship building, constituency building, and power building), these three-day, two-day, and one-day learning and planning sessions move beyond fundamentals to provide an instructive and challenging space that deepens each participant’s vision, skills, and capacity. Each advanced training also provides dedicated opportunities for integration and alignment to participants’ current programmatic goals and/or campaign strategies.
Movement Matters is committed to the use of a values-based approach to organizing and movement building that is intersectional, anti-oppression, anti-colonial, and anti-racist. Our educational approach and capacity building framework are firmly based in popular education, cultural organizing, and other liberatory pedagogies with the ultimate goal of transforming not only the outcome of our work but also the process by which we do it.
We ask that each participant come prepared to re-examine and move past their own discomfort to fully participate in our liberatory, creative/arts-based, non-linear, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, transformational learning and action spaces.
All Advanced Trainings participants are required to complete a capacity questionnaire/registration form, and/or be part of a 1-on-1 prior to the trainings to ensure that we understand your capacity building needs, how to support your work, and how to tailor the trainings. Space is limited.
Movement Matters is committed to the use of a values-based approach to organizing and movement building that is intersectional, anti-oppression, anti-colonial, and anti-racist. Our educational approach and capacity building framework are firmly based in popular education, cultural organizing, and other liberatory pedagogies with the ultimate goal of transforming not only the outcome of our work but also the process by which we do it.
We ask that each participant come prepared to re-examine and move past their own discomfort to fully participate in our liberatory, creative/arts-based, non-linear, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, transformational learning and action spaces.
All Advanced Trainings participants are required to complete a capacity questionnaire/registration form, and/or be part of a 1-on-1 prior to the trainings to ensure that we understand your capacity building needs, how to support your work, and how to tailor the trainings. Space is limited.
To the best of our abilities, we gladly work on a sliding scale with individuals and groups that need the support.
Manual, art materials, and healthy meals and snacks are included.
Manual, art materials, and healthy meals and snacks are included.
The Movement Matters Advanced Trainings gave me concrete ideas to build from, especially with more creative approaches to centering community members in our work. Being in a room full of people who also believe in our cause gave me further inspiration and bravery to take risks.
Advanced Trainings Participant.
Our Stories, Our Meaning:
Advanced Community Media Studio©The stories we tell about ourselves, each other, our struggles and our victories frame our understanding of what we believe is possible. When we can communicate beyond campaign slogans, we open space for people to connect with our work emotionally and be driven to action from a place that feels purposeful. To create story and meaning alongside our members is to honor and integrate into our organizational narrative the intimate relationship between the work, member needs, and our collective desire for the future; it is to see each other in the world we are striving for.
Community media challenges, reframes, and goes beyond the narratives broadcast into our communities about what we are capable and deserving of. It is a tactical art form produced by communities for the purposes of building trust, deepening our analysis and commitment, inciting popular imagination, and pressuring public officials. In a culture where we are conditioned to produce, consume, and repeat, community media asks us to be intentional about our process of production.
Community media creates the space for us to process, understand, and articulate our relationship to the work we are doing, while also presenting outward-facing meaning from our collective findings. Movement Matter’s community media production is rooted in our approach to popular education; which decolonizes and re-creates our context and analysis to guide the external change we are creating in the world (lo de afuera). It also helps us create the internal values and ways of relating to each other to model the world we are trying to create (lo de adentro).Movement Matters' Advanced Community Media Studio© is a space for organizers and community media producers to develop a media project for a specific campaign or organizational need with the support of our facilitators and feedback from other active organizers and producers.
During each studio session we dedicate time to ground our media production in Movement Matters’ community organizing framework, connecting various aspects of communications and media work to the core organizing competencies of: relationship building, constituency building, and power building. Participants will be guided through tools they can apply in their organizations to ongoing narrative development and future media projects.
This online studio will combine in-person virtual sessions, individual media projects, and 1-on-1 accompaniment to allow participants to both learn new skills and put them immediately into practice.Transforming Vision, Power, and Leadership:
Advanced Popular Education©
Popular education is transformational.
It lies at the roots of values and visions that challenge the status quo of capitalism, racism, supremacy, and misogyny over peoples, other-than-humans, and the earth. It sparked radical cultural and political change led by peoples in the southern hemisphere. In the US, it is rooted in the Black Southern Organizing Tradition and other movements for change (i.e. the Farmworkers’ Movement) that have shifted our understanding of what is possible.
