​Movement Matters Team

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​​Movement Matters is an absolute and essential treasure for movement organizations. They have once again been critical in developing the pedagogy and approach by which MLOV (Many Languages One Voice) recruits its members and develops its leaders.

​Today I was asked by another organizer, 'Who shaped your political consciousness?' The first two names on my lips were, Marta and David.

Sapna Pandya
(former) ​Executive Director, Many Languages One Voice (MLOV)

About Marta

​​​Marta de los Ángeles Vizueta Bohórquez is a popular educator and community organizer in Washington, DC, as well as the principal and co-founder of Movement Matters. She brings extensive experience in working in multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual contexts with grassroots communities of color, and in supporting the development of social justice organizations with deep core values and strong administrative capacities.

Originally from an Ecuadorian family grounded in liberation theology, Marta arrived in New York with her grandmother and brother. She grew up in the streets of North Brooklyn and Jackson Heights with Puerto Rican, Black, and immigrant communities where she learned English, where she learned to dance, and where she actively volunteered at community centers supporting families, workers, and immigrants. She began traveling by bus throughout the country at 18, clear in the need to understand the United States, its cultures, its histories, its layered complexities, and its unheard voices.

Marta began organizing in Black and first and second-generation immigrant communities in Washington in 1997. Understanding how racism, xenophobia, gender violence, classism, and other forms of oppression occupy a central role in society and the non-profit world, Marta challenged and moved organizations and their staff to deepen their values, build community leadership, and fully ground their work in the voices they represent. For example, as the Popular Educator and Organizer for Manna CDC, she furthered the vision and values of the CDC’s staff to move and transform the organization into Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC (ONE DC), a popular education, member-based and led organizing group.

Marta believes in movement building and in the necessity to develop networks and supports for other visionary organizers and grassroots community leaders. Inspired by the Penn Center and her studies at Highlander, and by witnessing the relentless challenges faced particularly by organizers of color, Marta creates cultural spaces for unpacking, cross-pollination, and coalition building. Her earlier work in this area includes the development of the Kressley Initiative, which directly trained and built the capacity of local community organizers and their respective institutions, and the annual Shaw Freedom School, a yearly tri-lingual event that brought community members (Black, and Central American and Chinese immigrants) together for a day of learning, capacity building and culture. This approach can be currently seen and felt in Marta’s work with Movement Matters’ Community Organizing and Popular Education Institute, Advanced Training Series, Learning and Action Circles, and Community Healing and Action Circles.

In the DC public education arena, Marta’s successful parent engagement, leadership development, and multiracial, multi-lingual organizing work earned national recognition and continued Ford Foundation funding in the early 2000s. Under the auspices of Teaching for Change and the DCPS Department of Multicultural Education/OCR Compliance, she also developed a fully funded program to support the training of DC teachers and lead teachers/mentors on anti-racism and multicultural education.

Marta has been key in developing popularized/culturally competent organizing manuals, curriculum guides, and advocacy tool kits, including Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching—a project she led, and that grew out of her work in curriculum development and education organizing. Her other publications include Building By Building: A Tenant Leadership Manual—a curriculum for DC tenants, tenant leaders, and organizers, and Fighting Back on Budget Cuts, A Tool Kit—which she co-developed with Makani Themba while leading the Praxis Project’s training department.

Marta’s own community work braids culture, expressive arts, popular education, participatory action research, and laughter. She is happiest when she is facilitating with neighborhood children, youth, and adults; learning, growing, and building together. Marta creates anti-oppression, transformational spaces grounded in values, arts, culture, and ritual that deepen vision, grow knowledge, and de-colonize voice and bodies. As an ethno-contemporary dancer and long-time instructor, Marta uses movement, dance, and theater to sustain radical healing and joy so that we can continue to reclaim and strengthen our bodies, our voices, and deepen our connection to nature.

Marta is also a doula, works with plants, and is fluent in both Spanish and English. 

About David

​David S. Haiman is a principal and co-founder of Movement Matters. David’s two decades of experience in community organizing, strategic planning, facilitation, and non-profit management has helped Movement Matters to develop into an effective and dynamic capacity building organization. 

