Created in 2014, Momentum was the brainchild of frustrated but inspired organizers who saw the limitations of the work they were doing and the shortcomings of mass movements like Occupy Wall Street and the global justice movement of the 1990s. These organizers were faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges amidst the compounding threats of an eroding democracy, economic austerity, climate and racial crises, and the rise of authoritarianism. Meanwhile, much of the organizing arena was operating in siloed, hyper-local issue areas, winning piecemeal campaigns that, even when coalesced, were not enough. What we needed were scalable, effective social movements that could absorb hundreds of thousands of people and turn popular will into real change.
Momentum was created with the support of a large community of organizers, largely from Occupy, immigrant justice work, labor efforts, and the youth climate movement.
They drew on research from civil resistance scholars Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan and combined it with the study of specific struggles, like the Civil Rights Movement and the South African anti-Apartheid movement. Chiefly, they learned from the model of mass mobilization utilized by Otpor, the Serbian political movement that played a key role in overthrowing the dictatorship of Slobodan Milošević. All of these movements used some form of “hybrid” model that would take the best of both structure organizing and mass protest work.
Through this research came the Momentum hybrid organizing model. It quickly became clear that there was a thirst for rigorous organizing trainings and robust investment in the craft of social movements. What first began as a one-off training, was intentionally transformed into a rich community of practice. From there, organizers in our community, committed to the ethos of building tangible people power, started to build new social movement organizations and experiment with new strategies and tactics.
These movements have already had profound impacts on the social landscape. The shared language allowed them to debate, analyze, and form new organizations.
Leaders from the Dreamer movement would experiment with focusing on a specific demographic and build Movimiento Cosecha Support Network to organize undocumented workers across the country. A group of organizers from the Divestment Student Network, a campus-based environmental justice organization, joined together to form Sunrise Movement Education Fund, which took the disruptive actions of the mass protest tradition and combined them with a clear, stable electoral engagement strategy to train up thousands of young people on effective climate organizing strategies and educating the public on a more comprehensive solution to the climate crisis, the Green New Deal.
IfNotNow Education Fund, an organization focused on ending American Jewish support for the occupation of Palestine, reformulated its strategy as a part of the community. Dissenters, a new antiwar organization created by young people of color who cut their teeth in the anti-sweatshop labor movement, received support from Momentum throughout their early development. And a veteran group of Black Lives Matter organizers helped Momentum commit more resources towards Black leaders, and then worked to establish 2020’s defund the police demand as the Minneapolis-based organization Black Visions.
What’s next for Momentum?
In 2021, after over 5 years of experimentation, Momentum paused to assess our wins and losses, the role of movements, and what we could do to make them even more successful. We are now turning the corner from a training program into a robust institution and home for social movement organizers.
We understand that our role is to create committed groups of movement practitioners with a shared historical analysis, a sober assessment of what is possible, and ambitious plans to expand the possible and win. As part of that development, we teach organizers the skills and methods they will need to build social movements capable of realigning social and economic forces in the U.S. toward justice. That’s why we’re laying the foundation for a 21st-century Movement School that speaks to our 21st-century context.
Momentum’s expanded vision and programming will serve as a primary vehicle to prepare organizers to address the challenges of our time. Our program will serve as a funnel to attract and absorb leaders and groups at multiple stages of their development, through the many cycles of their leadership. In addition to trainings, cohorts, and other programs that will be offered to thousands of leaders through the Movement School, Momentum will provide ongoing and intensive support to movement organizations through:
Leadership coaching and strategic facilitation;
Research, systematization, and dissemination of learnings in the field;
Movement and campaign incubation in key issue areas and ecologies;
thought leadership;
Building a robust, interconnected community of practice across movement organizations and leaders to support cross-pollination, cross-movement collaboration and learning, and a shared orientation toward a broader, long-view vision for change.
All the programs of the Movement School will build on each other by design, and will consistently be updated based on what movements need, research produced, and our collective successes and failures.
Research projects will be in direct conversation with observations from our coaches about the most pressing knowledge and skill gaps within social movement leadership. That analysis will then be translated into curriculum and trainings for our practitioners and the public through targeted thought leadership. Then the movements we support and incubate will be prioritized based on their role and potential to enact the recommendations from our curriculum and shift the political landscape in favor of everyday people. This virtuous cycle will allow us to keep our finger on the pulse of movements, and deploy resources strategically to ensure we maximize our impact.