Popular education is transformational.

Popular education is more critical than ever in our current political moment. 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.

Popular education is foundational to move issue-based organizing to long-term movement building.  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.

​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.

Movement Matters' Advanced Popular Education Training will help participants develop the theoretical understanding and concrete skills to incorporate popular education as a foundational aspect of their community organizing practice.​ This online training will combine "in person" virtual sessions with individual "homework" and "one-on-one accompaniment" to allow participants to both learn new skills and put them immediately into practice.
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​For more information on our Advanced Trainings or to bring an Advanced Training to your organization, 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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Movement Matters began offering Community Healing and Action Circles (CHACs) in the summer of 2020 with the recognition that community members leading campaigns to support and create change are lacking spaces to heal and grow together. 

Our first series of CHACs was developed for laid-off restaurant workers who continue to organize themselves as they fight for the rights of their families and communities. These community leaders asked for a space to mourn the current moment, to heal and deepen their resilience, to care for themselves and their bodies given their limited resources and access to nature, and to build their public speaking skills as community leaders at the forefront. 

We create spaces of radical joy, reflection, and trust building by using culture, expressive arts (including dance, movement and theater), breath work, self-massage, medicinal plants, ritual, story creation and story telling to center healing, self-care/self-regulation, resiliency, and the decolonizing of voice, microphones, and 'public speaking' in its entirety.

Our current series includes:

CHAC 1 & 2: Breath, Movement, & Voice
CHAC 3 & 4: Movement, Yoga, & Story Creation
CHAC 5 & 6: Healing Traditions, Chinese Medicine, & Self Care

The Community Healing and Action Circles are intentionally structured to build resilience within a community context. Participants are not just isolated individuals, but leaders of change efforts who are deeply connected to their constituencies. We mindfully cultivate each session to meet the emerging needs of the work, campaigns, and the broader membership of participants, ensuring that healing and capacity building are being integrated into the larger organizing community.

We partnered with the DC Urban Sustainability Administration and Washington Parks & People, and have been holding these live, COVID safe, physically-distanced sessions at the Columbia Heights Green garden. We thank the Junte Comunitario Virtual and its community leaders in Puerto Rico for providing us with the safest strategies for in-person sessions during COVID times. We have moved the sessions online for the winter.

The CHACs are being developed in conjunction with our Learning & Action Circles and our Dismantling Anti-Blackness Among People of Color work, both of which are oriented toward organizers and professional staff.
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​For more information on our Healing & Action Circles, 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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Dynamic Demonstrations is the fourth and (for now) final online case example we created to support and inspire organizers, advocates, and community leaders during Covid19 and the current economic and racial upheavals.

Most of our tactics for change require a physical presence. As Covid19 continues to restrict our ability to gather, we have to find creative ways to put pressure on decision-makers. At the same time, we need to engage our members in actions, even when they can't be physically present. Many of our partner groups are combining limited in-person actions and artivism to create dynamic demonstrations. Layering in deeper member engagement and ownership of the arts development process can take these actions to the next level and build long-term membership and capacity alongside short-term political impact.

​We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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Getting Tenants in Rhythm is the third of four online case examples we created to support and inspire organizers, advocates, and community leaders during Covid19 and the current economic and racial upheavals.

Engaging community members where they live is a vital part of the organizing process. Even when we are limited in how we can gather, a building can be the cornerstone for developing community resistance and resilience. We have seen many examples of using pots and pans to create noise and show solidarity. With additional coordination, arts, and cultural elements, these actions can bring in new members, deepen constituency, and showcase the narrative of a campaign. 

​We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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Strengthening Networks is the second of four online case examples we created to support and inspire organizers, advocates, and community leaders during Covid19.

​Engaging new members of loose networks and building relationships of trust and action with them and among them are key to creating a long lasting, active constituency; one that shares values, a vision for change, and the energy and focus to lead in making that change.

​We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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As we continue to work closely with campaigns and other organizing projects during Covid19 we have been advising groups and organizers on how to adapt cultural organizing and deep constituency building to current physical distancing requirements—ensuring that the voices and leadership of community members are at the forefront of demands, actions, and solutions.

We developed our newest online tool to support and inspire groups during a critical time; to animate ideas that lean on creativity and perseverance so we can continue building  constituency and grassroots power to make change. Cultural Organizing While Physical Distancing: Petition Drop is the first of 4 case examples we will be sharing over the next month.

