about us.
Movement Catalyst is a social movement support hub based in Washington, D.C. working nationally and locally. We’re an experienced and interdisciplinary team of strategists, organizers, campaigners, and researchers, who will launch strategic projects to meet the moment, partner with organizations looking to expand their ability to have an impact, and anchor movement infrastructure.
Learn more about who we are and our mission in this Medium piece.
who we are.
liz butler
Liz Butler brings nearly 30 years of experience organizing, campaigning, and movement building with a focus on both corporate and legislative campaigns. Liz has extensive experience in convening networks, building alliances, facilitating, running campaigns, organizing, direct action, training, and developing strategy. She recently was Friends of the Earth’s Vice President of organizing and strategic alliances and has worked with the Movement Strategy Center as the Network Organizing Project Director where she worked with a range of social justice, economic justice, climate justice, fossil fuel resistance, and environmental justice.
During that time she partnered with many organizations and projects including 99% Spring, Stop the Frack Attack, Global Witness, OUR Walmart, the Gettysburg Project, and Friends of the Earth. Liz was also previously the Campaign Director (Executive Director/CEO equivalent) of 1Sky, a large-scale collaborative climate campaign. Liz managed a successful merger of 1Sky with 350 in 2011 after helping build and execute a successful campaign on climate and clean energy. Prior to 1Sky, Liz was a co-founder of ForestEthics, where she spent 10 years as the Organizing Director.
abby henderson
Abby Henderson is a human rights lawyer and policy advocate. Since law school, Abby has been investigating and challenging the myriad ways corporate actors negatively impact people and the planet as an Advocacy Counsel at the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR). In this capacity, Abby has served as the coordinator of an anti-strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) coalition; drafted and advocated for legislation to stop the use of SLAPPs and increase corporate liability for human rights abuses in their business operations; and conducted a wide variety of research in the areas of business and human rights and corporate accountability.
Abby holds bachelor degrees in International Business and Asian Studies from the University of Tulsa. She earned her Juris Doctor degree and a certificate in American Indian Law from the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where she also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the American Indian Law Review. Abby is licensed to practice law in the State of Oklahoma and in Washington, DC (pending).
laura beth pelner
Laura Beth is a Creative Director with a decade of experience in communications, design, and advertising within nonprofits, advertising agencies, and political organizations. Most recently, Laura Beth has put her creative skills towards electoral politics, and progressive political and social movements. In 2019, she joined the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign as a Senior Designer. There, she strategized creative solutions for outreach to Latino and Black communities as well as designing digital first media for all the Bernie 2020 social channels. After the campaign ended, she joined the Working Families Party as their national Senior Creative Strategist where she has helped to rebrand and relaunch the 20+ year old minor political party’s brand and presence, visually elevating WFP’s work across 25 states.
Laura Beth’s work brings together her experienced, creative vision with a fierce commitment to justice. Locally, she has organized in DC within Queer Liberation movements, such as DC Dyke March, and led creative and digital campaigns for ShutDownDC.
bill ragen
Bill is a campaigner and organizer with 35 years of experience in the labor movement, mostly with SEIU. At SEIU he led campaigns that combined direct action with corporate accountability and legal strategies to organize low wage workers.
He helped win a global organizing agreement with a company that had over half a million workers in over 100 countries. Since leaving SEIU two years ago, he has worked on climate change with a variety of groups, such as Stop the Money Pipeline, to stop the financing of the fossil fuel projects that drive climate disruption. As with his union work, his climate work focuses on combining grassroots organizing with corporate strategies to build our movement and change corporate behavior.
beth yirga
Bethelehem (Beth) Yirga fought on the frontlines of educational equity for 10 years, as a special education teacher and founding school leader. During that time, she fundraised for millions of dollars; created and differentiated curriculum for students, teachers and adult learners; amplified black and brown student voices and cultivated spaces of cultural inclusivity, collective action and community. Beth is one of the co-founders of The Palm Collective, currently with the role of lead organizer and chief strategist. The Palm Collective (TPC) is a Black-led organization connecting individuals, networks, and grassroots organizations to end systemic racism in DC and beyond while creating powerful communities through Collective Action.
Beth holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Temple University, Master of Public Administration from West Chester University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Education from University of Delaware. Life shines brightest for Beth when she’s driving and singing songs from the Freedom Futures Collective playlist with her three year old daughter, Luna.
patrick young
Patrick Young is a campaigner, organizer and researcher based in Washington, DC. He has spent 15 years working in the labor movement for the United Steelworkers, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Patrick was the lead researcher and campaigner for the Steelworkers National Oil Bargaining Program through three rounds of contract negotiations with the US oil industry. Those negotiations covered 30,000 workers and culminated in the 12-week national oil refinery strike in 2015.
