In Times of Crisis We Need More People Power

This is not a theoretical challenge. Rather, it is one that mass protest movements have repeatedly faced in recent years. At whirlwind moments when crowds of people take to the streets and seek to join movements for justice — think Black Lives Matter, or the Women’s March, or mass antiwar protests — organizers must somehow find a way to absorb the rush of energy and participation. Too often, they have few systems in place to truly handle the surge of interest. And so when the high-water period subsides, most of the newcomers drift away, and much of the promise of the moment is lost.

So how, then, can movements better respond, making the most of the opportunity to channel this precious wave of new participants into long-term involvement?

Mass training provides a crucial answer.

Why mass training matters

Coming to an appreciation of the power of mass training represented a major breakthrough for those of us who were starting Momentum, the training institute and movement incubator I was involved in founding in 2013. Carlos was another of the founders, while Dani would later become the Director of Advanced Programs. At Momentum, I worked with leaders who had experienced cycles of high movement activity, from the globalization and antiwar movements of the early 2000s, to the mass immigrant rights protests of 2007, to the 2008 Obama campaign, to the subsequent peaks of the Dreamers and Occupy Wall Street. In each case, periods of whirlwind activity were followed by stretches of disillusionment, demobilization and disorganization.

We believed that movements could do better in harnessing and sustaining the power of these peak moments, as well as in channeling the energy into longer-term cycles of organizing. We sought to systematize methods for doing so, and we quickly realized that mass training would need to play a big part.

When discussing “mass training,” the type of program that I am talking about is different from a typical protest training that someone might attend in advance of participating in a nonviolent direct action — a relatively short session designed to brief newcomers on the scenario of how the protest will play out or orient them to the “action agreements” that participants might sign on to when joining the day’s demonstration. Instead, mass training is a way of bringing people into the movement in a more substantive way, fostering sustained involvement.

“Mass training gives you the ability to disseminate a lot of information and primary skills that can allow a group to succeed without as much centralized support,” Carlos says. “It also creates an emotional container where people really get excited about the work.” Its purpose is to transmit the entire DNA of a group — the story, strategy, structure, principles and culture of the movement.

Even with mass protest groups that are based around large-scale mobilizations, too often a big day of protest is the only thing that participants are invited to. If there is any follow up after that, it can be rote — an ask to sign a petition or make a donation. That can be an alienating experience for a new person who has just awoken to the magnitude of the struggle. “The goal of mass training is not just to give people a next step,” Dani says. “It’s to give them a whole path to deep and authentic leadership within the movement. It’s a means of giving people a sense of belonging, purpose, motivation and shared responsibility.”

Obviously, that’s a lot to accomplish. So how do you do it?

To make it work, there are four key components that must be in place: liminality, scalability, going beyond the initiation, and creating the right balance between training, coaching, and action.

A group experience of liminality

The first important component in how mass trainings work is liminality. This concept was initially developed in early-20th century anthropology, coined by European ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, who was interested in the rituals that marked important rites of passage. Contemporary anthropologist Bjørn Thomassen describes liminality as “spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge.”

In recent decades, the importance of liminal spaces has been taken up in social psychology and a variety of other fields. For trainers in the activist world, the state of being in-between — the power of spaces in which people are open and receptive to personal transformation — is hugely significant because it helps address a key problem: how to enable many people to have breakthroughs in a limited amount of time.

In structure-based organizations such as unions and community groups, which focus on steadily building up organizational infrastructure over many years, the process of onboarding new participants and training new leaders is generally accomplished through one-on-one mentoring and apprenticeship. Organizers develop skills under the tutelage of an experienced master, and with time and practice they themselves can gain a deep understanding of the craft of movement building, but the organization’s capacity is capped at the dozen or two-dozen people that each lead organizer can realistically mentor.

Mass trainings create a space in which a much larger number of new participants can be initiated and put on a path of leadership development. When someone attends a training over the course of several days or a week, their life is disrupted. They have to travel to a new physical location, they are often surrounded by people they do not know, and they are wrestling with big, challenging issues that otherwise take a back seat in their routine lives.

The collective learning that takes place, combined with the shared vulnerability of participants and trainers alike, builds a culture of commitment to a common project. These ingredients open new mental and emotional doors for participants. And when used well by trainers, they create an environment conducive to transformational experiences that cannot be replicated in an individual setting. In short, mass trainings open up a new world for participants to walk into and then come out as leaders.

“The training is a space of reflection, of learning and of listening,” Carlos explains. “A lot of people that participate have never been in a movement space like that before. What happens when people go through a deep listening and sharing process with one another — like in the Marshall Ganz model, which infuses public narrative as the centerpiece of the mass training program — is that there are a lot of stories that people tell that they haven’t told other people before.”

Carlos emphasizes how this generates a powerful bond within the group: “There’s something magical about telling stories to strangers that are going to be listened to,” he says. “That creates a special vulnerability that people rarely find in their lives.”

The effect created is very different from what can be achieved elsewhere. “Emotions grow bigger when you have more people,” Carlos says. “It creates a feedback loop where it’s like, ‘holy shit, we are all in this together.’ And there’s a faith that you can do something together in the world that might otherwise feel impossible.”

