New 2024 Circle of Practice: Membership Development and Base Building

One of our greatest joys in this work is bringing organizers together in deep relationships of learning and exploration. This happens in our trainings and our Learning and Action Circles. We are excited to further this approach through our new Movement Matters Circles of Practice. The 2024 Circle of Practice will engage a cohort of organizers from 6-8 organizations in the DC/MD/VA region to deeply explore membership development and base building through the lens of cultural organizing and popular education.
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With all of the demands of organizing, we can often overlook the critical need to create regular places and spaces where our communities can exercise their membership. This active engagement requires structure, intentionality, and strategy. In addition to onboarding and orienting new members, we have to scale participation to create meaningful and sustainable ways for members to contribute at all levels and, over time, to deepen their engagement. This process needs to be connected to seasoned long-time members taking on leadership roles in both the thinking and doing of our organizing work.

Intersecting with member development is the need for cultural organizing and popular education. By this we mean understanding, honoring, recognizing, and incorporating the existing culture of our members into the ways that we gather, into the ways that we analyze issues, into the ways that we organize. For many communities, connecting to cultural values and knowledge (whether traditional teachings from other countries or the ways culture has evolved in the US in marginalized communities) provides an alternative to a colonized, capitalist way of being. Tapping into these “ancestral” worldviews will only deepen our organizing and capacity.

At Movement Matters, cultural organizing and popular education also mean building culture within our organizing work―spending time on the integration of arts, ritual, and community healing to define and highlight the values of our organizing group, what we are fighting for, and how we are being with one another while growing our numbers. This can also include how we develop and transmit the stories about our work and our organizing.

All of these elements provide vehicles for deepening leadership and membership. We are looking forward to spending 7-9 months with a motivated cohort of organizers experimenting with and implementing new ways to do this. We look forward to embodying these approaches so that they become an integral part of how this cohort does their work during and beyond this first Circle of Practice!

For more information on our Circles of Practice, connect with us.

Movement Matters is based in Washington, DC.
​We work regionally and with national partners.
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