Fortifying for the Future: 5 Infrastructure Promises from Building Movement Project

by Janis Rosheuvel, Executive Director at Building Movement Project

Fortifying For the Future:

5 Infrastructure Promises from Building Movement Project 

We once more find ourselves as a sector in a fraught moment of questioning, regrouping, planning and mourning. The coming days, weeks, months, and years will bring known and new challenges. And we can meet them by locking arms, tapping into our creativity and fortifying ourselves and our organizations for the future. 

At Building Movement Project (BMP), we are doing what we have done for the past 25 years. We are standing alongside our colleagues on the frontlines of social movements and in nonprofits working to respond to this moment. We are here to support the building and buttressing of solid infrastructure for our sector. Infrastructure includes a wide range of processes, skills, programs, partnerships, and tools that enable movements to thrive and evolve overtime. Infrastructure also requires intersecting institutions, coalitions, and structures that undergird social change. 

BMP is committed to being a key infrastructure partner. Many of you know our research, organizational change, movement building, leadership development and racial equity initiatives. We want all of this work to support your resistance and strategy aims now and as we come to understand what the next years will look like for us and our communities. 

Here is what we promise:

1. We Will Support Principled Dialogue: BMP will keep offering spaces that help to steward generative dialogue. We will continue to facilitate conversations across key parts of the sector, like our upcoming State of Solidarity: Solidarity Beyond the Elections webinar on 11/14/24 at 12pm ET. Register here. This conversation will include Rachel Cheek, National Network of Abortion Funds; Mary Hooks, Movement for Black Lives; and Margaret Faliano, IllumiNative; and will be moderated by BMP’s Adaku Utah. BMP is also a key convener of several peer learning cohorts focused on a range of identity groups, racial justice practitioners and social service providers. If you would like to know more about any of these learning and strategy spaces, please let us know: [email protected].  

2. We Will Help Fortify Organizations: BMP will continue to provide tools to help organizations thrive under pressure. We have tools you can use in the immediate term as you try to process and plan, including The 2024 Elections and Beyond: Fortifying Ourselves, Our Organizations, and Our Ecosystems toolkit. Because we know this moment will inevitably require urgent action, pay particular attention to the Rapid Response Decision Making Tool (page 18), which provides a set of questions that organizations can use to figure out their responses in times like these. Our Ecosystem of Well-Being (page 23) can also be a guide for individuals and organizations reflecting on their current practices, identifying what drains and restores their energy, and intentionally developing strategies to prevent burnout. In addition to tools for right now, we are also ready to provide tools that help make organizations strong enough to weather the storms to come. Those seeking support to help fortify their organizations for the long haul can use BMP’s Racial Equity Assessment tools to help build more racially equitable and inclusive workplaces. They support building workplaces that over the long term are more ready to respond to societal moments of upheaval and crisis.  

3. We Will Conduct Responsive Research: We will provide cutting-edge research by remaining in strong partnership with those leading struggles for social change. Our research will continue to be a place to share and inform trends from across the sector. Please use our recent report, Sounding the Alarm: Nonprofits on the Frontlines of a Polarized Political Climate to support your own advocacy, funding and safety planning. For leaders in particular, our series of reports, including, Race to Lead, Reckoning with Sustainability: Black Leaders Reflect on 2020, the Funding Cliff, and Organizing Infrastructure, and The Push and Pull: Declining Interest in Nonprofit Leadership, reflect your stories and, we hope, give you grounded data as we all work to reshape the sector to meaningfully sustain your leadership. 

4. We Will Nurture Experimentation: Eras like this one necessitate creative experimentation. BMP has always supported the sector’s strategic exploration of new ways of working for social change. We remain a space to help our sector colleagues reflect, plan and test assumptions. We are experimenting once more with cohort training for direct service organizations seeking to build infrastructure to engage in social change efforts in their communities. We will be launching a new cohort in mid 2025 and applications will be open in the coming months. In addition, BMP will keep providing spaces for movements, nonprofits and funding partners to advance their work through experiential learning. 

5. We Will Help Funders Build Resolve: To our comrades in the philanthropic sector, we see many of you working to keep the pressure on your boards, trustees, leaders and peers to liberate greater resources. Thank you. We want to help you build yours and others’ resolve to keep doing this work. The ideal baseline has always been providing multi-year, unrestricted, general operating funding to groups in the struggle for justice. This remains true. But so much is shifting and will continue to, especially as nonprofits on the ground face additional attacks and threats to their very existence. Continuing to listen and act based on the self-assessed needs of those on the frontlines will be essential now and in the years to come. BMP will continue to monitor, pay attention, and lift up vital infrastructure issues as they continue to impact the field. We are your partners in this work.

In many ways, we were made for these times. So many of our ancestors have taught us how to live and thrive despite enormous threats. These times require us to have a deep understanding of our histories. They require us to fortify our collective wellbeing and secure infrastructure for the fights ahead. We also need to hold one another close and remember that, as the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote:

we are each other’s

harvest:

we are each other’s

business:

we are each other’s

magnitude and bond. 

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