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​MM Popular Education and Cultural Organizing Approach

Our approach was developed from decades of on-the-ground work and our own lived experiences. The following is not an "academic" or top-down definition but one that carries the stories and voices of those we have accompanied in this calling that we love. We gladly share this and ask that you credit us as necessary. Connect with us if you have any questions.
© 2016-2024 Movement Matters
Organizing is both art and science. It requires keen strategy and tactics that confront and challenge real world conditions and oppressive powers that harm our communities (lo de afuera). But it also requires that we build new ways of being with one another, ways that model the world we are trying to create (lo de adentro). 

Movement Matters understands that deep organizing, movement building organizing, needs to be built on a foundation of popular education and culture. We cannot sacrifice the internal power for the external. When we do, we build weak institutions and processes that can, at best, win short term incremental change. But we also need to combine internal power with the external in order to see our vision made manifest in the world. Popular education and cultural organizing allow us to connect to our ancestral knowledge and develop the internal group culture to meet these dual needs.
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, non-humans, more-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. It also helps us nurture the internal values and ways of relating to each other to model the world we are trying to create—centering 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.

Popular education draws from the existing culture of members. It learns from and respects the values and rhythms of our ancestors, while also growing through the elements of our inherited culture that cause harm and oppression to our own self and to others. It moves us beyond colonized binaries. It opens a space where everyone can bring their whole self; a space where our names are fully heard, where we are fully seen, where power is decolonized, reconceived, and recreated.

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.
Too often, organizers confuse popular education with political education or art activism. "Top down" political education by organizers can be just as dehumanizing and oppressive as the lessons taught by our dominant institutions. Understanding the liberatory aspects of popular education practice and methodology is a necessary part of the organizers' toolkit. Organizers need to know how to:

⌾  skillfully share knowledge, power and leadership;
⌾  center community members as active co-developers in the learning;
⌾  create and maintain rituals that build transparency, trust, growth, and connection; and
⌾  develop and implement tools (codes, activities, participatory research) that ground collective community-owned analysis.
Popular education and cultural organizing are even more critical in the current moment. We have entered the catastrophic throes of an ecological crisis driven in large part by late-stage capitalism, with all of the inequity and suffering that it brings. The deep damage that we have done to one another, the earth, and the beings that share the world with us demands a radical level of consciousness and reconnection to spirit, nature, land, and water unlike anything we have faced before. Without a process to critically reflect on these experiences and model new ways of being, 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 and cultural organizing offer a way to build this type of long-term vision into our work, even in the midst of multiple existential crises.

​Movement Matters helps our partners incorporate popular education and cultural organizing into their relationship building, constituency building, and power building work. Every step in the organizing process, from an initial door knock to large-scale actions, need popular education and cultural organizing at its foundation. These practices not only deepen the organizing, but also infuse the work with more creativity, joy, and sustainability for the communities and the organizers alike.

We remain committed to approaching Movement Matters' work in this spirit and to helping our partners achieve this depth of work through our technical assistance, training, and accompaniment.

​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 further decolonized and deepened our work with popular education.
To request information about MM's Popular Education and Cultural Organizing approach, connect with us.
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Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC.
We work regionally and with national partners.​
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