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As we assess the state of the world at this moment in history, it’s undeniable that our work to transform society needs to be wholly braided with the transformation of individuals and communities. Deep liberatory practices of culture, ritual, and relationship must be embedded within our organizing practice to model and inspire new ways of being, of relating, of communing. Rigorous liberatory analysis of the conditions of our world, grounded in the lived experiences of our members, must be the basis for our long-term vision and action. This transformative view of organizing comes out of an approach rooted in decolonized popular education and movement building. Movement Matters practices this type of transformational organizing in every aspect of our capacity building work. The creation of transformative spaces is hardwired into our training methodology, practice, and content. It serves as an anchor for the work we co-develop with our grassroots partners and in our accompaniment of their organizers, members, staff, and leaders. It guides how we engage funders who are expanding the horizons of their work. We are also constantly seeking to learn from and highlight peers who explicitly incorporate this approach into their work. Transformational organizing is a lens through which we explore how people envision, how they build, how they sustain. As we continue nurturing this crucial work, we want to hear from you! Share your stories of building culture, of incorporating community arts in organizing, of connecting people’s experiences to a transformative vision of the world to come. We hope you enjoy and are moved by our stories of accompaniment of this work within our spheres. We wish you many moments of ease and restoration, joy and laughter as we move through the difficult months ahead. -The Movement Matters Team 
Artist: Harriet Lenneman
Community Organizing & Popular Education InstituteThe application process is now open for our weeklong, in-person Community Organizing and Popular Education Institute. Based on Movement Matters' unique field-developed curriculum and nationally recognized training and facilitation style, the Organizing Institute provides an instructive, challenging learning and action space that deepens participants' vision, skills, and capacity. There will be additional 2.5 hour virtual pre-Institute and post-Institute Learning and Action Circles (LACs) to ensure the learning and integration of the materials. MM's training approach is also grounded in somatics, expressive arts, story-sharing, and ritual practices that engage participants' bodies and minds so that they can more fully experience the training content. For more information on our 2025 Organizing Institute or to bring an Organizing Institute to your city or region, connect with us. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally with various communities and with national partners. Movement Matters has supported the work and development of labor unions throughout our history - through direct contracts to help locals strengthen their internal systems, the development of strategic campaign plans, and anchoring labor-community coalitions. We have watched with enthusiasm as labor has seen a resurgence throughout the US in recent years. We have also worried at the lack of consistent practices in many unions to build deep and robust member-leadership, not only for issues on the shop floor, but to meet the broader political moment. Our long relationship with 1199SEIU has been a joyful and verdant one in which we have been able to help shape evolving mechanisms for building just this type of member-leadership. Members of 1199 staff have been attending Movement Matters trainings for years, allowing us to build a strong relationship of trust and a common understanding of decolonized popular education and base building. When 1199 staff recognized the need to engage their members in a better understanding of and context for the union’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza, they began to put into place a series of “teach-ins” to engage members around the issue. The Movement Matters team helped to equip 1199 staff with concrete ideas and coaching for how to facilitate these sessions and productively engage in values based conflict de-escalation. 1199’s instinct to use this moment to engage their members in critical reflection and learning is a great example of the steps that are needed to more fully engage labor in a broader movement building. 1199 organizers also recognize the need to more fully embed popular education practices throughout their member engagement. Movement Matters and 1199 organizers prepared an introductory popular education skill-building workshop as part of 1199’s staff convening in Philadelphia this summer. During this workshop, 1199 organizers were able to more deeply understand and discuss how to bring popular education principles into their regular meeting spaces with members. This was a first step in expanding an internal 1199 audience to the principles and practice learned in Movement Matters trainings. We are already planning for a new set of sessions with 1199 staff and members focused on the integration of healing and community care in their membership development practice. We look forward to continuing this relationship and this process, helping 1199 (among a host of other unions) to lead the way in building radical, transformational union organizing. Connect with us for more information about our Technical Assistance and Training work. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. 
Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Roshi, is an author of two books, a maverick spiritual teacher, master trainer, and founder of Transformative Change. She has been bridging the worlds of personal transformation and justice for decades. Ordained as a Zen "sensei," she is the second black woman recognized as a teacher in her lineage. She is a social visionary that applies wisdom teachings and practice to social issues. Both fierce and grounded, she is known for her unflinching willingness to both sit with and speak uncomfortable truths with love.
