The River and the Springs

Freedom Trainers, popular education, and the relational work that turns mass training into lasting movement

On a single evening last year, one hundred and thirty thousand people signed on to a Zoom and, for two hours, learned together about pillars of support, the strategic logic of noncooperation, and how civil resistance has been used to defeat authoritarian regimes around the world. It was the largest noncooperation training in American history. The network that led it - Freedom Trainers - has now trained something approaching half a million people in less than two years, with an explicit goal of One Million Rising.

I am one of those trainers. I want you to be trained too. Go to freedomtrainers.net. Sign up for Noncooperation 101. If you run an organization, a congregation, a union local, a neighborhood association, or a mutual aid pod, request a workshop for your community. The materials are open-source. The trainers will come. This is among the highest-leverage things you can do right now to ready yourself and the people around you for what this moment requires.

What follows is not a critique of that work. It is a companion to it.

The question I want to put to Freedom Trainers participants, Freedom Trainers hosts, and the wider movement ecology increasingly organizing itself around these trainings is the one the Citizenship Schools (the massive organized effort mounted by Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins in the 1950s to help Black people in the rural South to pass the literacy tests designed to deny them the right to vote) answered seventy years ago, and that every durable movement in the history of organizing has had to answer: what happens on either side of the training? Who comes, how, from where, and, crucially, where do they go afterward?

What Freedom Trainers does, and why it matters

Freedom Trainers is doing something the American civil resistance ecology has never done at this scale before. It is taking the best available pro-democracy research - Erica Chenoweth’s comparative work on nonviolent movements, Gene Sharp’s pillars-of-support analysis, the hard-won lessons of Serbia, the Philippines, Chile, Tunisia, and dozens of other cases - and translating it into a curriculum an ordinary person can absorb on a Tuesday night and apply by Wednesday morning. It is doing this in the open, with free facilitation guides and slide decks any competent trainer can pick up and use. It is doing this through a distributed volunteer network rather than a single central institution. And it is doing it fast, because the authoritarian timeline demands it.

This is exactly the right intervention for the pedagogical moment we are in. Millions of Americans who, two years ago, had no political education beyond voting are now looking for concrete methods of resistance. Freedom Trainers is meeting them where they are arriving, with the thing they need most: a clear, research-grounded account of what works.

Sign up. Host a workshop. Become a trainer yourself.

And then, because mass training is a seed and not a tree, build the soil on either side.

The popular education tradition, briefly

The Citizenship Schools of Johns Island, about which I wrote recently, were part of a tradition - the tradition of popular education - that developed at places like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and in Brazil under Paulo Freire, and in at least a dozen other places in the twentieth century where oppressed people built their own pedagogies because the official ones had been designed to exclude them. Its premise is simple, and it is correct: people learn best from their own experience, in relationship with others, in service of collective action they themselves have chosen. The teacher is a facilitator. The curriculum comes from the room. The classroom is continuous with the struggle.

Mass training at the scale Freedom Trainers is achieving is not the same thing as popular education, and it should not try to be. Popular education requires depth, time, and relationship in ways a 120-minute session cannot provide. Trying to do both at once would break both.

But popular education is what nourishes the seed that mass training plants. Without it, the trainings become events people attended - like concerts, or webinars, or weekend retreats - rather than moments of entry into a practice. With it, every training becomes a recruitment point into an ongoing conversation about power, history, and what to do next.

The architecture of a durable civil resistance movement looks like this: popular education on either side of mass training. Springs on either side of the river.

Before the training: the relational work of recruitment

Who comes to a Freedom Trainers workshop changes everything about what the training can become.

A workshop of one hundred individuals who found it on Instagram and showed up alone is a different room than a workshop of one hundred members of the same congregation, or the same labor council, or the same tenant association, or the same PTA - people who will see each other on Sunday, or on the job, or at the mailbox, or at the school meeting on Tuesday. The content is the same. The downstream is completely different.

