community.  expression.  liberation.  movement.


​Popular Education and Cultural Organizing

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 and cultural organizing are transformational. They lie at the roots of values and visions that challenge the status quo of capitalism, racism, misogyny, and supremacy over peoples, other-than-humans, and the earth. They sparked radical social and political change led by peoples in the southern hemisphere. In the US, they are rooted in the Black Southern Organizing Tradition and other movements for change (i.e. the Farm Worker Movement) that have shifted our understanding of what is possible.

Popular education is based on renewing traditions 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.
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Cultural organizing 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 opens a space where every one can bring their whole self; a space where our names are fully heard, where we are fully seen.
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 centers the "learner", recognizing that they have the inherent capacity to understand and transform the world around them. It democratizes the relationships between "teacher" and "student" so that the "student" moves from a passive recipient of information to an actor in the creation of knowledge; bringing their life experience, wisdom, curiosity, and capacity to retell our collective stories in ways that build a framework for deep analysis and action.

​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.
​Popular education and cultural organizing also help us build 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 grown and built with vision and discipline.​​​ Cultural organizing creates a new collective reality within our organizing groups, one based on rituals and ways of being that ground us in our shared journey toward liberation.
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​Popular education and cultural organizing are even more critical in the current environment. Our Black, Native, 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 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 a crisis.
Movement Matters helps our organizing 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, should have 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.

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.
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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