It’s going to take multiple strategies to win under Trump 2.0

In the wake of the 2024 election and Donald Trump’s return to power, we have heard many suggestions for how progressives should regroup and respond. Some activists have argued that we need to prepare for mass protest and civil disobedience against the horrific policies the administration is bound to implement, such as mass deportations and the rolling back of labor rights — with some organizers, following United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, going so far as to suggest that a general strike could congeal by the end of Trump’s term. Others, citing feelings of “protest fatigue,” are instead using the moment to build communities of care and mutual aid. A third group has pushed for a revival of base-building and community organizing. And still others have looked to electoral campaigns and legal action at the state and local level as a bulwark against federal hostility.

In early December, the Ayni Institute convened a summit in Boston where organizational leaders and veteran activists came together around a different proposition: namely, that none of these strategies, by itself, is sufficient. Rather, movements gain strength when they can find ways for many approaches to work together.

At the gathering, some 70 participants representing movements around climate, criminal justice reform and prison abolition, immigrant rights and economic justice, as well as leaders in philanthropy, engaged spirituality and local government, shared learnings and strengthened ties as a community of practice dedicated to creating healthy social movement ecosystems. These practitioners held in common the belief that defeating the forces of white supremacy and creeping authoritarianism, while winning true economic justice and multiracial democracy, is not a matter of finding one “right” strategy for change. Rather, social movement success is predicated on appreciating the varied contributions of groups pursuing different theories of change and crafting complex collaborations between them.

By finding ways to manage the tensions that commonly arise, while rejecting the idea that diverse initiatives should be seen as being in competition with one another, movement organizations can emerge with greater strategic clarity and a stronger sense of common purpose. The discussions taking place at the summit offered some key insights into how.

* * * * *

Social movements as ecosystems

The Ayni Institute describes social movements as “multi-strategic.” As the organization explains in a video introducing the model of social movement ecology, “This means that they implement many different strategies towards creating social change simultaneously, whether they are conscious of it or not.” Varied theories of change are embodied by organizations in different parts of a movement ecosystem. In principle, these can be complementary. In the moments that movements are most successful, it is generally because groups with different organizing traditions and strategic approaches have been able to come together or play off of one another in constructive ways. Yet often these different approaches come into tension. Crucial to managing the conflicts that emerge is clarifying the divergent assumptions and organizational practices held in the distinct segments of the ecology.

We have worked with Carlos Saavedra at Ayni to develop a framework that classifies movement organizations based on their primary approach to making change, dividing them into five categories. The first category is perhaps the most mainstream and accepted within U.S. society: the inside game. Here, advocates lobby policymakers, enter into electoral contests, file lawsuits or otherwise work within society’s existing dominant institutions.

Two other approaches also try to influence these dominant institutions, but do so by wielding power from the outside. Practitioners of structure-based organizing work to build durable membership organizations, such as unions and community groups, that can leverage the influence that comes from a unified base to extract concessions from corporations, landlords, politicians, bureaucrats and other powerholders. A separate approach, mass protest, uses large-scale demonstrations and escalating campaigns of civil resistance to alter the limits of political debate. Such campaigns allow mobilized communities to create urgency around an issue and shift public opinion, “changing the weather” around their issues and producing more favorable conditions for all the other strategies. At its most potent, mass protest uses the disruptive power of widespread noncooperation to suspend the ordinary workings of mainstream institutions and thereby force concessions from those in power.

The two other approaches to change operate outside of dominant institutions. Activists constructing alternatives attempt to “prefigure” new possibilities for society by building models of social housing, community farms, credit unions, worker co-ops, counter-cultural arts spaces and radical schools. These types of alternative institutions provide bottom-up methods for serving the needs of the community while also embodying a set of values distinct from mainstream capitalist accumulation and profit-seeking. Finally, organizations oriented toward personal transformation believe, in Ayni’s words, “that change happens when we better our lives and the lives of others through providing service, improving our health and well-being, or reaching higher levels of consciousness.” Society is transformed as the lives of individuals are improved through spiritual pursuit, education, therapy or recovery practices, or other one-on-one development and support.

The fact that there can be invaluable work going on in each of the five segments highlights the idea that there is no single correct approach to creating change. Rather, the fortunes of social movements depend on the dynamic relationships that exist within the ecosystem of groups pursuing political transformation.

* * * * *

Mapping the terrain of movement organizations

With regard to its most recent gathering, the purpose of Ayni’s summit was not to introduce movement ecology to new people. Rather, it was to bring together a community of practitioners who have already aimed to implement the framework into their organizing. Participants compared notes about how the tool has aided their work, as well as about how to confront challenges that have gained urgency in the current political moment. To this end, attendees wrestled with issues such as how to make political advances in populist times, how to defend movements against authoritarian repression, how to deal with periods of failure in organizations, how more-neglected segments of the ecology can be integrated, and how to construct more sophisticated collaborations.

