Momentum Model
Definition
Mark and Paul Engler’s momentum-driven organising model — articulated in This Is an Uprising (2016) and the accompanying practitioner essays — combines structure-based community organising (the Alinsky tradition) with mass mobilisation capacity (the social-movement tradition), bridged by the discipline of strategic alignment between strategy, structure, narrative, and tactics.
The model’s central claim is that neither tradition wins consistently alone: structure without mobilisation produces insular organisations that can’t escalate, mobilisation without structure produces flash-mobs that evaporate. The pivot is strategic alignment — choosing the campaign whose story, target, and timing line up with both the organised base and the wider public mood.
The practitioner craft is in the diagnosis: the campaign’s first task is to read the political moment (the momentum) and identify the campaign that exploits it, rather than starting from the organisation’s existing programmatic wish-list. The Momentum Community’s Momentum Manual — the US training organisation born from the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaigns — adapts Ganz and Alinsky for 21st-century movement work and is the practitioner operationalisation of this synthesis at the local-campaign level. [source: momentum-community]
Full page: [[momentum-model]].
FAQ
What is the momentum model?
The momentum model is Mark and Paul Engler’s momentum-driven organising model — articulated in This Is an Uprising (2016) and the accompanying practitioner essays — combining structure-based community organising (the Alinsky tradition) with mass mobilisation capacity (the social-movement tradition), bridged by the discipline of strategic alignment between strategy, structure, narrative, and tactics [source: momentum-community].
What is the model’s central claim?
The model’s central claim is that neither tradition wins consistently alone: structure without mobilisation produces insular organisations that can’t escalate, mobilisation without structure produces flash-mobs that evaporate [source: momentum-community]. The pivot is strategic alignment — choosing the campaign whose story, target, and timing line up with both the organised base and the wider public mood.
What is the practitioner craft the model names?
The practitioner craft is in the diagnosis: the campaign’s first task is to read the political moment (the momentum) and identify the campaign that exploits it, rather than starting from the organisation’s existing programmatic wish-list [source: momentum-community]. The Momentum Community’s Momentum Manual — the US training organisation born from the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaigns — adapts Ganz and Alinsky for 21st-century movement work and is the practitioner operationalisation of this synthesis at the local-campaign level.