Multitudes is changing; we are deepening our focus on experimentation, movement infrastructure-building, and actioning liberatory practice.
Founded in 2021, Multitudes co-op has been a collaborator and partner to a number of grassroots organisations and groups within the movement-building ecosystem in the UK and internationally.
For the past five years, we’ve been known as a service provider, offering digital and material infrastructure on a one-on-one basis to movement groups. This has allowed us to gain valuable insights into what is required to build infrastructure provision that centres relationality, sustainability and care.
We are moving away from service provision towards a programme-led orientation that gives us room to imagine common solutions to the common problems that we have observed. This is exciting and deeply necessary as groups often solve common challenges individually, depleting limited resources and siloing valuable knowledge and information.
As we shift towards being a programme-led organisation, you’ll notice some changes from us. Namely, we have taken the decision to close our Studio arm of work in its current form, at least for now, and pivot towards focusing more on experimentation, movement infrastructure-building, and actioning liberatory practice. In many ways, this feels like a natural progression as we continue to seek to understand what our communities need and how we might help to build it.
Our vision for the future
Our new programmatic strategy aims to continue supporting a healthy and resilient movement space by building and contributing to radical systems and infrastructure shaped by care and joy and informed by a Black Feminist praxis. This vision is supported by five pillars:
- Create spaces where we can imagine and dream of new systems and infrastructures based in liberatory practices
- Develop and sustain systems of mutuality across the movement space
- Build a tech justice movement in the UK that is global and interconnected
- Support storytelling and the archiving of movement work to share knowledge and expand ways of thinking
- Create spaces of solidarity, refuge, imagination, and resistance
Introducing our programmes
We have 4 programmes of work which speak to these pillars in different ways:
Black feminist school of community technology
The school seeks to develop robust educational infrastructure that expands knowledge about technology and empowers movement organisers to resist harmful tech through a Black feminist tech justice political analysis.
Internal workings
The aim of the Internal Workings programme is to structure Multitudes so that the co-op can cater to the worker collective and build on what we said we'd deliver. Internal Workings creates spaces where we can explore ways of working, and build deeper relationships with each other to better understand our politics so that we can work together as well as we can.
Open movements
The Open Movements programme works to understand what relational and other infrastructure is required to scaffold movement commons architecture that is robust, deeply thoughtful, care-filled, well-resourced and maintainable. Through a series of learning partnerships and experiments, the programme hopes to propose methods for community stewardship and governance of these movement commons embedded in emergent relational practice.
Sites of resistance
The Sites of resistance programme is the experimental department of the co-op that investigates ways of building tech infrastructure needed to get us to the world we want. This programme aims to develop new technology approaches that imagine a disability-first web, ways of divesting from big tech and expanding ideas around digital degrowth and low-tech solutions.
What does this mean for you?
- We’ll be honouring existing commitments and projects, with a view to winding down the studio by the summer. After this, our studio team will then be focused on the number of exciting programmes we’re developing internally at Multitudes, and we look forward to sharing more about that work soon.
What can you expect from us moving forward?
- Continuing to support grassroots groups to share resources and knowledge more effectively;
- Exploring governance models that enable communities to steward and sustain shared infrastructure;
- Deepening our inquiries into alternative hard and soft infrastructures that allow groups to divest from big tech and regain autonomy over the tools they rely on;
- Contributing towards social and environmental systems are thriving, shifting current paradigms of extraction
Reach out and say hello