Movement Building 101:
Andrew Lichterman - DisarmamentActivist.org

In our organizations, we need to emphasize activities that get people working together with others in a sustained way, and where an increasing number of people are learning the skills needed to initiate and carry through work themselves. Some questions we might ask ourselves in choosing actions to build a movement which is sustainable for the long term are:

• Does the action increase our understanding of the issues we are working on in a way which also will be understandable to others? Does it help us to understand and explain the connections between our issues and other concerns that people care deeply about and that affect their everyday lives?
• Does the action build skills in its participants (and especially volunteers), and provide them with a way they can become and remain engaged with the issue?
• Does the action help to build community among the people involved? Once again, in current organizing, one way this has come up is in questions of scale– is crisis-driven organization of large events in a few major cities the right focus, or should we be thinking about events and organizing techniques that start small in many communities, building new groups, organizations, and coalitions for the long term?
• Does the action build organizational structures which can be sustained? In particular, does it create or help to maintain new organizing “nodes” around which further activity can coalesce, particularly in geographic regions or sectors of society where there currently is little activism on our issues?
• Does the action build coalitions which will last?
• Does the action help to shift the boundaries of debate in a positive way?
• And finally, because no one really has a definitive answer for these difficult questions, do our campaigns and organizational forms encourage a variety of approaches, and are they designed to help us learn from experience and from each other about what works and what doesn’t?