When movements go into winter
Movements for social justice and civil rights have undeniably transformed America through multiple waves. Yet they are poorly understood because most people are only paying attention to them when they are in their ‘mass movement’ stage, and this distorts historical perceptions. If your idea of a movement happening is a lot of people in the streets and tons of public attention paid, then when those things aren’t happening, it can feel like the movement is dead. But that’s not true – movements go through seasons, just like organizations and individuals. And each season is crucial for successfully achieving transformational wins, even winter. To learn more, check out courses at the Ayni School.
I’m interested in how to support movements, organizations, and leaders, as well as local movement ecosystems, to have good winters, as the nature of the following spring and summer will be shaped by what happens in winter.
That’s the topic of a 1989 paper I read recently (h/t Professor Steve Teles) about the nature of the women’s movement in the United States from 1945 to 1960, a time of retrenchment. Author Vera Taylor explains how “social movement abeyance structures provide organizational and ideological bridges between different upsurges of activism.” In her analysis, the keys to movement continuity include: promoting the survival of activist networks, sustaining a repertoire of goals and tactics, and promoting a collective identity that offers a common sense of mission and moral purpose. She presents the example of the National Women’s Party (NWP), which shrank from 60,000 members in the last years of the suffrage campaign to 200 committed members by 1952, but forged and sustained intense bonds between leading women’s rights activists and maintained goals and tactics. This well of knowledge and relationships provided a critical jumping off point for the resurgent women’s movement in the 1960s, including the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Less happily, it also imported older class and race limitations into new formations.
I’m now reflecting on how one might apply this to the criminal justice reform movement. On the one hand, we see the movement to end mass incarceration gaining ground with the public, which has a much better grasp on the issues than 10 years ago, with numerous political victories in DA races and other matters bearing out that support. On the other hand, the public is not focused on pushing the issue further, and the existing work is facing serious headwinds when it comes to media and political institutions. Meanwhile, several major donors who have carried the criminal justice reform field over the past few years are, for their own reasons, moving in some different directions. New donors are coming in, but not at the same pace yet. So we are looking at a major dip in funding at a moment when the field is most in need of support to get over this hump, and more importantly, when there are the greatest opportunities to shape the next stage of work for success.
Winter gets maligned but it can be one of the most productive times, if you approach it with the right mindset. It’s the time to decide and plan for what seeds to plant in spring. It’s when old shapes and structures fall apart and can be redesigned. It can offer a liberating blank canvas. In the context of criminal justice work, some examples of winter funding might include: a substantial sabbatical fund for key movement organizers and thinkers, allowing for 1-2 years of reflection, plus support for gatherings; investing in distributed efforts to build onramps for impacted people to learn, build community, and train for impactful activism; and institutionalizing policy gains by infiltrating the agencies in charge of implementing them.
Figuring out how to winter well and how to fund winters most effectively is something I’m thinking about often.