Since Movement Matters’ inception in 2007, David has brought his expertise to a variety of projects, including program and organizational development and evaluation for a range of organizational partners, both local and national. These organizations include grassroots organizing groups (e.g. Empower DC), local and statewide coalitions (e.g. Virginia’s Climate and Equity Working Group), unions (e.g. UFCW Local 400), foundations (e.g. Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation), and national networks (e.g. Communities for Public Education Reform). These partnerships have included visioning and strategic planning for new program areas, Board development, deepening organizational capacity for community organizing, developing and refining leadership curricula, conducting power analysis and strategy development for campaigns, and development of organizational management systems.

David has also co-led the establishment of Movement Matters’ nationally recognized training program. David has co-developed the curriculum and led the training of hundreds of participants in Movement Matters' weeklong Community Organizing and Popular Education Institute and Advanced Trainings in Facilitation Skills for Organizers and Strategic Communications and Media Development. In addition, David has adapted Movement Matters’ training curriculum into a weeklong Immigrant Youth Organizing Institute.

David was part of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform team that provided technical assistance to community-based organizations and school districts receiving planning funds from the Nellie Mae Foundation. In this role, David assisted school districts and their community partners in Rhode Island and Massachusetts to develop community engagement plans that assist the districts in implementing a student centered learning model for education reform efforts. Additionally, David designed and facilitated a community engagement process for the DC Public School system, engaging parents and community members in conversations designed to refine DCPS’s approach to building relationships with communities.

David also serves as a trainer and facilitator for national groups like NeighborWorks America. He trains on a variety of topics related to community organizing and social justice, including: Community Organizing, Leadership Development, Organizational Development for Community Ownership, and Equitable Community Development. In addition to these training roles, David is also an adjunct faculty member at the Catholic University School of Social Work, where he teaches community organizing.

Before helping to start Movement Matters, David spent over 9 years at Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE DC, formerly Manna CDC), starting as a staff Organizer and ending as the Associate Director and Director of Community Organizing. In this capacity, he worked with community residents and the ONE DC Organizing Team to initiate, fund, and grow new organizing projects to increase residents’ control over development in their neighborhood and to increase the community’s capacity for sustainable organizing that addresses long-term, systemic issues of poverty. Under his leadership, the organization involved hundreds of residents in efforts that created the District’s first resident-led comprehensive community benefits agreement; secured commitments for 92 units of new, very affordable rental apartments; and developed and funded, through City legislation, a $2 million training and hiring program for living wage jobs created in new development. As a Management Team member, David led and oversaw the transition of Manna CDC to the fully independent organization, ONE DC, managing all organizational development areas including fundraising, strategic planning, community-based board development, and staff development.

Prior to his work at ONE DC, David received his Master’s Degrees in Social Work and Public Policy from the University of Michigan.

David is fluent in spoken and written English and proficient in spoken and written Spanish.

Our Partners and Collaborators

Movement Matters is also made up of visionary, courageous movement builders that create with us in order to make change happen in our communities, regions, and throughout the nation. We are thankful to sustain this work together.

About Karina

Karina is a media maker and educator. She has spent most of her life co-creating multilingual short-form videos, graphics, and meme campaigns alongside organized communities.

As an educator she has supported organizations in building programs that develop collective and individual leadership of young people and aligns their media with their values, capacity and political strategy. This has taken the shape of developing spaces where young people have the support to lead: place-based  community journalism programs, coalition-based media production, intergenerational community media institutes and productions for campaigns developed alongside organizers.

As an artist she is committed to stories and creative processes that: 1) encompass the experience and vision of working people; 2) are nurtured in historical context, watered by possibility and playful with time 3) are accountable to a larger organizing strategy.

In recent years she's been deepening her studies of storytelling  and reconnecting with the dimension of our humanity that inherently distrust all that is simple to explain and still longs to be heard. Apart from run-on sentences, she's been working on screenwriting and showrunning. The results so far have been odes in the forms of short narrative films to Queens, NYC and working-class, matriarchal families. 

