We often express our gratitude to Dr. Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé (may his secret be sanctified), dearly known to the many who studied with him as Ibrahim Baba. We are excited to share this beautiful album, Makam Shekhina, filled with traditional Sufi liturgies, Hebrew chants, and new creative compositions each with woven teachings from Ibrahim Baba. Makam Shekhina was founded by Sheikh Ibrahim Baba and Rav Kohenet Taya Mâ Shere through their immense delight of praying together in the realms of counter-oppressive devotion. Listen to Makam Shekhina. Read about the artists/the Makam Shekhina community, or purchase the album. Movement Matters is excited to announce the return of our weeklong Community Organizing & Popular Education Institute (OI) this Spring 2022! This uniquely tailored and comprehensive yearly training will take place from Monday, May 2nd - Friday, May 6th at the Eaton Workshop in downtown Washington, DC and will follow COVID-safe protocols. Given the current difficulties of travel and the safety needs of everyone, our 2022 Organizing Institute will be open only to participants from the DMV (DC, MD, VA). Movement Matters' Organizing Institute was a major shift for me, both personally and for the direction of my work. A year later, I still keep their 'organizing framework' manual on my desk to fashion my own popular education programming and to use as a guiding roadmap. And that really just scratches the surface. The necessity to continue to train organizers and popular educators is even more important as our constituents and communities are being pushed into a normalization period while their representation continues to be ignored or erased. Movement Matters' yearly Organizing Institute provides an instructive and challenging learning and action space that deepens participants' vision, skills, values, and capacity. As importantly it also supports cross-pollination and solid relationship building among organizers—a key element of successful movement building campaigns in DC and the DMV. We will open our trainings to organizers and popular educators from around the nation this Summer 2022. We deeply appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and trust as we slowly return to in-person sessions. We take the opening and teaching of our weeklong Organizing Institute very seriously given the safety concerns of organizers and their families/loved-ones, and as we move through another winter filled with uncertainty for them, for our communities, and for the change work we are all trying to achieve. For more information on our Organizing Institutes or to bring an Organizing Institute to your organization or city, connect with us.
Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally with various communities and with national partners. 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. Nowadays, (thankfully!), we see glimpses of it everywhere, it goes by many names and comes in many forms, but community media, liberatory media, essentially calls upon a production process that intentionally recuperates resistance memory for the sake of moving towards a regenerative future. Through community media, the production process becomes a way of organizing each other and connecting with other organized communities, deepening our relationship to important political work, and engaging people who would otherwise be excluded from decision-making processes. For examples and resources on contemporary approaches to community media across our movement check out our report: Beyond Access & Representation: Media Case Studies. 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. 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. This media strategy extends beyond news coverage and permeates movies, television, and other “recreational” media controlled by dominant interests. The same biases and intent creep into our entertainment and, as a result, creep into our understanding of ourselves, our world, and its possibilities. 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:
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. Advanced Community Media Studio Online Sessions:Session 1: Media Rituals: Exploration, creation, and deepening of personal and organizational media rituals. Session 2: The Stories We Tell: Tools for identifying the root values in the stories we love, approaches to communicating these stories effectively across platforms to produce media for political education and campaign advancement. Session 3 (1-on-1s): Meet with facilitators 1-on-1 to discuss the specific media needs for campaign, check in on progress of media project, and debrief studio experience so far. Session 4: Feedback Circle: Present a first draft of your media project and receive feedback from other organizers and cultural workers. 14 online content hours + 2 hours of individual accompaniment + workbook & resources. Connect with us if you have any questions. For more information on our Advanced Trainings or to bring an Advanced Training to your organization, connect with us.
Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally with various communities and with national partners. How would the shows we watch be different if writer's rooms included our community leaders and organizational members? And how would that change the way we understand the world? Cultural workers, youth media organizations, filmmakers, public media advocates and organizers have all put in so much work for us to reach this golden age of QT-BIPOC film production, where access and representation are central tenets of equity in entertainment. Even as we celebrate, many of us hear the cautionary voices of our political elders telling us, “we have been here before!” And still many others hear, “there are still so many other ways and so much more we can attain!” Movement Matters is pleased to announce our latest report,
Beyond Access
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