Movement Alliance Project works to build a healthy movement ecosystem where organizations succeed in making transformational social change. We collaborate with organizations and alliances to develop strategy, collectivize the administrative capacity emerging projects need, and convene groups to deepen the interconnection and solidarity within and across sectors of organizing.
Movement ecosystem: noun. 1. the individuals, campaigns, organizations and other institutions that play various and distinct roles in a movement – a large-scale and sustained mobilization around a common issue. 2. the relationship and interactions between the individuals, campaigns, organizations and other institutions within a movement.
We believe a thriving Philly social movement ecosystem, ready and positioned to build the conditions for liberation in our home town, and participate in that process around the world, is necessary and possible.
We are working to support the health and success of that movement in Philly. A movement ecosystem able to overcome fragmentation to move together in cohesion, through trust and principled struggle, and access the courage to take grounded and strategic risks. Doing so, with the leadership of Black and Brown working class people in Philly, alongside the work of our national and global social movements.
Through serving our local movement ecosystem we seek to make more possible the leadership of local movements to win a transformed society where every human being has enough not just to survive but to thrive. That means transforming material conditions for Black, brown, poor, and working people of all ages and genders to reflect the care, well being, and dignity all people deserve.
For over 15 years, Movement Alliance Project has been bringing organizations in Philadelphia together around a shared vision of change. In 2005, when our cofounders created the Media Mobilizing Project, that vision was shaped by a need for independent media and we convened a network of community media makers and community organizers to use new media tools aligned on the importance of documenting and telling untold stories. From this foundation our work expanded into shifting the structural inequities in corporate communications and media systems taking on giants like Comcast.
Our role has evolved over the years as we built relationships with organizations across the city and taken on new fights in other arenas. We also started providing fiscal sponsorship to new and growing organizations in the movement ecosystem and mobilizing resources to ensure philanthropy invests in the most powerful and needed projects and strategies. Throughout it all, we’ve always worked hard to convene organizations into coalitions and strategic alliances that have made powerful impacts in the city.
After nearly two decades of wearing many hats, we decided in 2020 to make our core strengths more central to our work by changing our name to Movement Alliance Project. After a pivotal restructuring in 2021, we are scaling up those efforts with a clearer purpose and multi-faceted strategy to support and build movement infrastructure in Philadelphia.
Movement Alliance Project works to build a healthy movement ecosystem where organizations succeed in making transformational social change. We collaborate with organizations and alliances to develop strategy, collectivize the administrative capacity emerging projects need, and convene groups to deepen the interconnection and solidarity within and across sectors of organizing.
