Popular education is transformational.

Popular education is more critical than ever in our current political moment. Our Black, Indigenous, Brown, immigrant, LGBTQ+, low-income, and working class communities face significant changes in their material conditions as a result of the Covid crisis. Without a process to critically reflect on these experiences, many community members will only engage to meet their most immediate needs; our ability to stake out a visionary claim on the future and to build lasting relationships to achieve it will be lost. Popular education offers a way to build this type of long-term vision into our organizing work, even in the midst of a crisis.

Popular education is foundational to move issue-based organizing to long-term movement building.  It lies at the roots of values and visions that challenge the status quo of capitalism, racism, supremacy, and misogyny over peoples, other-than-humans, and the earth. It sparked radical cultural and political change led by peoples in the southern hemisphere. In the US, it is rooted in the Black Southern Organizing Tradition and other movements for change (i.e. the Farmworkers’ Movement) that have shifted our understanding of what is possible.

​Too often, organizers confuse popular education with political education or art activism. "Top down" political education by organizers can be just as dehumanizing and oppressive as the lessons taught by our dominant institutions. Understanding the liberatory aspects of popular education practice is a necessary part of the organizers' toolkit. Organizers need to know how to:

• skillfully share knowledge, power and leadership,
• center community members as active co-developers in the learning,
• create and maintain rituals that build transparency, trust and growth, and
• develop and implement codes as integral parts of collective community-owned analysis.

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.​ This online training will combine "in person" virtual sessions with individual "homework" and "one-on-one accompaniment" to allow participants to both learn new skills and put them immediately into practice.
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​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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Movement Matters began offering Community Healing and Action Circles (CHACs) in the summer of 2020 with the recognition that community members leading campaigns to support and create change are lacking spaces to heal and grow together. 

Our first series of CHACs was developed for laid-off restaurant workers who continue to organize themselves as they fight for the rights of their families and communities. These community leaders asked for a space to mourn the current moment, to heal and deepen their resilience, to care for themselves and their bodies given their limited resources and access to nature, and to build their public speaking skills as community leaders at the forefront. 

We create spaces of radical joy, reflection, and trust building by using culture, expressive arts (including dance, movement and theater), breath work, self-massage, medicinal plants, ritual, story creation and story telling to center healing, self-care/self-regulation, resiliency, and the decolonizing of voice, microphones, and 'public speaking' in its entirety.

Our current series includes:

CHAC 1 & 2: Breath, Movement, & Voice
CHAC 3 & 4: Movement, Resilience, & Story Creation
CHAC 5 & 6: Healing Traditions & Self Care

The Community Healing and Action Circles are intentionally structured to build resilience within a community context. Participants are not just isolated individuals, but leaders of change efforts who are deeply connected to their constituencies. We mindfully cultivate each session to meet the emerging needs of the work, campaigns, and the broader membership of participants, ensuring that healing and capacity building are being integrated into the larger organizing community.

We partnered with the DC Urban Sustainability Administration and Washington Parks & People, and have been holding these live, COVID safe, physically-distanced sessions at the Columbia Heights Green garden. We thank the Junte Comunitario Virtual and its community leaders in Puerto Rico for providing us with the safest strategies for in-person sessions during COVID times. We have moved the sessions online for the winter.

The CHACs are being developed in conjunction with our Learning and Action Circles and our Dismantling Anti-Blackness Among People of Color work, both of which are oriented toward organizers and professional staff.
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​For more information on our Community Healing and Action Circles, 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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Dynamic Demonstrations is the fourth and (for now) final online case example we created to support and inspire organizers, advocates, and community leaders during Covid19 and the current economic and racial upheavals.

Most of our tactics for change require a physical presence. As Covid19 continues to restrict our ability to gather, we have to find creative ways to put pressure on decision-makers. At the same time, we need to engage our members in actions, even when they can't be physically present. Many of our partner groups are combining limited in-person actions and artivism to create dynamic demonstrations. Layering in deeper member engagement and ownership of the arts development process can take these actions to the next level and build long-term membership and capacity alongside short-term political impact.

​We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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Getting Tenants in Rhythm is the third of four online case examples we created to support and inspire organizers, advocates, and community leaders during Covid19 and the current economic and racial upheavals.

Engaging community members where they live is a vital part of the organizing process. Even when we are limited in how we can gather, a building can be the cornerstone for developing community resistance and resilience. We have seen many examples of using pots and pans to create noise and show solidarity. With additional coordination, arts, and cultural elements, these actions can bring in new members, deepen constituency, and showcase the narrative of a campaign. 

​We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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Strengthening Networks is the second of four online case examples we created to support and inspire organizers, advocates, and community leaders during Covid19.

​Engaging new members of loose networks and building relationships of trust and action with them and among them are key to creating a long lasting, active constituency; one that shares values, a vision for change, and the energy and focus to lead in making that change.

​We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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As we continue to work closely with campaigns and other organizing projects during Covid19 we have been advising groups and organizers on how to adapt cultural organizing and deep constituency building to current physical distancing requirements—ensuring that the voices and leadership of community members are at the forefront of demands, actions, and solutions.

We developed our newest online tool to support and inspire groups during a critical time; to animate ideas that lean on creativity and perseverance so we can continue building  constituency and grassroots power to make change. Cultural Organizing While Physical Distancing: Petition Drop is the first of 4 case examples we will be sharing over the next month.

We welcome questions, thoughts, and dialogue on these tools, including how to apply them to your particular initiative/campaign.  Connect with us!
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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.

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.