Movements don’t just happen, they’re built. Movement building is both an aspect of Catalyst Project’s work and why we do all of our work. The political education and training we provide is in service of building multi-racial, working class, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color-led movements for collective liberation. We join these movements as active participants and to support the development of dynamic activists, organizers and leaders working in grassroots organizations. We support the development of infrastructure to sustain organizations and movements beyond moments of crisis and uprising. We bring organizers and organizations together across race, class, sector, and region to build anti-racist political alignment and power. We prioritize struggles and organizations that have strategic potential to build the movement and where we have been asked to support their work.
Our movement building work is guided by three goals:
- Support revolutionary politics and organizing that advances concrete short-term goals with a long-term systemic change vision and strategy.
- Support effective, dynamic and strategic white anti-racist leadership and organizing.
- Support effective, dynamic and strategic multiracial alliances prioritizing the leadership of working class people, people of color, women, and queers to build our movements.
Some examples of our movement building work:
Christians for a Free Palestine (CFP)
In 2023 and 2024, we played a key role in the development of Christians for a Free Palestine, a multiracial group interrupting Christian zionism and building the broader base needed to achieve an arms embargo and ceasefire.
Learn more about CFP
Supporting Indigenous Pipeline Struggles
In 2016, Catalyst sent a collective member to Standing Rock in North Dakota for 5 weeks, where they helped hold orientations for the thousands of newcomers to the Indigenous struggle to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. They oriented an estimated 4,000 non-Indigenous people about how this fight was fundamentally about Indigenous sovereignty, colonization, and facing history in order to build a new path forward.
In 2021 a Catalyst collective member organized an affinity group of Braden alum and others to joined the Giniw collective camp to take action to stop the pipeline and protect Anishinaabe sovereignty.
Indigenous Solidarity Network (ISN)
In 2017 Catalyst Project cofounded the Indigenous Solidarity Network, a coalition of non-native organizations that organizes for Indigenous sovereignty, to defend land, water, and Mother Earth, and support efforts to return land to the original stewards. ISN shares resources and actions for non-Native people to be in solidarity with Indigenous struggles. We host webinars that encourage people to show up for frontline Indigenous movements, ongoing solidarity campaigns such as Native land taxes, and an annual Rethinking Thanksgiving webinar. We send a regular newsletter with updates and action alerts.
Learn more about ISN
Stop Urban Shield
Catalyst Project was a member of the coalition to Stop Urban Shield, a broad coalition of grassroots community and social justice organizations that successfully united to stop the largest militarized SWAT training in the world. Held annually in the Bay Area on the weekend of 9/11, Urban Shield was a war games training and weapons expo that involved international and local law enforcement agencies and emergency responders. This important victory - against racism, repression, militarism, and state violence - came after years of cross-movement organizing led by BIPOC forces.
New Orleans Solidarity Program
Following Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of volunteers from around the country went to New Orleans to support working class and poor Black communities to rebuild their city. Catalyst Project dispatched collective members to New Orleans, where they worked closely with on-the-ground organizations like People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Common Ground, providing direct support and developing and providing anti-racist political education for volunteers.
Organizing to Win: A Poor and Working Class Convening
In 2017, following the first election of Donald Trump, Catalyst Project, in collaboration with Highlander Center, organized a convening of 30 mostly white organizers working for justice in poor and working class white communities across the US to connect, strategize, and build.