Patrick is also an organizer with Rising Tide North America, a continent-wide climate justice organization that has played a major role in front-line fights against fossil fuel infrastructure including the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and fracking in the Marcellus Shale. Patrick holds a Bachelor of Science and a Masters of Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.
We’re grounded in social movements.
Our team has worked for NGOs or labor unions but we come out of, and are accountable to, grassroots social movement spaces. We effectively move between those worlds to bring the organic energy and creativity of grassroots social movement spaces together with the sophistication of large organizations.
We’re interdisciplinary.
We deploy actions, build networks, facilitate strategy development, and conduct research. Our team has decades of experience running strategic campaigns challenging corporate and state power at the local, national and international levels. This breadth of experience gives us a uniquely holistic perspective on the work that we do.
We work across organizations, issue areas and movement spaces.
We have backgrounds in a wide range of different social movements, issue areas, campaigning, and organizing traditions. That allows us to build deep connections across movement spaces and facilitate generative and authentic collaborations.
what we do.
Create strategic projects.
We are working to identify gaps and opportunities in the social movement landscape and identify partners to work with to move the work forward. This could mean building a coalition or facilitating a conversation; it could mean anchoring an action or taking on a research project.
Work in strategic partnerships to provide direct support for organizations that need additional capacity.
This can include things like planning actions, providing non-representational legal advice, conducting research for a campaign, or facilitating a strategy process. We want to work in partnership with organizations that are doing the work that needs to happen to make a serious impact.
Build and support social movement infrastructure.
We’re investing in building the physical, knowledge-based, digital infrastructure that grassroots social movements depend on. We have a long history of effective movement collaboration in DC. This gives an understanding of what is needed in DC for collective action. That means maintaining an equipment library where organizers can go to get tools, making up-to-date information about the action landscape in DC available (maps, know your rights materials, event calendars and more!), and offering access to digital tools like mass texting, email, and phone banking software for grassroots activists. It also means experience setting up effective organizing spaces.
How we do it.
We’re accountable to the movement.
We’re building a movement project that comes from social movements and is accountable to social movements. Many of us have been working together in grassroots movements for decades and all of us worked together to help create #ShutDownDC, an organizing space that dozens of DC-based grassroots groups created to coordinate large-scale actions around the Youth Climate Strikes, an Earth Day to May Day mobilization and DC-based efforts to defend democracy during the 2020 election. We are working to establish an advisory board of a wide range of activists and organizers who we’re individually and organizationally accountable to. Feedback and input from our advisory board will inform our work and priorities.
We’re agile and scalable.
Our team has experience scaling up action and organizing capacity during major movement escalations as well as running long-term disciplined organizing campaigns. Some of us are jumping into this project full-time, others will balance participating in this project with other work and responsibilities. This will allow us to maintain a manageable and predictable baseline of staffing but also to rapidly scale up capacity in movement moments.
why now?
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
We’re in the midst of a global pandemic and a massive economic recession. Unemployment benefits, relief funding and eviction moratoriums are going to run out before the economy gets better. The impact of the climate crisis is increasing and more communities are being poisoned by fossil fuel projects. We don’t know how or where, but we can expect to see a massive swell of movement activity that echoes the Occupy movement. Building social movement infrastructure ahead of this moment puts us on stronger ground to take advantage of opportunities that arise in this transformative moment.
This is not the time to pull punches. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.
With a new Democratic administration many on the institutional left will likely confuse access to decision makers for real power to influence policy outcomes. They’ll argue that we should back off on our most ambitious demands and give the Biden administration room to reach across the aisle. We’re facing a global pandemic, a historic recession, and we’re running out of time to respond to the climate crisis. Meanwhile the far right is entrenching its influence in the Republican Party and will likely try to gridlock the next four years in disputes over the 2020 election. All the while corporations are making historic levels of profit at the expense of people and communities. This isn’t the time to pull punches, this is a time to take bold action and demand systemic change.
This is the time to invest in the grassroots infrastructure.
In periods of uprising, social movements grow faster than institutions and organizations can respond. Investing in shared social movement infrastructure can allow emerging movements to ride ebbs and flows of uprisings, consolidate gains and build sustainable capacity.