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. 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. Facilitating Transformational Spaces & Experiences: |
