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 rise of right wing organizing and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, much of the progressive arena was operating in siloed, hyper-local issue areas winning piecemeal campaigns that, even when coalesced, was not enough. It became clear to them that our existing pathways to change were not enough to meet the scale of the crises. What we needed was scalable, effective social movements that could absorb hundreds of thousands of people and turn popular will into law.
Momentum was created with the support of a large community of organizers. Founders included Max Berger, an Occupy alum and later member of Justice Democrats; Kate Werning, who came out of immigrant rights organizing and the Wisconsin Uprising; Maria Fernanda Cabello from United We Dream and the immigrants rights movement; Mimi Hitzemann and Guido Girgenti, student organizers who had also been involved in Occupy; Nicole Carty, another Occupy alum; and Belinda Rodriguez, who came out of the climate justice movement.
Most of the early trainings and curriculum development process were led by two other founders Carlos Saavedra — who was grounded by his experiences organizing undocumented immigrants through United We Dream — and Paul Engler, who created the L.A.-based labor and interfaith organizing project the Center for the Working Poor and had previously been a labor organizer with UNITE HERE, a union primarily organizing hotel workers and others in the service industry.
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, the South African anti-Apartheid movement, and, chiefly, the model of mass mobilization utilized by Otpor, the Serbian political movement that played a key role in the 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 the need for robust investment into the craft of social movements. What first began as a one-off training, burgeoned 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 political landscape. The shared language allowed them to debate, analyze and come together to form new organizations. A handful of organizers who’d worked within or were inspired by Occupy Wall Street formed AllOfUs, which later merged with and became Justice Democrats, the organization responsible for the recruitment and election of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Leaders from the Dreamer movement would experiment with focusing on a specific demographic and build Movimiento Cosecha 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, which took the disruptive actions of the mass protest tradition and combined them with a clear, stable electoral engagement strategy to popularize their solution to the climate crisis, the Green New Deal. IfNotNow, 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, including anti-sweatshop labor activist Byul Yoon, received support from Momentum throughout their early development. And a veteran group of Black Lives Matter organizers like Miski Noor and Kandace Montgomery 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 and even higher states, Momentum took a pause to assess our wins and losses, the role of movements, and what Momentum can 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 political practitioners with a shared historical analysis, a sober assessment of what is possible, and ambitious plans to expand what is 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 political, social, and economic forces in the U.S. toward justice. That’s why we’re laying the foundation for a 21st-century movement school and institution which speaks to our 21st-century context.
Momentum’s expanded vision and programming will serve as a primary vehicle to prepare progressive and left organizers to address the challenges of our time through building and driving social movements. Our multi-level training program will serve as a funnel to attract and absorb leaders and groups at multiple stages of their development, through many cycles in 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; and 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 political project for shared progressive political vision.
All the programs of the Movement School will build on each other by design, and we will consistently be updating the offerings (curriculum and programs) based on what movements need, research produced, and our collective successes and failures. For example, new research projects will be in direct conversation with what Momentum coaches identify as the biggest emerging knowledge/skill gaps for the movements and leaders they are supporting, and will be disseminated through new curriculum and trainings for our practitioners and to the public through targeted thought leadership; and the movements and experiments we support and incubate will be prioritized based on their role and potential in the broader political project and ongoing political assessment of our leaders across movements.