Building movement infrastructure for what comes next.
Our movements are navigating extraordinary pressure. The Movement Strengthening Initiative examines what organizations and capacity builders are experiencing now—and what it will take to build stronger, more sustainable movements for the future.
Why this matters
The pace has changed.
Intensifying authoritarianism is not a revelation. What we are witnessing is the culmination of a deliberate, decades-long right-wing project.
What has changed is the pace. Democratic institutions, civil society, and decades of progress won by justice movements are being dismantled at a speed few imagined possible.
Movement infrastructure was not built to withstand this level of coordinated authoritarianism.
Not yet.
An invitation from RoadMap
For nearly two decades, RoadMap has worked alongside movement leaders, organizations, networks, funders, and movement-rooted capacity builders. MSI grew from what we were seeing across that ecosystem—and the questions this moment demanded we ask.
The question
For nearly two decades, RoadMap has seen movement-rooted practitioners develop extraordinary expertise—approaches, frameworks, and wisdom forged through accompanying movements through change, uncertainty, and crisis.
Yet that expertise has never been adequately resourced, coordinated, or made consistently accessible across movements.
That led us to ask:
What challenges are movement leaders and capacity builders facing in this moment?
How are movements already adapting and innovating?
What would it take to strengthen movement ecosystems for the future?
How we listened
Conducted between January and March 2026, the research combined qualitative and quantitative data with RoadMap's ongoing practice, using an action research approach that continually tested emerging observations against the lived experience of movement leaders and capacity builders.
116
SURVEY RESPONSES FROM MOVEMENT-ROOTED CAPACITY BUILDERS
32
CAPACITY BUILDERS ACROSS FOCUS GROUPS
116
IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS WITH MOVEMENT LEADERS
20
YEARS OF ROADMAP PRACTICE ACROSS THE U.S. AND PUERTO RICO
What the research reveals
Capacity building is movement infrastructure.
Organizations and movements need more than episodic technical assistance. They need sustained relationships, shared learning, experimentation, and connective infrastructure that help them adapt and build power over time.
Collaboration is already happening. The infrastructure to support it isn't.
Capacity builders are already sharing knowledge, partnering across areas of expertise, and building informal networks of support. Much of that work remains invisible and unfunded.
Survival is narrowing the field of vision.
Organizations are responding to extraordinary financial, political, human, and security pressures. Those responses are necessary—but sustained crisis response leaves less room to imagine, plan, and build toward the future.
Another way is already emerging.
Across the field, people are experimenting with more human-centered accompaniment, ecosystem-level approaches, peer infrastructure, collective learning, radical imagination, and new organizational and funding models.
Who should engage with this work
Movement organizations
Use the research to reflect on organizational health, clarify your role in a larger ecosystem, and consider what capacity you need not only to survive this moment—but to shape what comes next.
Movement-rooted capacity builders
Learn from what peers across the field are seeing, explore promising practices, and consider opportunities for deeper collaboration, shared learning, and collective infrastructure.
Funders
Understand the conditions organizations and movements are navigating—and where sustained investment in capacity, relationships, collaboration, and shared infrastructure can strengthen movements over time.
Access the research
Built for What Comes Next: Movement Infrastructure for a Liberatory Future
The 2026 Movement Strengthening Initiative report brings together research, practitioner insights, promising practices, and recommendations for strengthening the infrastructure movements need to endure, adapt, and build collective power.
Access the full report along with the companion brown paper that laid the foundation for this research.
What comes next
We can't build what we can't imagine.
The research points toward a different understanding of capacity: not simply the ability of an individual organization to operate more effectively, but the ability of people, organizations, and ecosystems to learn, adapt, collaborate, care for one another, and build power together over time.
Capacity builders and movement leaders are already practicing toward that future. The opportunity now is to build the conditions that allow them—and the movements they accompany—to go further.
Special thanks to The California Endowment, who funded the first phase of this action research project.