For more on Karina's work, visit: karilamari.com

About Alicia

Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom is a nationally-recognized expert in youth development and youth organizing, and building systems that reflect the human-centered needs of children, youth and families. She is also a parent of three children, living in a seven-person, multi-generational household where all manner of self-directed creative, community-focused and scientific inquiry projects are encouraged.
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​Over the last 20 years, she has worked with youth, families and the organizations that support them in advocating and organizing around their own community and social supports; in strengthening community partnerships and improving the work of foundations and intermediaries to promote community-driven work around ensuring that the social and community ecosystem supports all youth.

For two decades, Alicia has worked with both national and community-based groups on a range of youth-focused projects including facilitation of community-planning and outreach for the Detroit Forward Promise/My Brother’s Keeper initiative; the Clayton County (GA) Juvenile Justice systems reform collaborative; budget training for youth organizers through The Children’s Funding Project; technical assistance to support the Wayne County (Detroit) Wayne Kids Win! tax fund campaign to generate a $55 million fund to support afterschool programs and strategy guidance for creating a dedicated fund for youth in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

Alicia has co-authored several articles, guides and reports and curated web-based content related to this body of work including the report Funding Brighter Futures: How Local Governments Enhance Investments in Kids and a curated website Democratizing Evidence on centering the creation and use of evidence in communities.

About Amrita

Amrita Wassan situates themself in the interstices between individual and collective liberation. This focus has led to projects as diverse as cultural campaigns promoting healthy relationships in LGBTQIA communities, collectivization of resources for hyper local grant making, building multiple cooperative businesses, working to support youth both inside and outside schools with their creative and political desires and creating spaces and economic opportunities for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. As an educator and economic alternatives builder, they are constantly honing their craft with an ever expanding repertoire of tools as well as networks of learning communities. 

About Julien

Julien A. Terrell is a father, educator and cultural organizer who lives and works in West Philadelphia along with his two children. Originally from Harlem, he focuses primarily on supporting children and young people in making meaning of both the history of black struggle in the US and internationally as well as analyzing the current political moment through cultural practices such as music, creative writing and media. From a young age, he studied the key cultural moments in Harlem's history including the Harlem Renaissance, Black Liberation Movement and Black Arts Movement which has shaped his understanding and work in expanding the individual and communal capacity for revolutionary imagination.

Over the past 16 years, Julien has focused on organizing, political education, training, and engaging community in public art activities as a means to hone his skills as a supporter for others in their process. Most recently, his experiences as a father have also sharpened his focus on family as a key space for shaping the worldview, and political and cultural lens of children and adults. 

About David

​David V. Hunt is a nationally recognized teacher and leader in organizing for social change. He has been trained in many small and large group facilitation methods which serve him well as a nationally sought after speaker, facilitator, trainer, planner, thinker, community and organization builder.

​In 1996, David Hunt & Associates was founded to serve as an institution dedicated to citizen empowerment and community development. Much of his research, training and methodology were born during his three-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Leadership Fellowship. He uses a wide variety of techniques and tools including storytelling to create sacred space where the voices and visions of all that are gathered can be shared and heard.

Using a variety of community organizing techniques, David has taught the fundamentals of organizing to thousands of people. Teaching and practicing what he learnt as one of four principal trainers of the Midwest Academy (one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious social change organizing training institutions) from 1998–2012, David has been instrumental in winning many victories for individuals and the communities they serve.

David is the founder of the Community Building Storytelling Project, a project designed to reintroduce storytelling into American culture as a tool to build community and heal America. He uses storytelling to create sacred space where the voices and visions of all that are gathered can be shared and heard. His presentations give insight to his belief that next to the universal laws of physics, absolutely nothing impacts the collective and individual human spirit and its mystical and magical journey, more than story.

For more on David's work, visit: davidvhunt.com

Asha Carter
Facilitation​

Brenda Perez Amador
Facilitation

Brittney Washington
Facilitation and Illustrations
​For more on Brittney's work, visit her website.

Juan Carlos Vega
​Administration and Information Specialist
​For more on Juan Carlos' work, visit The Activist Librarian.

Miguel Castro Luna
Facilitation and Organizing
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Nawal Rajeh
Facilitation​

Peter J. Figgis
Carpentry and Catering
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