After a year off and many delays due to COVID 19, we held our annual in-person Community Organizing and Popular Education Institute (OI) this May. We also engaged this year’s cohort in three virtual Learning and Action Circles (LACs) before the Institute and one LAC after.

Twenty-four participants representing ten groups and campaigns across the DC Metro region gathered  for 5 days of learning, cross-pollination, somatics, art creation, theater, visioning, planning and trust building.

The MM team revamped our OI curriculum this year, more deeply incorporating expressive arts, culture, and somatics into our organizing approach. In addition to a greater connection with the materials, these changes fostered a profound sense of connection and community within the group.

We greatly appreciate the contributions of many institutional and individual supporters of the 2022 OI, including the DC Eaton Workshop.

The 2023 Organizing Institute will open again to organizers and groups around the US. We deeply appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and trust as we slowly return to in-person sessions. 

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 at 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.
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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 based in Washington, DC.
We work regionally with various communities and with national partners.


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