Popular education is based on practices that span generations. It emerged as a foundation based on culture, ritual, practices and procedures used by peoples to care for and maintain their communities; to deepen their consciousness and skills. Popular education is ancestral knowledge. It is grounded in culture and living stories; in the ways that our communities are already communicating and connecting, sharing knowledge, and building resilience and resistance. Deep change, driven by a liberatory vision and rooted in the people, has always had popular education at its heart.Popular education decolonizes and re-creates our context and analysis to guide the external change we are creating in the world (lo de afuera). It also helps us create the internal values and ways of relating to each other to model the world we are trying to create (lo de adentro)—centering tradition, culture, nature, and spirit. Throughout these internal and external processes, popular education recognizes the inherent knowledge and capacity that each of us brings to the table, making a seat for everyone, and protecting what is built with vision and discipline.
Cultural organizing, facilitation/animation, group process, and collective healing in community are all integral parts of popular education. Creating the space for community members to center their individual and collective experiences, to share and deepen structural analysis about the problems they face, and to build a common identity around a shared vision is necessary for transformative organizing that builds beyond a short-term campaign. It is foundational to move issue-based organizing to long-term movement building. Popular education is even more critical in the current environment. Our Black, Indigenous, Brown, immigrant, LGBTQ+, low-income, and working class communities face significant changes in their material conditions as a result of the Covid crisis. Without a process to critically reflect on these experiences, many community members will only engage to meet their most immediate needs; our ability to stake out a visionary claim on the future and to build lasting relationships to achieve it will be lost. Popular education offers a way to build this type of long-term vision into our organizing work, even in the midst of a crisis.
*We acknowledge and thank Elder Daira Elsa Quiñones Preciado, Afro-Colombian human rights leader, artist, healer, and founder of AMDAE, for her guidance as we decolonized and deepened our work with popular education.*
No Base, No Leaders, No Change:
Advanced Facilitation, Meeting Design, and Planning©Base-building is a crucial foundation of community organizing and one of the most challenging areas of growth currently faced by groups throughout the DMV and beyond. Changing demographics in the region have meant that a privileged, politically savvy population is advancing policies, practices, and priorities that devalue the experiences and contributions of long-time low-income communities of color.
In the face of these dynamics, our organizations and communities will be powerless without a cohesive and well-developed base that shares a rooted analysis and has built the trust and discipline to react as a united group. Well-designed, consistent gathering places, and the reflective and skilled facilitation of them, are irreplaceable steps in developing this type of constituency. However, these essential skills are often overlooked as expendable "soft" components of organizing.
Far from being a luxury, effective meetings and skilled facilitation are vital in building a sense of common identity and cohesion necessary to transform a group of individuals into a constituency that can envision change and take the necessary risks to attain it. These ensuing ‘relationships of action’ drive movement-based organizing work.
We ground our Advanced Facilitation, Meeting Design and Planning training in this constituency building context, lodged within our own community organizing framework. It connects the theoretical role that facilitation and meetings play as the “spine” of the organizing process with practical skills to create more dynamic meetings.
Applying What We Learn: MM Learning and Action Circles
We heard clearly from our alumni that there is a strong need for anti-oppression spaces for organizers, popular educators, and community leaders in the DC DMV region to continue building our skills and apply what we learn on an ongoing basis.
In response, we launched Movement Matters' Learning and Action Circles (LACs). We envision these spaces as a shared workshop where each participant can bring their ongoing projects and have the opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas with peers, access resources, get support in planning and implementation, and deepen their own skills. These sessions are also aligned to continue the learning from our Community Organizing & Popular Education Institute and our Advanced Training Series.
In response, we launched Movement Matters' Learning and Action Circles (LACs). We envision these spaces as a shared workshop where each participant can bring their ongoing projects and have the opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas with peers, access resources, get support in planning and implementation, and deepen their own skills. These sessions are also aligned to continue the learning from our Community Organizing & Popular Education Institute and our Advanced Training Series.
To request information about MM's Advanced Trainings, or to request an Advanced Training in your area, connect with us.
Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC.
We work regionally with various communities and with national partners.
We work regionally with various communities and with national partners.
