community.  expression.  liberation.  movement.


​Popular Education and Cultural Organizing

Organizing is both science and art. It requires keen strategy and tactics that confront the 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 and 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, 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.​​​
​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 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 and growth, and
  • develop and implement codes as integral parts of collective community-owned analysis.
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.
OUR CULTURAL ORGANIZING WORK-----------



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More to come, check back soon!
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 with various communities and with national partners.​
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