Rev. angel offers a simple monthly 4-hour (half-day) or 8-hour (full day) virtual "sit." This small retreat helps us restore and begin a mindful practice of liberation. There are two sessions to accommodate different time zones. The event is by donation, and registration is required. The next Half/Day Sit will take place on October 19th. Attending Rev's Half/Day Sit will open the door to the daily No Big Deal Morning Sits, a shorter "come as you are, leave as you must" daily practice. We invite you to get to know Rev angel's radical and impactful work. Rev angel's Monthly Half/Day Sit Rev angel's Podcasts Transforming an organization from “professional-led” advocacy to community-led advocacy and organizing is not easy or quick work. Since its inception, the Fair Budget Coalition (FBC) has experimented with various models for grounding their budget advocacy in the lived experience of impacted community members. Early on, FBC’s theory was that its member organizations (mostly service provision groups) would engage their clients as leaders in the coalition. Over time, however, FBC realized that most of its organizational members are not structured to hold the needed base building and community engagement to support this model. As a result, professional staff have historically interpreted client experience, analyzed the policy landscape, and developed both FBC’s budget platform and the strategy for winning it. Over the last several years, Movement Matters has partnered with FBC to shift their infrastructure and practice to change this approach. The coalition has incorporated a racial and economic justice lens to their budget platform development. They have begun moving beyond reactive annual budget fights and started focusing on longer term solutions that change the outcomes of the budget and the actual budget process itself. They have built out their staff capacity to not only engage their organizational members, but to work outside of these organizations to build their own constituency of impacted community members. For the last year, Movement Matters has helped FBC create a more focused curriculum and the initial implementation of a Constituent Leadership Program (CLP). The curriculum moves beyond some of the pitfalls of previous leadership development programs, avoiding the dynamics of anointing a group of impacted individuals as tokenistic representatives, but leaving them unable to actually build the power necessary to have their voices heard. Instead, we are grounding the CLP in organizing theory and practice, helping Fair Budget develop a group of leaders who have the skills and experience to actually engage their communities. To use their role as constituent leaders to be more than the mouthpiece for the organization, and instead be a conduit for connecting FBC to impacted communities as leaders in both the development of budget demands and a strategy for building power. We are seeing CLP members respond strongly to these components, naming dynamics in the advocacy process that have felt lacking to them and identifying ways to more deeply engage their community in change efforts. They have explored community-based research as a tool for examining the root causes and interconnectedness of community issues and to build a base of community members committed to building power for their solutions. They are visiting local communities to understand how issues play out across neighborhoods segregated by race and income. They are connecting themselves and others with FBC’s existing infrastructure for shaping its budget platform and engaging with decision-makers. Simultaneously, we are helping FBC staff and existing leadership understand and envision how their work needs to shift if they are, in fact, going to fully integrate this process of constituency building. Through this lens, we are reexamining existing FBC infrastructure for developing a budget platform, for making decisions about campaign strategy, and for allocating organizational resources. The willingness of Fair Budget’s organizational leadership to envision and work towards this transformation is creating dynamic new developments in their work. As always, transformation requires constant attention, adjustment, and sustainment. Even as we implement the CLP curriculum, we are planning for an improved version, one that ties workshop topics to active bodies of work within FBC’s systems. We want to make sure that “a-ha” moments don’t get lost in the shuffle, but are immediately connected to new ways of doing things within the coalition. As we do this work with the community, we are working with staff and leadership to understand the exciting new possibilities available to the Coalition with this type of principled constituent membership. Connect with us for more information on our Technical Assistance and Action Coalitions work. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. We have already shared about our work in developing Eviction Defense Hubs, a mutual support and organizing model based on the Participatory Defense Hubs created by Silicon Valley De-Bug for the criminal court system. We have continued to partner with the tenant organizing team of the Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) to build a robust model in which tenants who are navigating the eviction courts support each other through collective learning, wisdom-sharing, and mutual aid. To date, the dozens of tenants who have moved through this process have left better equipped to fight their eviction, to organize with other tenants in their building, and to better understand the injustices of the housing system. For Movement Matters, a critical part of this process is also connecting tenants’ individual eviction cases to more systemic organizing opportunities; to transform the “little s” self-interest of staying in one’s home, to a “capital S” self-interest of fighting for quality affordable housing for all. We have identified small ways to do this within the Eviction Defense Hubs. For example, we have supported a tenant who is being targeted by their landlord to canvass their building to identify how widespread the harassment is, as well as to connect this canvassing to ongoing efforts to build a strong tenant association in the building. In addition, at the Hub meetings themselves, we have been holding discussions about the eroding city rent support programs and the need for more radical approaches to dealing with the fact that the rent is too damn high. As part of this iterative approach of finding opportunities for more transformative work within the individual cases, we are now in the planning stages for a complementary type of mutual aid/organizing hybrid that we are tentatively calling Participatory Action Hubs (PAH). We recognize that the Eviction Defense Hubs, while incredibly important, are reactive and keep most of the focus on the individual case. They also do not equip tenants to address negligent landlords, particularly around issues of housing code violations and conditions issues. We are currently developing the infrastructure for a parallel tenant-led mutual support model that will help tenants sue their landlord in conditions court, lead rent strikes, or otherwise proactively address bad landlord behavior. We know that the existing court systems are inadequate. Even winning a conditions case in housing court often only results in “patch and paint” approaches to terrible building conditions or minimal fines that landlords can ignore. However, we know that if we approach this work as part of an organizing process, it can become a strategic tool for tenant action. For instance:
All of this work becomes possible when we create community-based infrastructure that is grounded in broad tenant leadership, guided by a clear vision and values, and fosters a culture of critical reflection and adaptation. Connect with us for more information on our Technical Assistance and Action Coalitions work. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Movement Matters has been helping to lead an exciting body of work with a funders’ consortium in Maryland, Virginia, and the District to transform how they approach philanthropic work. Historically, this collaborative has supported advocacy and research around workforce solutions designed to connect residents to better jobs as a means out of poverty. However, the pandemic created an opening to more fully explore underlying assumptions about the workforce system, to transform the focus from job access to economic justice, and to more thoroughly examine how societal and philanthropic power dynamics reinforce racialized and gendered poverty. The project, in partnership with the Greater Washington Community Foundation, began with the development of a participatory action research (PAR) project in which Movement Matters engaged several grassroots partners in exploring the issue of economic security. The findings highlighted the notion that: 1) jobs only got folks so far, and 2) more reliable income support (e.g. COVID economic measures, universal basic income) was necessary to achieve any level of security, even for those working multiple jobs. In addition, the project called attention to the depth of community networks that enable people to survive poverty and poverty level employment. With these collective findings at hand, the Community Foundation is now engaging a broader array of community partners to identify a guiding set of economic justice priorities for the region. The Reimagine cohort will integrate the economic justice vision and principles that emerge from the community-side process. Centering these perspectives is critical to both point funders in the right direction about what to fund and to practice new power dynamics that put community knowledge in the driver’s seat. While there is not a formal commitment that these principles will guide philanthropic giving, we are setting the stage for a shift towards funding that is more focused on structural economic change. Throughout this process, we are committed to deeply exploring the way that philanthropic institutions often replicate white supremacist structures, while simultaneously creating a space for those employed within philanthropy to examine their own biases, behaviors, and values. This combination of individual and organizational, personal and professional, is building a transformative cohort that is learning together and will continue to support each other in changing both what kind of work gets supported and how philanthropy supports it in more equitable ways. Connect with us for more information on MM's Funder Training and Technical Assistance. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. All too often in our base building and membership development work we focus on the doing, not the thinking. We rest in an assumption that people’s lived experience with oppression means that they have a detailed understanding of how and why it happens. We under-resource the necessary work of building a shared analysis and set of values to guide our vision and strategy for change. When we invest in leadership development, it is focused solely on “how” skills (how to do a one-on-one, how to speak to a decision-maker, how to develop an action), but very seldom on the “why” or “for what”. This type of orientation is understandable. Our members and our grant deadlines often demand a timetable that is oriented toward immediate action and doesn’t allow for “non-essential” work. Our organizations have limited capacity to do deep member engagement. And our ecosystem hasn’t created the institutions that can do this kind of popular education at scale. But even if it is understandable, it is not acceptable if we want to win in the long term. A lack of investment in robust and comprehensive member education builds weak movements. We at Movement Matters have lived by this sentiment. Organizing work (whether labor or community oriented) needs to be built on a robust foundation of not just member education, but popular education. We need to create strong systems where members are supported in examining their lived experiences and existing understandings of the world; where they are challenged to contextualize these experiences within a framework of history, race, politics, gender, and economics; and where they envision and embody systems that can create true alternatives to the racialized capitalism that is destroying our people and our planet. We continue to support our labor and community partners in building these kinds of spaces, ones that merge the thinking with the doing, to build for the long term. We greatly appreciate the author, Daniel Judt's call to remember this history, as well as their highlighting spaces where unions are reinvesting in these kinds of efforts. As we all learn and navigate the current political moment, grounding ourselves in what was and what should be is necessary. And investing in the popular education of our members is the foundation of the transformative organizing that we need. Connect with us for more information on our member development work and unique popular education approach. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Sometimes the right group of people, the right facilitation team, and the right content all come together at just the right time and in the right container to create magic. This past spring, Movement Matters experienced precisely such a magical moment at our 2024 Advanced Facilitation Training (AFT). Our team worked tirelessly in the months leading up to the advanced training. We took a curriculum that had already worked well for us in previous years and we dialed in on the places that we instinctively felt had to be strengthened. We breathed life, ritual, culture, art, spirit, and healing into every aspect of the three days, both as a training methodology and as content to be learned. We invited elder artist Baba Ras D to join our already dynamic facilitation team and accompanied him as he deeply incorporated song and rhythm into each day of the gathering. We watched with awe as people shared their stories, called in their guides and ancestors (human and more-than-human), danced, mourned, sang, and created community with-in rhythm. We demonstrated in real time that when we truly move together, our hearts beat in unison, our brains sync, and we create genuine transformative relationships of trust, action, and belonging. Beginning with the application process, we thoughtfully cultivated a tremendous group of participants, spanning two continents and three languages. We met the challenge of making the AFT a fully integrated trilingual space, recommitting to practices of language justice and deep connection through and beyond spoken language. This AFT cohort came from hyper-local grassroots groups, regional labor unions, and national coalitions. We had native relatives from Hawai’i–Kānaka Maoli–, from the Eastern Cherokee Nation, and the Potiguara Peoples of Brazil join other organizers from across the US representing Black, Afro-descendent, Brown, white, and immigrant communities. Folks shared their culture and stories. They built enduring connections across distance and identity. As participants created profound community over the three days, they also practiced advanced skills around the incorporation of arts and culture-building in facilitation practice. We wrestled with how to engage community members fully in our individual work while also holding a disciplined focus on the issue at hand. We learned techniques for conceiving and incorporating popularized graphics and physical movement-based practices to unlock creative potential when envisioning solutions. We dialed in on appropriate practices for building the content and methodology for engagement based on where a group is in its development. These kinds of magical movement building moments need to be held up, celebrated, and aspired to. If we are to build spaces of radical joy, visionary imagination, expansive learning, and transformational power within our organizing work, we have to experience them for ourselves, integrate them into our bones, reflect on how to create them for others, and practice how to create the conditions to do so. As trainers and capacity builders, it is easy to become jaded, to take for granted the work that we are privileged to do, to believe change within our movements is not going to happen. The Movement Matters team owes a sincere debt to each of those who shared space with us at the AFT for rejuvenating us, pushing us to aspire to this level of inspiration in all of our work, and showing us that it is possible. As we collectively move into another round of profoundly contested struggle in this country, as climate change and racialized capitalism threaten the world’s survival, these numinous animated spaces are critical to keep us moving forward, committed to building decolonized power for the world that can be, and skilled enough to move us in that direction. Connect with us for more information on our Advanced Facilitation Training. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Popular education is a bedrock of Movement Matters’ unique approach to community organizing and transformative change. We created our Advanced Popular Education Training (APET) to dive deep into both theory and practice while also allowing popular educators the space to contemplate and reshape their own practice. One of our central themes is the pivotal role of ritual and of somatic healing in building learning spaces for communities, in embodying a “learning by doing” of the world we are trying to build. Without radically transforming our internal processes for connecting, learning, and building together, our work for external change will collapse. Without places and spaces to put into action the vision, trust, communication and relationships built among members, the internal will collapse. And this fine balance, this process of titration, is what we accompany, energize, and sustain as popular educators and cultural organizers. A benefit of the virtual space of the APET is the ability to integrate practice into the life of the training. The time in between sessions is used not just to reflect and process information, but also to experiment with and embody new practices. We are also able to spend one-on-one time with participants in between sessions to tailor course learning to their specific needs. Another key element of popular education that is well served by this more individualized approach is the development and integration of codes as a tool for deeper concientizacion. Being able to envision and integrate prompts that allow community members to simultaneously recognize issues that they face, share their knowledge and understanding, and open the door for new information and perspectives are difficult skills to hone, especially in the abstract. Being able to work through specific examples with participants based on real-time community issues grounds this important piece of work that differentiates popular education from political education. The APET continues to be a unique offering of Movement Matters’ training work. It integrates beautifully with our Advanced Facilitation Training and continues to be a way to build deep relationships with organizers and change makers across the country.
For more information on our Advanced Popular Education Training or to bring an Advanced Training to your organization, connect with us. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. |
