movement building
It would really warm my heart if these concepts were more popular in the left
Jonathan Smucker (author of Hegemony How-to) shares his insights on campaigning. “Politics is not something you “have.” It’s something you DO. If your “politics” doesn’t involve building and wielding collective power,...
Community Organizing Capacity Tool
PowerCheck can help you assess a baseline of groups’ organizing readiness skills, resources and other capacities, plan how to strengthen the organization, and mark progress in doing so.
How to make your social justice event accessible
Krysia Birman (The Commons Social Change Library) writes: “If you are organising a Pride march or a youth rights event, for example, why not take the extra steps to make the gathering as accessible as possible? You won’t get everything right, but you can find...
Why I’ve Started to Fear My Fellow Social Justice Activists
Nicole Mason reflects: “Callout culture. The quest for purity. Privilege theory taken to extremes. I’ve observed some of these questionable patterns in my activist communities over the past several years… If we as activists do not feel safe in our...
Five Tips for Building an Organization that Supports Movements
Phil Wilmot (ICNC) shares five tips derived from victories and shortcomings hoping they can “assist those walking similar paths and help progressive funders growing curious about resistance movements understand what to look for in movement-minded...
Women of colour in the nonprofit sector | New report
This Race to Lead report reveals that women of color encounter systemic obstacles to their advancement over and above the barriers faced by white women and men of color. Education and training are not the solution—women of color with high levels of education are more...
Embracing the Network: How to Build a Powerfully Collaborative Campaign
“Embracing Networks” in campaigns can lead to powerful results. Many of the largest campaigns in the world, mobilizing millions of people, use the power of networks. It’s easier than ever to embrace networked campaigning thanks to new technologies that have come...
No justice without love: why activism must be more generous
Frances Lee writes: “I want to be a member of a thriving and diverse social movement, not a cult or a religion… I believe that social justice activists must be committed to rooting out supremacy, dogmatism, and unhealthy behaviors inside themselves while...
Beyond Command-and-Control Campaigns (NetChange)
While the directed-network campaigning model delegates the management of some important activities to its base, central leadership typically owns certain things like issue framing and storytelling that are critical to campaign success. Rapidly self-propagating protest...
Momentum is a training institute and movement incubator
Momentum is committed to teaching and learning the craft of popular movements fighting for justice. We give grassroots organizers the tools to build massive, decentralized social movements that aim to shift the terrain under policymakers’ feet. We live in a time of...
Rise Up: Board Game Designed For Activists To Practice Building Movements
Board games have a history in social justice movements. Even Monopoly was originally created to teach players about inequality and the problems capitalism can create. A new game, inspired by those roots, is designed to let players practice building a social movement....
Swarm | Decentralised organisation
Swarm is Anyi’s program on decentralized organization which asks the question: how do we engage thousands more people in our organizations? What Anyi have learned from a diverse range of contexts and disciplines (including biology, complex systems, network...
Networked change | How progressive campaigns are won in the 21st century
What makes some of today’s most successful advocacy campaigns work, while so many others fail to make an impact? The Networked Change Report maps out the strategies and practices that made 47 of today’s most successful advocacy campaigns work. These campaigns achieved...
The Sierra Club Movement Organising Manual 2016
This manual is designed to aid your work as an organiser: building campaigns that enlist grassroots power to achieve outcomes that improve the world. Our objective is to lay out key ideas and practices that, in our experience, result in campaigns that succeed. This...
Important qualities of authentic relationships across differences
Karen Pace and Dionardo Pizana write: “Our commitment to the ongoing process of developing an authentic relationship across racial and gender differences has helped us to identify important foundational qualities of our relationship. These characteristics are...
A Radical Alliance of Black and Green Could Save the World
But first the two movements will have to rediscover their shared roots in a fundamental critique of an economy and a society that value things more than lives. As in the environmental world, many in the black community are seeing limits to traditional advocacy…...
Against activism | Astra Taylor
““A pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation… Successful organizers, by...
Not so grassroots: How the snowflake model is transforming political campaigns
Stephen Mills writes: “Campaigning has broken out from the electoral context and evolved into a new tool for business, government and civil society actors. Campaigning is now the dominant form of collective political activity in Australia. Waves of...