In discussions with various organizers, several key reflections emerged about how thinking through the dynamics of movement ecosystems can foster strategic advances.

A first important use of movement ecology articulated by members of the community of practice was as a tool that could help them map the universe of organizations working on their issue areas or within their geographical regions. One participant who described using the framework in this way was Dawn Harrington, who both manages special projects for the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and serves as the executive director of Free Hearts, a Tennessee-based organization led by women directly affected by the prison system.

“We require people that are trying to join the leadership of our organization to do a course in social movement ecology,” she said. “Then during our leadership campaigns and policy meetings, we look all across the state and ask, ‘What are the different organizations and the different theories of change? And where are the gaps? Where do we need more of this or that?’”

Harrington emphasizes that the framework gives shared language to describe strategic differences, and is helpful in navigating conflicts among diverse groups. “We prioritize structure organizing as our core strategy, and so where there were groups doing personal transformation or straight up inside-game, we were having a lot of conflicts,” Harrington explained. “Before, we were thinking, ‘Okay, it’s just personal issues, or we just hate each other.’ But the movement ecology framework helped us to understand that it’s actually our theories of change that are in tension, and it helped us better appreciate the other areas of change.”

Not all experiments with the framework were successful. “When we first got trained in the model, the first thing we did was try to build a cross-theory-of-change coalition across our state,” Harrington said. “It started out really good,” she added, but resentment built when not all groups were equally committed to joint campaign work. Still, “it wasn’t a complete failure, because I think it got us to the point where we know what’s happening across the state with other organizations, and there is more communication.”

In moments when the Tennessee state government has locked in conservative rule and inside-game efforts have been stymied, movement ecology allowed organizers in the criminal justice space to identify opportunities to build power from the outside, Harrington said: “We can see the whole picture of how, even when politically things are getting worse, we’re still building a movement. All the pieces fit together.”

* * * * *

Filling gaps, navigating tensions

James Hayes, co-director of Ohio Voice, an organization dedicated to doing ongoing civic engagement with underrepresented communities in order to win progressive governance, has seen benefits as the framework has gained a foothold among groups in his state. “Movement ecology has been part of our strategic plan since I joined the team in 2017, and we train a lot of people in our space in Ohio on it,” Hayes said. “In large part, it just helps us have shared language to talk about the things that we are seeing and experiencing. So if we have disagreements, we’re using similar terms and coming to a similar understanding of what we’re disagreeing about.”

At the Ayni conference, a variety of representatives from the foundation world who were present argued that movement ecology allows them to identify areas of need and to make a case for dedicating funding to underdeveloped areas. For Hayes’s organization, the framework serves a similar function, helping them to set priorities. “It’s been helpful in thinking about what type of work we really want to support at Ohio Voice — to ask ‘where do we want to focus our resources, our energy, our time?’” he explained. “Part of our analysis is seeing that we had a lot of mass protest energy erupt over the years, but there has been a loss of organizing capacity in that time for various reasons. We saw that we needed more groups doing base building and running issue campaigns at the local level.”

Furthering the point, Hayes argues that an examination of the ecology in a given region can reveal imbalances that are creating weaknesses for movements. “We’ve been able to talk about how people have gotten away from organizing and become reliant on inside-game strategies — and how that’s not working now because gerrymandering has made it very difficult to move anything,” he said.

Hayes also echoes Harrington’s belief that awareness of movement ecology allows groups to better navigate tensions. He mentioned Equality Ohio, which is one of the more powerful organizations working on LGBTQ issues in the state. “Historically, the relationships between more insider groups like Equality Ohio and more radical queer liberation groups have been frayed and tense,” Hayes explained. “The previous executive director a couple years ago told me how grateful she was for the movement ecology framework, because it gave her the tools to talk with her team and her board and also to talk with outside partners about how they can have better relationships.”

This has concrete effects on how campaigns played out, Hayes believes. “There was really powerful work that happened, where people engaging in the State House strategy were open to there being more outside game energy and to some of those types of pressure tactics,” he said. “In general, it just resulted in a growth of capacity, culminating in getting the governor to veto an anti-trans bill that had been passed.”

Among other takeaways from the Ayni conference, Hayes points to discussion of inside-outside strategies. “I think eight or 10 years ago, there would have been huge pushback on the idea that movements doing co-governance was even possible, let alone necessary,” he said. “I think now there’s a huge hunger for it. We’re bringing more people into a conversation about what type of power we need if we’re going to get what we want out of electoral politics.”

* * * * *

Allowing for both focus and flexibility

Juan Pablo Orjuela, a community organizer and longtime immigrant rights leader with groups including Movimiento Cosecha, spoke to how an ecological framework can help specific organizations focus on what they do best, while also allowing wider movements to make strategic pivots when circumstances warrant.

