Media shapes what we think is possible. It shapes our dreams while we sleep. It creates meaning we act on while awake. During this collective moment of extensive grief, anger and injustice, we as cultural workers must continue creating images, sounds, stories in ways that commits us to the future we want to wake up in; stories with memory and vision; stories that hold us, deepen us, and propel us towards action.
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​​We know all too well the rampant disinformation, silencing, and fear mongering that dominant media is unleashing onto our communities during this moment: a hyperfocus on crime and the need for police, an erasure of the real stories of excluded and “essential” workers, and mischaracterizations of campaigns that call to #CancelRent, #DefundThePolice, and #ExtendTheMoratorium.​
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​We recognize this type of media as a tactic of people in power within a larger strategy to remain in power and minimize the urgency for dissent. We recognize the impacts of this superficial and disconnected storytelling: retraumatization, memory loss, hopelessness, escapism. This tactic is not restricted to the US. We see the manufacturing of imperialist interests disguised as a call to revolution in the coverage of Cuba and other Caribbean and Latin American countries. We see a complete lack of coverage of African nations, unless there is sensationalistic violence that is reported without context. 
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​​Building on tools and frameworks from across our movement, Our Stories, Our Meaning: Advanced Community Media Studio will be an online space for content creators who are already using their craft as a tool to challenge power to focus on:

1. Developing their story and world building for a particular project,
2. Integrating popular education tools to assure community members can participate in story creation, and
3. Planning for the strategic distribution of their work to advance community needs.

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​​MM’s Advanced Community Media Studio is ideal for cultural workers and organizers who are developing a specific media project alongside a community organization or community formation. Four online studio sessions will take place between October 1st and October 29th. The first two sessions will be all-day hands-on trainings, the third session will be 1-on-1's with participants and our studio leads, and the last session will be dedicated to presenting and receiving feedback on specific projects.
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Popular education is critical to the organizing process. Deep, sustainable constituency building and member development can't happen without it; yet it is often misunderstood. Movement Matters has made popular education an integral part of our week-long Organizing Institute,  but we have also realized that organizers are hungry for more and deeper opportunities to learn, practice, and cross-pollinate their skills in this area.

In our September 2021 Advanced Popular Education Training, participants will to learn how to:

• integrate popular education into ongoing organizing practices;
• ground ritual and culture as part of the popular education process to build internal group power;
• develop relevant codes and workshops that deepen constituent engagement and analysis with organizing issues; and
• Understand their own capacity and continued growth to move and center constituent engagement work.

​​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.

​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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For more information or to register, visit:
Advanced Training Series.
We look forward to building with you!
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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 region. Changing demographics in the Washington, DC area 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. The region’s growth and prosperity are touted while Black and Brown neighborhoods are destroyed, new development pushes communities to the fringes, racial wealth and income gaps increase, and institutions critical to the culture and survival of low-income communities are undermined. 

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.

Movement Matters grounds our Advanced Facilitation Training in this constituency building context, lodged within our own community organizing framework. In October 2018, we brought together 24 participants representing 12 regional organizations to connect the theoretical role that facilitation and meetings play as the “spine” of the organizing process with practical skills to create more dynamic meetings. 
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​We engaged in activities that increased participants’ abilities to utilize physical movement and graphics in their facilitation, reframe and redirect comments to deepen participants’ engagement with a theme, and incorporate activities that create strong relationships of action among members.  

Movement Matters staff modeled these tools and approaches to facilitation throughout the training, allowing participants to experience the process and its impact as they honed their own skills.

We are already actively working with several participating organizations to incorporate the skills and approaches from the training into their organizing work. For example, Movement Matters is helping the tenant organizing team at LEDC build a structure for their city-wide multi-lingual, multi-racial tenant leadership group that is based in liberatory approaches to group learning and identity. We are also helping to strengthen the organizers’ utilization of graphic facilitation and meeting design to move away from a lecture style of training and group building. This tenant leadership group is also leading the development of DC's first tenant union, which will launch the Summer of 2019. We are engaged in similar conversations and practice with several other local groups to help them tweak and/or revamp their constituency building practice through enhanced meeting design and facilitation.

As we reflect on this training, we are envisioning ways to strengthen and expand the content. We expect to repeat this curriculum on a regular basis with organizers from the DC area and other regions throughout the country.

The increasing structural assaults our communities are facing demand our visionary and strategic best, as well as a strong dose of courage. Movement Matters continues our process of inquiry, learning, accompanying, and building the local landscape of organizing and community leadership for equity and change. We developed our new Advanced Training Series to provide a stimulating, inspiring action space where seasoned local organizers, popular educators, and community leaders can stretch their knowledge and skills, renovate their spirit, grow with their peers, and plan their work ahead—all at a complicated time when many organizers and community leaders are weighed down and struggling to maintain energy, focus, and vision.

“Changing and controlling meaning” around our issues has been a key area of challenge for local groups and initiatives in the last ten years, a fact that has a direct negative impact on local base building efforts and policy and implementation campaigns. In August, Movement Matters completed our first advanced organizer training: Communications, Media Tools, and Strategies. The 2-day training, attended by 23 participants representing 16 DC area and national organizations, provided a theoretical grounding in media and communications as liberatory tools to combat dominant messaging that reinforces inequity and powerlessness in our communities. 

This first advanced training was also grounded in Movement Matters’ own community organizing framework. It connected various aspects of communications and media work to the core organizing competencies of: relationship building, constituency building, and power building. Participants gained an understanding of how each of these organizing competencies can be strengthened by strong communication strategy and media development, and how to begin incorporating these tools and techniques into to their current programmatic and campaign work. 
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As importantly, we created a learning and action space that encouraged participants and facilitators to wrestle, question, integrate, and grow both personally and as organizers/popular educators. Expressive arts, decolonization, ally building, trust building, personal story sharing, and altar building were some of the training elements that helped participants draw out their own experiences, open themselves to learning in community, challenge and teach each other, and claim their space and voice.
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​With the success of the training and requests for support and next steps, we have already begun capacity building conversations with several participants/organizations to help them develop and implement systems that incorporate new skills and practices into their ongoing organizing and base building work. The creation and development of cross-organizational “action coalitions” has been one of the key areas of Movement Matters’ work in the last ten years. With this vision in mind, we are equally excited and ready to build on participant interest in bringing various groups together to develop a joint, intersectional media and communications project that will highlight resident voice and issues in the District and begin to change meaning around our issues. More to come on that.

We are also gearing up for the next training in our Advanced Training Series, focusing on facilitation skills and group process for organizing. This training will ground participants in the necessary skills and theory to create gathering spaces that serve as a foundation for the individual transformation, creation of group identity, deepening of consciousness, and moving to action that drive movement-based organizing work.

Adelante/we move forward.

For more information or to register, visit:
Advanced Training Series.
We look forward to building with you!