Momentum is dedicated to movement building.
We are 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 severe inequality, racial disparity, and concentrated wealth in the United States. We need transformational change, and we believe it won’t come from within the political system. We need big movements, and we need leaders with the skills to shift public opinion and organize people at scale.
Momentum is committed to supporting these leaders with an organizing model rooted in international civil resistance, with tools that will win profound structural and cultural changes.
Cycle of Momentum
We teach organizers how to activate the public and change the political weather by using the cycle of momentum, focusing on:
Popular movements need to force the public to take notice of the issue and take a stance. Escalating strategic nonviolent action drives a wedge into the public’s moral conscience by asking: which side are you on?
We know that political power flows from the cooperation of the people, and we base our training principles in a social view of power. When people are activated, and refuse to cooperate with injustice in massive numbers, they win.
In order to get to scale, movements need to decentralize to have the capacity to absorb new members during critical moments of public attention. In order to decentralize without collapsing into chaos, movements must “frontload” their story, strategy, and structure.
What does it take to build social movements:
Momentum just completed our most ambitious program yet:
The first ever Frontloading Cohort. Frontloading is the highly intentional process in which a small team of leaders craft an organization’s DNA -- its story, structure, strategy, and culture -- and prepare for it to be distributed across the country in the form of a mass movement organization.
This past year we’ve worked with an extremely dedicated group of leaders as they developed a series of organizations committed to transforming the world as we know it-- from fighting for reparations to the establishment of medicare for all and the advancement of voting rights for all.
Resources
Momentum 101: Intro to the Hybrid
This video series serves as an introduction to the core concepts of the Momentum theory of organizing and is an abridged version of our larger in person training. Our curriculum is designed to give organizers the tools to build progressive popular social movements to win on the most pressing justice issues of our time, drawing on lessons and skills from contemporary and historic social movements. These recordings are from our March 2020 online training for People of Color.
The training is split into three sections:
The first section covers Movement Ecology, the idea that there are multiple approaches to social change and that they can complement each other instead of being in competition with one another.
The second section, Two Dominant Traditions, discusses the two major organizing traditions in the United States and provides an analysis on both, and a proposal for an alternative.
The final section, Active Popular Support, covers the array of concepts necessary to understand Momentum’s theory on the actual mechanisms of changing dominant institutions in the pursuit of political transformation. It discusses ideas like Polarization, the Two Views of Power, Mass Participation, and provides an overview for the rest of the Momentum curriculum.
Webinar: How to build the movement in a moment of the whirlwind
The Movement for Black Lives has made what many thought impossible, possible. Cities across the country are seriously considering defunding the police. Minneapolis city council members committed to disbanding the police department, a testament to the power built by BLVC and the movement. Los Angeles is cut their police budget by $100-150 million to reinvest the money in communities of color. And hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets in cities across the world to confront white supremacy inherent in our institutions and systems. We’re seeing tremendous, unprecedented opportunity before us to reimagine a world without police, where community needs are met without police violence.
This webinar with Makia Green, BLM DC core organizer and a Momentum trainer, and our Training Director Cicia Lee answers three major questions about the uprisings for Black lives this past summer:
Are the protests working? How can we tell if the movement is winning?
How long will the energy last? What can we do to support the movement?
Tons of people are being activated - what do we do with them?
We break down how mass protest works, how movements build momentum by using moments of crisis to spotlight issues, craft demands, reframe the fight, continue to grow and sustain, and more.
Webinar: Mass Trainings
How do we remove bottlenecks and give people the skills, strategy, support and permission they need to lead? How do we give people access to transformative experience and leadership development or thousands of people without staffing up or centralizing control? How do we allow people to self-organize and act autonomously and without waiting for permission from a centralized group - without losing sight of our goal or our unified theory of change?
In this webinar, Dani Moscovitch describes IfNotNow’s mass training program, how it allowed them to bring in thousands of new volunteers in a ‘moment of the whirlwind,’ core features of how to build your own, and mistakes they made that you should avoid.
Webinar: Sunrise Movement
How did Sunrise study and build towards the “moment of the whirlwind” we’re seeing now around the Green New Deal? How did they use the spotlight on elected officials to build more public support and a more powerful movement? How have they learned to absorb the thousands of people who want to follow their leadership? Watch this webinar with Sunrise on their movement building lessons, and what this political moment demands of organizers around the country. Sunrise is changing what is politically possible — and is also changing what organizing looks like in this country.