“First being introduced to movement ecology, it was like an ‘Aha’! Before, when I was coming into mass protests, it felt like a negation of structure-based organizing, which is the philosophy that I came from,” Orjuela said. “Movement ecology helped me reconcile that these two traditions can exist and work together in some way. And it helped me be less resentful when people didn’t understand where I was coming from.”

Belief that change can be a result of multiple strategies does not mean that “anything goes,” or that all efforts are equally effective. Individual organizations must still make difficult choices about how to focus their work. And when they do choose to situate themselves within a given segment of an ecosystem, they should lean in to maximizing the role they have chosen. While doing this, they can also recognize that, as political circumstances shift, different parts of the movement may temporarily come to the fore while others recede in importance, only to become more significant later on.

“I was recently hired to do a strategic retreat with an organization in Los Angeles that was feeling really stretched thin, and we used movement ecology to help them diagnose what they were doing,” Orjuela said. The group’s leaders began to see that they were being asked to operate in many different segments of the ecosystem simultaneously — building alternatives through a land trust, while also running a personal transformation program for tenants, and then still trying to do structure-based organizing with a fiscal sponsor. “They had never broken down their work like that,” Orjuela explained. “And I think it was really helpful for them to realize, ‘we’re stretched thin because we’re working on too many theories of change.’”

The next day they talked about what their priorities were. The conversation allowed the group to drill down into a core strategy that best made use of their capabilities.

In addition to helping leaders focus on the work that they do best, Orjuela has witnessed how movement ecology can allow for greater strategic flexibility at key moments. Previously, he was involved with a campaign in New Jersey to pass a law that allows undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. “This is really important for a lot of people,” he said, because it means that being stopped by police for a traffic violation “doesn’t have to turn into a deportation proceeding.”

Orjuela saw the New Jersey campaign go through several rounds of battle between 2013 and 2019, with activists dealing with feelings of failure and defeat when a given push did not yield success. The first efforts, based in community organizing and inside-game maneuvering, came tantalizingly close. But that made it all the more heartbreaking when they fell short. “In 2015, we had the votes to get it out of committee,” he explained. “But there was an external event — a terrorist attack in Europe — that made anti-immigrant sentiment go up.” In the new climate, the politicians decided to not move forward with the bill. “There was this sense of grief in the base, and a lot of resentment and distrust,” Orjuela said, with many organizers leaving the campaign.

Yet within a couple years, Orejuela found himself drawn back in. “There was a feeling of, ‘We don’t want to fail the same way again,’” he said. This resulted in a hunger for new tactics. And in this context, Orejuela identified mass protest as an organizing tradition that had not yet been significantly deployed. People said to Cosecha, “You need to come here and implement this. It was actually by popular demand. Like we almost felt like we had no choice,” he said and laughed. “We shifted more to getting in the face of politicians and making them answer for why this bill had failed so many times. Instead of lobbying, we would take the tone of demanding.”

The campaign also launched a 300-mile pilgrimage across the state. As Orjuela explained, “It showed the need for driver’s licenses, because to not break the law, we had to walk all the way to Trenton to advocate for ourselves.”

In December 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy finally signed the bill, making New Jersey the 14th state, including the District of Columbia, to expand access to driver’s licenses and state ID cards. The ACLU cited it as a landmark measure, noting that it allows more than 700,000 New Jersey residents to gain the documentation necessary to drive.

In a session at the Ayni summit devoted to how organizers can grapple with the feelings of failure that commonly emerge over the course of movement cycles, Orjuela offered a reflection from the New Jersey campaign: “With grief came a recognition that we needed to try something different,” he said. “These feelings of failure and tension can also birth experimentation — if you’re open to it.”

For Orejuela, the Ayni gathering overall was an opportunity to both share his experiences and build his comfort in working with more people on movement ecology, even if they have never heard of the concept. “I don’t approach it from an academic background. I’m a trial-by-fire kind of person, and sometimes that’s made me afraid to talk about the things that I’ve actually learned about, even if I have the language for it,” he said. “For me, the more I integrate the framework, the more confidence I gain. And it’s cool to talk about it with the level of proficiency that I know I do have.”

* * * * * *

Learning through practice

The intent of the Ayni summit was not to launch a formal coalition, or even to create full alignment around strategy on how to build opposition to the Trump administration. Instead, by bringing people together who are incorporating an ecological framework into their organizing and who are coming from different segments of the social movement ecosystem, the gathering showed how a model that might otherwise be just a theoretical construct is being made real through practice and refinement.

Far too often, Ayni argues, “social change gets boxed into narrow choices: advocacy, elections, or service work,” when the real change comes just as much from “building alternatives, organizing mass civil resistance and leading transformative community organizing.” Having a community that has been willing to bring foundational theories of change together, engage with friction and difference, and process the tensions that arise gives hope that the problems that have hobbled movements in the past may have a less pernicious hold.

In this respect, the gathering offered a vital lesson: We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0. But if we foster a robust ecology of change, we may yet see the movement resurgence that we need.

__________

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich. Photo credit: Ayni Institute.