Impact Entrepreneurship

Movement-Building 101: How to Build an Engaged and Growing Community

Are you trying to turn your venture into a movement? Want to understand how a cause or campaign becomes a movement? Looking to take your mission and vision for your work to the next level? Want to create a sustainable, multiplier effect for the work you’re already doing?

This course is designed for social entrepreneurs, activists, non-profit employees and anyone who has a vision for a movement they want to build upon! Here you will learn tried and true foundations of movement-building that allow you to transform your work from something you’re trying to sell to other people to something a community rallies behind and helps grow. We will help you shape your work for a broader community that can be activated and help your work grow bigger than you ever imagined possible!
Movement-building is about creating strong, engaged communities that can share responsibility for a social problem and help you carry your work forward! Over the last century of everything from Gandhi’s Salt March to the movement for LGBT equality to successful social enterprises such as Kiva, it’s been proven that the foundational principles of movement building are the same across contexts. Come learn from this institutionalized knowledge and adapt it to your needs and community to build a movement out of your vision for social change.
In this 3-hour introductory session, you will get the fundamentals of:
  • Building a movement grand strategy for your social impact for your work
  • Building a brand and meta-narrative for your cause or venture
  • Community-building and how to create a multiplying effect
  • Crafting successful, strategic campaigns that will lead to larger victories—wither it’s a better social policy or just to the next level of your social business
  • Building and engaging a digital community

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Erin Mazursky has over a decade of experience in movement-building, technology, human rights and activism, having worked with social and political movements in over a dozen countries around the world fromTurkey to India, Lebanon to Albania.  She is currently the Founder and Executive Director of Rhize, a support network for social and political movements and the catalysts who spark them around the world. In her work, Erin has trained and coached hundreds of people in the foundational principles of movement building and campaigning.

 

Before starting Rhize, Erin worked at Purpose, a social enterprise that incubates and launches global social movements. There, Erin helped to lead some of Purpose’s biggest projects, most notably with the American Civil Liberties Union and CARE International, which integrated movement-building, technology and citizen advocacy to increase social impact. Prior to this, Erin worked for President Obama’s 2008 election campaign and went on to serve as the Youth Advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where she helped author the first global policy on youth development and made youth a central part of the Agency’s broader development efforts.

Erin began her career as a youth advocate herself as the Co-Founder and Executive Director of STAND, a leading organization in the anti-genocide advocacy movement that became one of the largest student organizations in the country, with over 800 high school and college chapters nationwide, and continued her anti-genocide work as the Coalition Manager and Board Member of the Save Darfur Coalition.  Erin served on the 2008 Presidential Inaugural Committee after having worked on President Obama’s general election campaign in Florida.  Erin is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, a 2010 Fellow at the New Leaders Council, an Aspen Ideas Festival Fellow, a fellow at the Impact Center’s Women’s Executive Leadership Program and a Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project.


PARTNERS & ORGANIZERS 

Brought to you by RhizeThe Center For Social Innovation, & Be Social Change

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Undergraduate

To apply to any of our Bachelor's programs (Except the Bachelor's Program for Adult Transfer Students) complete and submit the Common App online.

Graduates and Adult Learners

To apply to any of our Master's, Doctural, Professional Studies Diploma, Graduates Certificate, or Associate's programs, or to apply to the Bachelor's Program for Adult and Transfer Students, complete and submit the New School Online Application.

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