Movement Innovation Collaborative

Movement Innovation Collaborative is an organizer-led effort to amplify and accelerate the field of power building. We are seeding interconnected, intergenerational networks of innovative movements to catalyze lasting, long-term transformation in California. Our vision is to strengthen and scale our vibrant power building ecosystem that honors the collective imagining of each of our past and present movements towards a future deeply rooted in racial justice.

The steady and disciplined organizing in communities of color over decades in California has positioned our movements to respond powerfully to multiple, intersecting crises in our communities. We’ve made important progress over the past two decades towards meaningful progressive victories, and deepening solidarity across the movement for racial justice, creating coalitions that successfully aggregate power and engaging more younger voters and voters of color with progressive issues. At the same time, our futures and the strength of our democracy still face threats from outsized corporate power and rightwing extremists. People facing the biggest harms lack the power to make decisions — from low wages, rising costs, poor living and working conditions, and homelessness to deteriorating public health systems, industrial pollution, and state violence. If we want to sustain our progress, there is still work to be done.

Power building movements — especially those led by young people, Black and Indigenous communities and communities of color — have historically lacked investment and have faced inequitable distribution of resources. This lack of investment has slowed the progress of our movements and created conditions that leave many organizers and leaders overworked and under-resourced.

By connecting and scaling local and regional power building centers, organizations, and movement leaders, Movement Innovation Collaborative aims to catalyze a historic, first-of-its-scale, infrastructure to support California’s power builders to co-create, strategize, learn, struggle, heal, and grow together in virtual and physical spaces.