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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. We have already shared about our work in developing Eviction Defense Hubs, a mutual support and organizing model based on the Participatory Defense Hubs created by Silicon Valley De-Bug for the criminal court system. We have continued to partner with the tenant organizing team of the Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) to build a robust model in which tenants who are navigating the eviction courts support each other through collective learning, wisdom-sharing, and mutual aid. To date, the dozens of tenants who have moved through this process have left better equipped to fight their eviction, to organize with other tenants in their building, and to better understand the injustices of the housing system. For Movement Matters, a critical part of this process is also connecting tenants’ individual eviction cases to more systemic organizing opportunities; to transform the “little s” self-interest of staying in one’s home, to a “capital S” self-interest of fighting for quality affordable housing for all. We have identified small ways to do this within the Eviction Defense Hubs. For example, we have supported a tenant who is being targeted by their landlord to canvass their building to identify how widespread the harassment is, as well as to connect this canvassing to ongoing efforts to build a strong tenant association in the building. In addition, at the Hub meetings themselves, we have been holding discussions about the eroding city rent support programs and the need for more radical approaches to dealing with the fact that the rent is too damn high. As part of this iterative approach of finding opportunities for more transformative work within the individual cases, we are now in the planning stages for a complementary type of mutual aid/organizing hybrid that we are tentatively calling Participatory Action Hubs (PAH). We recognize that the Eviction Defense Hubs, while incredibly important, are reactive and keep most of the focus on the individual case. They also do not equip tenants to address negligent landlords, particularly around issues of housing code violations and conditions issues. We are currently developing the infrastructure for a parallel tenant-led mutual support model that will help tenants sue their landlord in conditions court, lead rent strikes, or otherwise proactively address bad landlord behavior. We know that the existing court systems are inadequate. Even winning a conditions case in housing court often only results in “patch and paint” approaches to terrible building conditions or minimal fines that landlords can ignore. However, we know that if we approach this work as part of an organizing process, it can become a strategic tool for tenant action. For instance:
All of this work becomes possible when we create community-based infrastructure that is grounded in broad tenant leadership, guided by a clear vision and values, and fosters a culture of critical reflection and adaptation. Connect with us for more information on our Technical Assistance and Action Coalitions work. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Movement Matters has been helping to lead an exciting body of work with a funders’ consortium in Maryland, Virginia, and the District to transform how they approach philanthropic work. Historically, this collaborative has supported advocacy and research around workforce solutions designed to connect residents to better jobs as a means out of poverty. However, the pandemic created an opening to more fully explore underlying assumptions about the workforce system, to transform the focus from job access to economic justice, and to more thoroughly examine how societal and philanthropic power dynamics reinforce racialized and gendered poverty. The project, in partnership with the Greater Washington Community Foundation, began with the development of a participatory action research (PAR) project in which Movement Matters engaged several grassroots partners in exploring the issue of economic security. The findings highlighted the notion that: 1) jobs only got folks so far, and 2) more reliable income support (e.g. COVID economic measures, universal basic income) was necessary to achieve any level of security, even for those working multiple jobs. In addition, the project called attention to the depth of community networks that enable people to survive poverty and poverty level employment. With these collective findings at hand, the Community Foundation is now engaging a broader array of community partners to identify a guiding set of economic justice priorities for the region. The Reimagine cohort will integrate the economic justice vision and principles that emerge from the community-side process. Centering these perspectives is critical to both point funders in the right direction about what to fund and to practice new power dynamics that put community knowledge in the driver’s seat. While there is not a formal commitment that these principles will guide philanthropic giving, we are setting the stage for a shift towards funding that is more focused on structural economic change. Throughout this process, we are committed to deeply exploring the way that philanthropic institutions often replicate white supremacist structures, while simultaneously creating a space for those employed within philanthropy to examine their own biases, behaviors, and values. This combination of individual and organizational, personal and professional, is building a transformative cohort that is learning together and will continue to support each other in changing both what kind of work gets supported and how philanthropy supports it in more equitable ways. Connect with us for more information on MM's Funder Training and Technical Assistance. 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. Since April of 2022, Movement Matters has been working in collaboration with several legal service providers, social workers and community organizing groups in a joint project to keep DC tenants in their homes by fighting evictions. With the end of the COVID eviction moratorium and an absence of city funding and leadership on this issue, several thousand DC residents face eviction each month. In response to these conditions, Eviction Prevention in Communities (EPIC) has been building up a canvassing apparatus to ensure that tenants who are facing evictions know their options and are connected to long-term infrastructure to build tenant power. This month, EPIC launched the Eviction Defense Hub. This "Hub" is modeled after Silicon Valley DeBug's participatory defense project in the criminal courts, which allows individuals and communities to take back agency over their involvement with the overly bureaucratic and puzzling "criminal justice" system. Organizers from the Latino Economic Development Center's Tenant Organizing Team, Empower DC, DC Jobs with Justice, Bread for the City, and Movement Matters have adapted this tool to landlord-tenant court. Movement Matters has helped to ensure that Hub meetings incorporate cultural organizing and popular education to create stronger bonds among tenants and connect to the deeper values of anti-eviction work. We are also assisting community partners to develop strategic organizing responses to issues that surface during Hub meetings. The Hub comes at a time when government rental assistance and tenant protections are either being diminished or eliminated by the DC City Council and Mayor while landlord attempts to evict tenants are rising at alarming rates with no end in sight. Connect with us for more information on MM's Technical Assistance and Action Coalitions work. