Movement Lessons from the First 100 Days

By Building Movement Project

Contents

Introduction

Lessons learned and put together in this brief by the Building Movement Project BMP from the first 100 days of the Trump administration in the United States in 2025.

This is part of BMP’s Movement Infrastructure Series, which offers ideas, approaches, and practices to strengthen individual organizations and broader social movement ecosystems.

Many of the recommendations in this brief emerged from conversations and inquiries that arose in BMP’s work with nonprofit organizations, working groups, and networks before and during the first 100 days. Through a series of interviews, a survey of the sector, and weekly field meetings with grassroots and national organizations, BMP captured a glimpse of how organizations around the country grapple with a range of multi-layered consequences.

The organizations that we supported and engaged during the first 100 days included social service providers that provide immigration services, support for survivors of gender-based violence, and homelessness prevention and mental health, as well as advocacy, organizing, and movement groups that advocate for policy demands from specific communities.

Movement Lessons from the First 100 Days has the following goals:

Provide a snapshot of how executive orders issued in the first 100 days affect the nonprofit sector.
Highlight movement infrastructure needs and challenges while documenting how organizations and movements are adapting through innovation, solidarity, and care.
Synthesize strategic recommendations for the nonprofit and philanthropy sectors that center sustainability, collective power, and solidarity.

Excerpt – Movement and Nonprofit Responses

Despite the hardships that organizations are having to navigate, they are also building power and finding ways to adapt.

Organizations are deepening seasoned relationships and building new networks, pushing back against harmful narratives, focusing on political education and organizing, and lifting up policies and other means of protecting and (re)centering the communities they serve.

These responses can be observed across three key areas:

Infrastructure
Solidarity
Funding

Infrastructure Responses

Movement groups and nonprofits are building both internal infrastructure and community networks, especially where government resources have been diminished or eliminated through deliberate attacks.

As BMP has been supporting movement and nonprofit tables in this moment, we have witnessed how organizations are relying on trusted and long-term relationships, playing roles that are strategic and non-duplicative, developing tools to share information quickly and securely, and identifying entities that can play a convening and facilitating role to bring groups together on a regular basis. Additionally, organizations are considering different formations that might serve the needs of their communities more effectively and sustainably.

A key infrastructure need that arises across various movements is legal capacity – especially around access to information, representation, and rapid response. Organizations have identified a need for accurate, in-language, and accessible Know Your Rights information and for analysis of federal executive actions in a timely manner.

Groups also need to know where to send community members who are being targeted by or receiving communications from government agencies. Some emerging strategies for strengthening legal capacity across movements include:

Groups also need to know where to send community members who are being targeted by or receiving communications from government agencies.

Some emerging strategies for strengthening legal capacity across movements include:

Developing and implementing creative, collective legal defense strategies rooted in movement lawyering
Translating and distributing Know Your Rights materials in multiple languages and formats
Setting up multilingual hotlines, intake systems, and referral networks
Training and coordinating pro bono legal networks
Hiring and resourcing in-house legal staff or legal partners within coalitions

These legal strategies require more than short-term volunteer efforts; they require sustained investment in legal infrastructure, including funding for dedicated staff, translation, and accessibility services, and institutional partnerships within movement-aligned legal organizations.

Examples include:

Trans organizers have expanded mutual aid networks to provide gender-affirming care, legal resources, and essential services amidst legislative attacks.
Immigrant rights organizations are offering digital security training and resources to protect communities from increased surveillance.
Cultural workers and healers are creating support spaces and resources, integrating art, ritual, and somatic practices to support frontline leaders experiencing burnout and despair.
Communities are creating guides and resources to support grassroots organizations, fiscally sponsored projects, and fiscal sponsors working in mutual aid, bail funds, and Palestine solidarity initiatives.

Solidarity

During times of crisis, communities and organizations often choose self-preservation and isolation in order to avoid scrutiny, focus on their own issues, and survive challenging times. Our work via SolidarityIs reminds us that intentionally building connections across communities and organizations is the only way to overcome isolation, scapegoating, and division.

Organizations are building broader coalitions across geography, identity, and issue areas to build mutual defense and collective power.

Through BMP’s work with movement tables, solidarity strategies that seem to be powerful include developing and sharing solidarity statements from a large number of groups, speaking up for each other on social media, and ensuring that organizations receive similar talking points and narratives.

Funding

In the face of growing restrictions, criminalization, and politically motivated funding withdrawals, many nonprofits are shifting away from traditional sources like federal grants and government contracts. Instead, they are exploring and investing in new community-rooted funding models – from private philanthropy and movement-aligned donor collaboratives, to social enterprise efforts, donor-advised funds, and grassroots giving.

Organizations are also reimagining sustainability through local philanthropy and emergency resource-sharing. In some regions, groups are creating regional solidarity funds that redistribute money more nimbly and explicitly to frontline organizations, particularly those led by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, undocumented, queer, trans, and disabled leaders.

Still, the demand far outweighs available resources. As organizations shift their capacity to navigate urgent needs, they continue to run into significant gaps in long-term funding. Short-term and rapid response grants can only go so far.

Organizations continue to need sustained, flexible funding that supports movement infrastructure, allows for experimentation and failure, and creates room for organizations to build and deepen partnerships across movements.

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Movement Lessons from the First 100 Days (PDF 26 pgs)

About the Author

The Building Movement Project (BMP) is a national nonprofit organization that provides
insightful research, practical resources, and pathways for transformative relationships that
support nonprofit organizations, networks, and movements in their work to create a just
and equitable world.

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Author: Building Movement Project
Source: https://buildingmovement.org/reports/100DaysMovementBrief/
Organisation: Building Movement Project
Location: US
Release Date: 2025
Content length: 26 pgs

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND

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