Dani echoes this sentiment: “What happens in a liminal space, as opposed to just smaller interactions or one-on-ones, is that it’s exponential,” she explains. “The emotional impact just reverberates. And that experience and that belief can strengthen really fast and really deeply in a way that is carried forward.”

The power of creating collective spaces that can nurture transformative experiences was famously modeled in the U.S. civil rights movement both through the training work of institutions such as the Highlander Center and in the church-based mass meetings that would take place nightly at the height of protest campaigns. The movement’s revival-like gatherings were not merely occasions for soaring oratory from well-known speakers; they also featured communal song, personal testimonials from rank-and-file activists and possibilities to segue into intensive trainings the next day. This made for an experience that built confidence, skills and purpose in participants, fostering a potent collectivity. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.”

We have seen the impact in many more recent movements as well. “At the end of IfNotNow trainings, we would go around and have people say what they were leaving with,” Dani explains. “Every time, at least four or five people would say, ‘I feel like I can finally be Jewish in a way that aligns with my values.’ Or, ‘I finally don’t feel helpless about this issue.’ People would talk about it as a turning point in their lives in terms of their sense of agency and belief that they could have an impact on the world.”

“In the Dreamer movement, a lot of people would share their stories about being undocumented, the struggles of not being able to go to school, dealing with deportations or having a family member be detained,” Carlos says. “People cried a lot, and there was a lot of emotional release.”

This practice grounded people and created a ritual, he argues. “All those stories really make everybody feel really, really clear about what was at stake for the movement. It makes people better activists because they get motivated. They can feel that this is extremely important for their lives, and they’re willing to put in the work to do something about it.”

Making a model that can grow to scale

The second key idea with mass trainings is that, in order to be able to reach the scale needed, they must be easy to replicate.

As IfNotNow’s program was gearing up, Dani and a few other key leaders — including Emily Mayer and Yonah Lieberman — found themselves frantically traveling around the country to lead trainings. “I essentially lived out of a car for a while,” Dani says. “I was traveling 20 to 25 days per month. I remember one time, I was so tired driving from a Boston training to one in New York that I crashed my car. I just parked and left and got on a bus so I could go run the training.”

There was so much demand for the program that new dates kept getting added to the calendar. But what should have been an organizer’s dream instead filled Dani with apprehension. “I was so exhausted, and just the idea of going to more and more trainings felt totally overwhelming,” she says. Her team realized that they could not run a true mass training program if it always ran into a huge bottleneck. “That bottleneck was me,” Dani laughs.

In order to change their model so that it could be scalable, IfNotNow took a lesson from Otpor, a youth movement in Serbia in the late 1990s that was part of the successful drive to oust anti-democratic strongman Slobodan Milošević. In order to initiate new members into the civil resistance movement, Otpor’s founders designed a training program that could be used by local chapters. But once they figured out how the trainings should work, these leaders quickly stopped running the sessions themselves. Instead, they focused on codifying and standardizing their practices into a curriculum that could be taken up and used by local chapters, operating independently. This insistence on replicability allowed the movement to build exponentially within the Serbian public.

As I wrote with my brother Mark in our book “This Is An Uprising,” “By the time Otpor had 20,000 members, so many trainings were under way in so many different localities that the obvious locations for gatherings — community centers and youth clubs — were constantly booked. More difficult than finding qualified leaders for the sessions was securing the physical space needed to train.”

In addition to bringing this lesson into IfNotNow, Dani and her team emphasized the need to always be developing new people who could master the pedagogy and teach others how to lead the mass trainings. “You have to train the trainers to train the trainers to train the trainers,” Dani says. New leaders do not have to lead a full training on their first outing. But by giving them a role at the next training — perhaps being responsible for a section of content — they both gain new skills and attend the training with a fresh perspective. A participant who learns the material as a listener absorbs a certain amount of information; someone who has to go back and teach it themselves truly takes it to heart.

In systematizing their trainings, IfNotNow implemented mechanisms for quality control to uphold a high level of craft. “Before they ever did it at a training, every trainer did three run-throughs of any module they would lead,” Dani says, “and we trained volunteer coaches on how to give them feedback.” This allowed the group to maintain the sharpness, clarity and integrity of their content. The organization made clear the requirements for people who wanted to take on more responsibility and move up their ladder of engagement.

Furthermore, they established schedules for how preparations for a training should take place, with clear steps to complete even six to eight weeks before the session. They also formalized a set of participant roles that would allow many people in a training to take a part in ensuring its success. These roles included welcomers, feedback collectors, timekeepers, participant supporters, dinner orderers, and fun captains or party leads.

Having a systematized, decentralized and coachable mass training program is what enables exponential growth. “We cannot rely on staff organizers maintaining relationships with all these people, and we shouldn’t have to,” Dani says. “You have to create systems that enable leaders to develop leaders.”

We call it “giving away the keys” — setting up others to organize without centralized control. Once the more distributed model was in place, Dani says, she did not attend an introductory training for two years, instead spending her time on other crucial tasks such as developing high-level coaches.