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Over the last year, Movement Matters partnered with the Organizing Center and the Funders' Collaborative for Youth Organizing (FCYO) to provide direct coaching to youth organizing groups working on climate justice and racial equity as part of FCYO's Youth Organizing for Climate Action and Racial Equity (YO-CARE) Capacity-Building Fund. We were thrilled to develop new meaningful relationships spanning the country, from Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (Bronx, NY) to Juntos (Philadelphia, PA) to Florida Rising to Hawai'i Peace & Justice to Latinos Unidos Siempre/LUS Youth (Salem, Oregon) to one of our local partners in the DC region, Progressive Maryland. These powerful groups were eager and ready to implement new ideas and practices to level up their base building and organizing skills. In addition to helping individual groups work on popular education curricula, cultural organizing and somatic-based activities, member engagement systems, and campaign strategies, we were also excited to be part of the facilitation team for FCYO's convening of 50+ organizers from YO-CARE grantee organizations this past summer in Atlanta. A critical part of this gathering was a deep engagement with FCYO’s Power to Win Framework, which helped to stretch youth organizers’ thinking about how to approach long-term movement building. This orientation is deeply aligned with Movement Matters’ organizing framework and the way we engage partners when doing capacity building work. It was a pleasure to support the learning and integration of this model and to be in partnership with such a significant cohort of youth leaders from around the country. Connect with us for more information on MM's Technical Assistance. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Providing support and accompaniment to organizers and community workers is a critical part of the way Movement Matters supports our collective struggle for justice. However, we recognize that those working on the ground are only part of the movement ecosystem. We are also excited when the opportunity presents itself to accompany funders who are interested in supporting transformative work. Over the last two years, Movement Matters has been partnering with Resourcing Radical Justice (RRJ), a funders collective that centers Black liberation as the path to a thriving Greater Washington region by advocating for philanthropic sector transformation, coordinating capacity building for and funding to Black and POC-led grassroots organizers, and building, lifting up, and learning from radical organizers. Our Movement Matters team played two distinct roles in RRJ’s Radical Learning Series process: helping to structure and ground the development of a learning cohort and providing content training to the cohort once it had been developed. RRJ drew on our expertise in creating values-driven, body-and-mind centered processes to help them envision the arc of their cohort design―from the application process to the learning modules to the post-workshop integration of knowledge, skills, and values. Those doing “professional” training for funders often overlook the need to allow participants to connect to their bodies, minds, and spirits as they navigate systems that may resist change. We provided concrete ways for RRJ to utilize arts and culture to avoid these traps and help participants deeply connect to new ways of thinking about funding and to navigate (personally and professionally) the obstacles they might face in implementing new approaches within their organizations. In addition to this overall framing, Movement Matters also designed and ran two training modules within the RRJ curriculum. These modules focused on understanding how philanthropy can both support and hinder movement work for systems change and racial justice, both in terms of what they fund and how they fund it. We drew on our deep knowledge of various philanthropic efforts to support community organizing, racial equity and systems change work in the DC area over the last 25 years in crafting the training content. We helped RRJ cohort members critically reflect on and ground themselves in philanthropic practices that contribute more consistently and meaningfully to a healthy movement ecosystem. As always, these workshops were deeply rooted in Movement Matters’ popular education approach and resonated strongly with the RRJ cohort. Connect with us for more information on MM's Funder Training and Technical Assistance . Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. Budget processes are designed to be intimidating and minimize public ownership. Yet so many of our struggles rely on budgetary processes to succeed. Our team recently spent two days with PowerSwitch Action to help them incorporate popular education into their budget organizing work and build tools to demystify the budget process. We started our work with PowerSwitch and their regional budget partners earlier in the year with our “Popular Education 101” training to orient the group toward creating liberatory community engagement and how to open and facilitate spaces for such engagement. Given how alienating the budget process is designed to be, grounding budget work in popular education is critical to facilitate a sense of community vision and ownership over the process. At our recent two-day gathering, we built community with the PowerSwitch cohort (also as a means to drive deeper that skill-set) and developed concrete tools—including popular education codes—that they can to use in their home communities. Our approach to popular education, including the importance of ritual, play and (physical) movement, has insured that PowerSwitch is approaching budget work as integral parts of popular education, especially when dealing with a potentially intimidating topic like budgets. We look forward to supporting PowerSwitch partners as they implement these tools in their home communities! Connect with us for more information on our unique Popular Education Approach or to inquire about Technical Assistance. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. The Rockefeller Foundation’s US Equity and Economic Opportunity team is beginning to fund worker organizing in four states. They have contracted Movement Matters to strengthen their understanding of how to support the work and to provide protocols and practices to best enter the field. As in our work with other funders, we grounded our process in a detailed understanding of organizing as a distinct change strategy, clarifying how it relates to and is different from other modes like service provision and policy advocacy. We have examined best practices to recognize and address funder-grantee power dynamics, especially when it comes to supporting grassroots efforts. We have also provided models for funder support of short and long term change strategies, and identified ways to shift philanthropic culture to be more responsive to the needs of organizations on the ground. We are excited to continue this partnership as the Rockefeller team begins to make grants and support the work. Connect with us for more information on our Funder Training and Technical Assistance work. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. We are thrilled to announce our partnership with the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) to develop popular education curricula for IEN's Indigenous Principles of Just Transition and support in the building of their Just Transition Program. IEN’s principles capture key elements about our relationship to Mother Earth, the immutable importance of Indigenous sovereignty, and the critical role of Indigenous knowledge in transitioning from an exploitative economy to one that fosters life and harmony. We cannot undo the harm we have done to the planet without addressing the destruction of settler colonialism. Climate justice cannot be achieved without centering Indigenous solutions and recognizing Indigenous sovereignty. We are excited to partner with IEN on this significant project! For more information on MM's Curriculum Development or Popular Education expertise, connect with us. Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC. We work regionally and with national partners. |
