Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) — Organizing Toolkits
Summary
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) coalition publishes a portfolio of organising toolkits — on mutual aid, on defunding / reallocation campaigns, on coalition building, and on base-building within a US racial-justice context. The toolkits are the working artefacts of the largest social-movement coalition in recent US history and are an unusually well-documented example of coalition-level organising practice.
Body
M4BL is the coalition that brought together dozens of US racial-justice organisations around the 2014–2020 Ferguson-and-after period, and the published toolkits are partly retrospective — the coalition made its organising practice explicit in order to teach it to the next wave of organisers who joined after the uprisings. [source: m4bl-toolkit] The mutual-aid toolkit covers the operational mechanics: how to set up a neighbourhood pod system, how to handle supplies without exposing participants to doxxing, how to coordinate across pods without recreating a top-down structure. [source: m4bl-toolkit] The reallocation toolkit addresses the defund-the-police demand: it walks through municipal budget processes, the legal levers available to residents, and the coalition-building required to make a credible threat of redirection. [source: m4bl-toolkit]
The coalition-building toolkit treats coalition maintenance as a distinct practice from coalition formation: it covers decision-making protocols, conflict-resolution norms, the role of anchor organisations, and the asymmetric-resources problem when coalition partners have very different budgets. [source: m4bl-toolkit] The base-building toolkit treats a “base” as a specific, measurable commitment pattern rather than as a warm-list metaphor, and pairs the framing with the kind of commitment ladder used in community-organising traditions (contact → conversation → commitment → leadership). [source: m4bl-toolkit]
The toolkits are US-specific in their legal and political context (municipal budget processes, police-commission structures, US coalition norms). [source: m4bl-toolkit] The coalition-maintenance discipline transfers; the legal-lever specifics do not. [source: m4bl-toolkit]
The toolkits are linked individually rather than as a single compendium, and the M4BL resource hub also links to local chapters’ published materials where they exist. [source: m4bl-toolkit] This page is the entry point for the practitioner who wants to navigate the M4BL corpus without having to find each toolkit through search.
Use it for
A reference for coalition-level organising practice; a US-specific resource for mutual-aid and reallocation organising; a benchmark for what an openly-published coalition-organising curriculum looks like.
Related
- affinity-groups
- boycotts-and-strikes
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- dilemma-actions
- distributed-organizing
- escalation
- leadership-development
- methods-of-nonviolent-action
- noncooperation
- nonviolent-direct-action
- one-to-ones
- pillars-of-support
- public-narrative
- structure-tests
- the-tactic-star