We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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Colleague - comrade - compx:

:  We stand with those who are protesting.
:  We stand with those who can’t join the protests but want to.
:  We stand with organizers.
:  We stand with our Black families and communities.

We stand steadfast in our belief in and support of actions and expressions of rage and grief. We stand steadfast in our belief in and support of long term organizing and building institutions led by those most impacted by oppression and injustice. We stand steadfast in our belief in and support of movement building that envisions and enacts new ways of being and new ways of challenging anti-Blackness and white supremacist culture at an individual and organizational level. These beliefs are more critical in this moment than they have ever been; when the weapons of the state are being used to murder and silence Black lives, when Indigenous lives are destroyed for oil and profit, when immigrants are kept in cages, when Black trans women and men are brutally killed, when Asian-Americans are attacked and scapegoated for the Corona virus. The direction of our work has not changed, it has just become more urgent.

Increased unemployment assistance is no longer the goal, universal basic income is. Rent remediation is no longer the goal, cancelling the rent is. Police accountability is no longer the goal, police abolition is. Let’s find deeper ways to engage with each other, with our communities, and with our work. Let’s find ways to transform these moments of protest and consciousness into long term capacity to organize for audacious demands. To meet the moment, our campaigns need to shift from short term, small incremental change to bold structural transformation.

We love each of you who have been part of our network, of our community, of our home. We are with you to grieve, to rage, to strategize, and to build. You carry us forward as we find our way to be of most use at this time. Continue to be with us. Since Covid 19 we have been experimenting with different ways to hold space where appropriate, and to support others where we can. Join us when it feels right and possible. Call on us when you need to. Challenge us to do more/better when we need to.

Keep fighting. Keep struggling. Keep feeling. Keep taking care of yourselves. We see you.

~ Movement Matters
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This past Summer 2019, Movement Matters created and facilitated a weeklong Community Organizing Institute for Latinx immigrant youth in the DC area. Training youth is different than training staff organizers. It engages us differently, challenges us, offers new perspectives on our work, and keeps us on our toes. Flexibility and responsiveness became key parts of the week.

The Youth Organizing Institute allowed us the opportunity to deepen our use of arts and theater/movement based activities to engage young people in deep reflection on the issues they face in their schools, jobs, and community. We explored power dynamics and how they are used to reinforce the status quo. We grappled with the role of race in creating divisions among youth, as well as common experiences that could be built upon. In each of these discussions, we integrated the need for structural change. And in order to create this change, the need for a strong youth voice, for cohesive relationships, for bold action, for organizing.

There is much work that is still to be done. The deep conversations throughout the week meant we spent less time than we anticipated on some of the core organizing skills we hoped to cover. We touched on the need for relationship building, but didn’t get to practice some of the essentials of outreach and one-on-ones. We talked about the need to challenge power, but only touched on the tools for conducting target analysis and building strategic campaigns. These became the guideposts for our current work, not just in trainings with Movement Matters, but in our ongoing engagement with the organizations that brought youth to the Institute.
 
These organizations included CASA de Maryland, the Latino Youth Leadership Council, and Many Languages One Voice. It was truly exciting to bring youth from various organizations across the region together to ground themselves in a common experience, build relationships of action, and begin to envision a broader immigrant youth movement in the DMV—​especially in this urgent moment.  Through our ongoing work with these groups, and our partnership with the Meyer Foundation to expand the number of organizations focusing on youth voice and power, we are excited to continue to build knowledge and commitment to youth organizing.  We plan to build on this process and expand the circle of organizations and young people learning and creating change together.

​​Movement Matters is currently scheduled to conduct a 4-day Youth Organizing Institute in Long Island, New York this April 2020.

Registration is now open for our 2020 Community Organizing and Popular Education Institute.

Five days of deep immersion into the mechanics and heart of relationship building, constituency building, and power building for change and equity.

Movement Matters is convening six local organizing groups and their community leaders to investigate key players in local DC politics; research who influences these decision-makers, how they wield this influence, and its impact on efforts to create change. ​

In our engagement with local organizers over the last year, two key themes emerged: 
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For more information on Movement Matters' Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects,
​connect with us.​

Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC.
We work regionally with various communities and with national partners.
​