This is not a suggestion that Freedom Trainers should change its model. It is a suggestion to the rest of the movement ecology, to the congregations, the unions, the neighborhood associations, the affinity groups, the mutual aid pods, the PTAs, that the most important thing you can do right now is not to find a Freedom Trainer and bring them in cold. It is to have the pre-conversation in your community first. What are we already worried about? What have we already refused? What do we already do together? What would a Freedom Trainers workshop add to work we already have underway?

When Esau Jenkins drove tobacco workers from Johns Island to Charleston in 1954, he was not recruiting strangers. He was using the forty minutes he already had with people who were already his neighbors, riding a bus they already had to ride. The Citizenship School was not a workshop people heard about and signed up for. It was the next step in a relationship that was already there.

Your congregation can do this. Your union can do this. Your block can do this. The Freedom Trainers workshop should be a destination in a relationship you’re already building, not a first contact. Recruit the room before the trainers arrive. That’s the first half of the work the surrounding ecology has to do.

After the training: where trained people go

The morning after a Freedom Trainers workshop, each participant carries a set of frameworks and, if the training did its job, a commitment to use them. What the participant does not carry, in most cases, is a place to put them.

Follow-up is what determines whether a mass training became a mass movement or a mass memory. Four specific things belong on the other side of every workshop you host or attend.

First, a debrief. Small groups, soon after the training, where participants work through what they heard, what surprised them, what they disagree with, and where they see themselves in it. Ninety minutes in the week after is worth more than another workshop six months later.

Second, a place to practice. Noncooperation is a skill. It is not acquired by learning the theory. It is acquired by doing something - a small public refusal like saying no to having your picture taken in a security line at the airport, a coordinated workplace action, a neighborhood response, a coalition petition - within days, not months, of the training. Movements that fail at this step produce trained populations that never actually act, and that forget what they learned by the time the real moment arrives. Movements that succeed at this step turn Tuesday night’s training into Wednesday morning’s action, however small.

Third, a pathway from participant to trainer. The Citizenship Schools’ durability came from the fact that every student was understood as a future teacher, and many of them became one. Freedom Trainers already has a train-the-trainer track. The movement ecology around it should be feeding participants into that track as aggressively as it feeds them into the initial workshops.

Fourth, ongoing political education. Noncooperation 101 is the beginning of a conversation, not the whole of it. What comes next - the longer work of understanding how race, class, history, gender, and power are shaping this specific authoritarian moment, and what specific strategies follow from that understanding - is work that unfolds over months and years, in reading groups, study circles, congregation-based formations, workplace committees, and the kind of slow, relational conversations popular education was designed to sustain.

These four things are not Freedom Trainers’ responsibility to provide. They are the responsibility of the movement ecology that hosts and surrounds the trainings. If you are a pastor, a shop steward, a neighborhood leader, a PTA officer, a mutual aid coordinator, or a civil society professional reading this, these four things are the work that most needs doing right now.

Springs and river

I have written elsewhere about the springs-to-river framework for thinking about movement scale. A river is powerful because water flows into it. It does not produce the water. The water comes from the springs - small, local, continuous, fed by conditions specific to the land they emerge from.

Freedom Trainers is the river this moment has. It is carrying water further and faster than any civil resistance training infrastructure we have had before. We need it. Sign up. Host. Train. Become a trainer.

But a river without springs runs dry. The springs are the congregations, the unions, the tenant associations, the neighborhood groups, the mutual aid pods, the affinity circles - the small formations where people know each other’s names and can call each other on the phone. The water that feeds the river of mass training has to come from somewhere, and the basins that catch it after the training have to be somewhere, and both somewheres are the same place: the specific, local, relational communities you are already part of, or could be.

The authoritarian movement arrayed against American democracy has spent decades building its springs. We are, finally, building our river. Now we build the springs to match. That is the work of this year. That is the work of the rest of our lives.

Get trained. Then build the road.

To take action: Register for a Freedom Trainers Noncooperation 101 session, request a workshop for your community, or watch a recorded training at freedomtrainers.net. All curriculum materials are open-source and can be adapted for use in your congregation, union, or community group. To deepen the popular-education side of the work, the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, remains a place you can go; Myles Horton and Paulo Freire’s We Make the Road by Walking (Temple University Press, 1990) is the foundational text.