Balancing training, coaching and action

The third idea that is essential in making a mass training program work is balancing the leadership development that takes place in the group context with the need for coaching and also learning from practice.

People are not passive recipients of information. One model of learning contends that people learn 70 percent by doing, 20 percent through mentors, coaches and relationships with other people, and just 10 percent through formal instruction or coursework. A training program must account for this by rejecting rote instruction and instead maximizing the ability of participants both to build relationships and experience the work of the organization.

This means not only making trainings participatory, but also encouraging behavior in training sessions that will be directly relevant in campaigns. “Whatever you model in training gets replicated,” Dani says. “So if you want people to leave the training and take on work in teams, there should be a part of your training where people sit in groups and start working in teams, making commitments for next steps. If you want people to join a Slack or WhatsApp for inter-movement communication, start using it as a way to bring people together during the training.”

Recognizing the importance of creating practices that acculturate people to the everyday work of the organization, Otpor had new participants plan and carry out a protest at the end of their week of training — coming up with a small but creative act of defiance to the Milošević regime. It was when they completed their first action that new members were officially considered part of the movement.

Since recruitment and development of more and more participants is an essential function of the movement, growing the mass training program is an important objective. But ultimately, training does not exist for its own sake. Organizations have to go out and act on their issue: raising awareness, cultivating allies, challenging those in power, disrupting business as usual, and forcing a response. Therefore, striking the right balance for learning must involve creating infrastructure for coaching that continues beyond the group training.

Movement work is hard and emotionally intensive, and members need regular encouragement and guidance to carry out the mission of the organization. In a decentralized mass movement, the group’s goal must be to create means for people to get individualized support — not from a single supervisor, as in the apprenticeship model — but from peers and leaders at multiple levels of the organization.

The process of building out a decentralized network of coaches is a distinct topic, the details of which deserve longer exploration. But, as a step towards this, organizations can make sure that people leaving their trainings are joining teams. “In some ways, mass training is really about how you can create a massive number of decentralized teams to work around a shared objective,” Carlos says. These teams allow people to learn through experimentation, to act autonomously in small groups while getting continual feedback on their efforts.

“We ran into a problem where we felt like sometimes people left our trainings with a vision for what should happen over the next five years, but they didn’t have a vision of what should happen next month,” Dani says. “You can get really inspired, and get a lot of ideas, and build a lot of relationships that will help you. But you can’t actually learn how to plan a mass mobilization in a day or two.”

Remedying this required being concrete about projects that new people could channel their energy into — whether it be running a phone bank, joining a working group, or taking responsibility for a specific aspect of an upcoming action — and also creating systems so that the teams doing these tasks could get the support they needed.

Going beyond the initiation training

The fourth key step for maximizing the power of mass trainings is going beyond the initiation sessions to create a culture of training in your organization.

One way in which participants can grow their leadership is by becoming trainers themselves and taking on ever-greater levels of responsibility in making the program work. But another way that groups can foster leadership development and promote the value of constant learning is by creating upgrade trainings that allow members to learn essential skills needed to sustain different aspects of the movement. These are designed not just for initiates into the program, but as ways to level up the leadership of older members as well.

The upgrade trainings serve several key functions. They convey that in addition to scale, we also need craft. They show a movement’s commitment to a rigorous practice of honing the skills of organizing and building a deep bench of committed leaders who can steer the movement through challenging times, without the hard cap of a command-and-control staff nerve center. They inoculate leaders against negativity and demobilization by giving them tools to address difficult issues, which inevitably arise during intensive campaigns. And they allow decentralized organizations to make interventions in their collective strategy and culture as time passes.

“Our organizations gain capacity by committing to retrain ourselves over and over again,” Carlos says. “It gives us a way to work out strategic issues, to work on specific skills, and to get people back in touch with their motivation. Once people get used to doing it, they understand that they can go to trainings when they need to get re-energized or when they don’t know what to do.”

Specialized sessions might take on media and communications, logistics, action planning, fundraising, coalition-building, or details of electoral campaigns or legislative processes. Or they can be designed to help a movement work through a specific dilemma. In the case of IfNotNow, one of their most innovative advanced sessions was a “strategy upgrade” training, which they ran in seven different cities with between 30 to 50 people in each. It involved doing a deep dive with top leaders about how to embody the organization’s theory of change and how they could facilitate discussions with their local chapters about creating good action logic, avoiding the “myth of the righteous few,” and keeping the movement focused on bringing in new people from outside the base of usual activist suspects. The training helped these leaders reinforce IfNotNow’s unique role in the social movement ecosystem — rather than drifting into a different mission.

“People felt really developed and invested in,” Dani says. “It was powerful.” She adds, “Doing that training really helped move people from doing one-off actions expressing moral outrage into doing more in-depth national campaigns.”

Constant leadership development is essential for organizations that want to remain volunteer-driven mass movements, rather than staff-driven advocacy groups. Putting a premium on training people to fill needed roles within the organization allows it to keep functioning without constantly turning to the market. And, for participants, recognition of advanced trainings as a pathway to leadership allows people to gain standing without a sense that everyone must join the paid staff in order to be recognized.