Webinar: Online to Offline Mobilization: Lessons from A Day Without Immigrants
Since the 2016 election, organizations across the country have been facing a similar challenge: What do you do when thousands of people come knocking on your door, ready to take action? Learn how Thaís Marques used digital tools to recruit thousands of immigrants across the country to take part in the largest immigrant-led actions in a generation during A Day Without Immigrants on May 1, 2017. In this webinar, you’ll learn how she used innovative digital tools to engage passive supporters of the movement to turn them into active participants to grow their organizational capacity.
Webinar: What makes nonviolent movements succeed?
Watch this webinar for an interview with Dr. Erica Chenoweth, author of “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” We asked her questions about what her research reveals are the best strategies and tactics from movements around the world that have succeeded and failed in taking on oppressive regimes.
Webinar: Learning from the Umbrella Movement
Watch this webinar with Johnson Yeung, one of the organizers behind Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, a massive civil resistance movement fighting for democracy. He analyzes and shares the movement cycle of the Umbrella Movement, key learnings around escalation in their 15 month campaign of civil disobedience, lessons in how they framed their issue, and how their tactics worked or didn't work.
Momentum Training Videos
Couldn't make it to a training? You can watch this series of 4 basic and 4 advanced webinars covering the earliest version of our curriculum. Produced in-house in the first year of our training by the Ayni Institute (formerly Movement Mastery), and led by co-founders Carlos Saavedra and Paul Engler, these videos are a great orientation to the theory of Momentum.
Swarm Videos
The Ayni Institute led a series of trainings that harvested lessons from a diverse range of contexts and disciplines, including biology, complex systems, network theory, and open-source software. Their Swarm Training teaches how to structure a social movement so that it maximizes the autonomy and creativity of its members while preparing for the challenges that come with decentralized leadership. They worked with participants to identify who to pull into their movements, how to create self-replicating team structures, and how to frontload principles to guide the culture and action of the movement.
The training videos cover:
* Introduction to theories of decentralized organization
* Creating your own decentralized structure
* Dynamics of self-organizing
* Anticipating challenges & creating principles to guide the "swarm"
* Roles and functions in a decentralized organization
Watch the Swarm webinars here >>
We're grateful to the Ayni Institute for their work to make these resources available. Check out their other trainings, and subscribe to their YouTube channel for more. Join their mailing list for access to the training powerpoints.
Book: This Is An Uprising
This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century is the companion book to the Momentum Training. Written by Paul and Mark Engler, it is rooted in decades of research on civil resistance, and looks at the hidden art behind mass movement eruptions, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest.
Read reviews of the book here.
Order your copy on Powell’s here.
Also available on Indiebound here
and on Bookshop.org here.
Here’s what past participants are saying about Momentum:
“The Momentum trainings not only share valuable information to help our movements get more strategic and clear in the different roles and approaches that are needed, but also builds strong and collaborative relationships across movements to help us become much sharper and more united.”
“Many have tried and failed to get organizations to be like the movements in the streets. And many have tried and failed to build movements that can move power. Momentum is a place where you can learn to do both.”
“Momentum has given me language for understanding organizing and strategy as a craft — a set of skills to be honed and practiced in community. It has helped me see myself as a young leader walking in the footsteps of generations upon generations of organizers and freedom fighters who I can look to and learn from. And it has enabled me to shift from seeing my experiences in social movements not as isolated incidents but as parts of long historical and political cycles that can be seen in many social movements. Momentum is the single most valuable training you can go to to advance your understanding of how social movements build power to win.”
“We need to get serious about the shared language and model of how we effectively do our work. This is an opportunity to enter that conversation, learn a lot, and fold into a powerful community trying to change not only the world, but how we go about building a new one. ”
“Momentum has completely changed the way I look at the work we do. It has made me see that there are different ways of organizing and building power with and for the community. ”
“Momentum has completely changed the way that I understand organizing. It has completely transformed the way that I understand power. It has given me a renewed hope in transformational change instead of just focusing on incremental change. Momentum has pushed me and my staff to rethink our organizing strategies, and has helped us to think a lot more deeply about our strategies and dream a lot bigger around our impact. ”
Previous participants in Momentum trainings come from organizations doing some of the most important movement-building in the U.S:
