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.
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​Movement Matters is pleased to announce our latest report, Building Youth Voice for Youth Power in the DMV: Lessons from the Field.
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​Building Youth Voice for Youth Power in the DMV: Lessons from the Field informs the growth of youth voice and youth power work in the region and also has lessons for the field that extend beyond the DMV. The report offers a framework for youth work that helps clarify the distinction between approaches while also identifying how these approaches can be networked together as an ecosystem to support the development of youth power.

We thank the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation for their ongoing efforts to change the way philanthropy is supporting work on the ground and for commissioning this report.

We sincerely appreciate the time, trust, and recommendations provided by the groups we interviewed as well as their commitment to youth work in the DMV.

With the support of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, Movement Matters will also be leading action-oriented conversations (Autumn 2019) around strengthening and deepening youth voice, youth work, and youth power in northern Virginia and regionally.

We keep building.

We heard clearly from our alumni that there is a strong need for anti-oppression spaces for organizers, popular educators, and community leaders in the DC region to continue building our skills and apply what we learn on an ongoing basis. ​

The lack of staffing capacity at our change organizations often leaves us overwhelmed and barely able to keep up with immediate demands in front of us, with no ability to reflect and improve upon our work. That is simply unsustainable, especially now. 

​​​In response, we launched the Movement Matters Learning and Action Circles (LACs). ​​We envision these spaces as a shared workshop where each participant can bring their ongoing projects and have the opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas with peers, access resources, get support in planning and implementation, and deepen their own skills. The sessions are grounded in Movement Matters’ Organizing Framework of: Relationship, Constituency, and Power Building. The LAC’s cement organizers’ capacities and skills in these areas and continue the learning from our Community Organizing and Popular Education Institute and Advanced Training Series.

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, safe 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 safe, creative 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!