On the morning of September 17th, 2011, the only continuous inhabitant of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park was a bronze statue of a businessman, seated permanently on a bench on the park’s west side.

That, of course, was before hundreds of demonstrators descended and built an encampment to protest the power of the 1%. By September 24th, when video of a New York City police officer pepper-spraying members of Occupy Wall Street garnered national attention, the newly rechristened Liberty Plaza Park had become home to a welcome booth, a kitchen, a childcare zone, an arts and culture area, medical and legal teams, a media-production center and a library.

These all emerged through improvisation, the active ingredient in Occupy. From its founders’ initial act to the proliferation of encampments nationwide, the movement unfolded mainly by way of intuition, experimentation, accident, luck and emergency.

That emergency intensified as police soon cracked down on the nascent movement, evicting encampment after encampment. In the blink of an eye, the state tore down most of Occupy’s visible achievements, leaving the public with the impression that it had failed to build anything lasting or useful.

And yet, Occupy is widely credited with making inequality a political priority—which, in turn, made possible the landmark presidential run of a 74-year-old socialist—as well as touching off a new era of raucous protest and civil disobedience.

If this seems like a big footprint for a failed movement, it’s worth looking more closely at what Occupiers built—and continue to build—that lived outside the parks. Occupy did indeed “change the conversation,” popularizing the “99%” formulation that reintroduced class into the political narrative. But just as significantly, it resulted in the construction of lasting movement infrastructure—communications networks, physical spaces available to organizers and models for training and analysis. While this kind of infrastructure is often overlooked or undervalued, it’s critical to a movement’s growth and lasting impact. Arriving on the scene at a low point of the American Left, Occupy scrambled to cobble together the structures that might have sustained it—but one of its most important legacies was that it gave subsequent movements something to build and improve upon.

Starting from scratch

When Occupy kicked off in 2011, it had little to draw from in terms of institutions, political parties, publications, communications networks or gathering spaces. The counter-globalization struggle of a dozen years prior, as well as the anti-war effort from the mid-2000s, had left behind bits and pieces of tools and support systems for social movements. Labor groups including the Communications Workers of America, the United Steelworkers and National Nurses United endorsed the movement, and a number of union locals and individual members stepped in to provide material support. But by and large, OWS lacked any of the infrastructure of a significant political Left to support it.

Without tools and spaces crucial for facilitating strategic movement building, Occupy never stood much of a chance of coalescing into a powerful political formation.

Still, the new movement was a welcome change from the anemic shows of protest and dissent many organizers had grown accustomed to in preceding years. Yotam Marom recalls that while he was involved in socialist organizing prior to Occupy, public demonstrations and activism had “always felt small, always felt scrawny, always felt like a sideshow. I would invite my friends to these actions and secretly hope they wouldn’t come, because it was a little embarrassing.”

Then, one day in Zuccotti Park, “the conditions were right, the right people were there at the right time, there was a little bit of magic dust and the shit just popped,” he says.

New people were arriving every hour. Often, they had never led anything; some had never done any activism. A well-functioning operation, says Marom, would have identified the natural leaders among them and ushered them through a process of leadership development. But no such process existed.

“We pretended we were a leaderless movement,” Marom laments. As a consequence, not only were new leaders developed by the sink-or-swim method, “the leaders who did emerge were not held accountable. It made us less collective and democratic, not more.”

The question of leadership continued to dog Occupy. But after the parks were emptied, this realization led Marom and a handful of other likeminded comrades to found the Wildfire Project, which has facilitated strategic planning, political education and leadership development with the leaders of a number of movements that emerged in Occupy’s wake.

Since the project launched in early 2013, Wildfire has worked with the Florida-based, youth-led black freedom organization the Dream Defenders, the Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Network, anti-foreclosure organizers Occupy Our Homes, and several others, aiming to equip activists responding to a crisis with “the tools and skills to do that work in their day-to-day.”

Wildfire covers basic skills including public speaking and how to have one-on-one organizing conversations. But the group’s process also draws on many of the lessons learned by Occupiers—for example, not to suppress conflict. “In other strategic planning processes, the idea is to table the emotional/political/interpersonal stuff and to get to the ‘work,’” explains Marom. With Wildfire, on the other hand, “we actually dive head-first into conflict. We’re trying, as much as possible, to teach people to be in conflict in a generative way, as a way to get to being able to fight over strategy.”

At the same time, Wildfire works to challenge the antipathy towards leadership that pervaded Occupy. “A lot of it has to do with fear of the enemy, with the resignation that we’re never going to win anyway,” says Marom. As a culture within the broader Left, he believes it’s “a barrier to building a powerful and strategic movement.”

The new rules for radicals

While Occupy’s decentralized model presented barriers, it also provided a powerful draw for those fed up with politics as usual.

In the run-up to Occupy, for example, Tammy Shapiro had been considering quitting organizing. Non-profits that operated according to a tailored political script, tightly controlling every aspect of a campaign’s messaging and development, seemed to be the only game in town.

“I was really repelled by the way funding and money controlled both Washington politics and the work of nonprofits,” recalls the former organizer for J Street U, a Jewish-American youth group that organizes against Israel’s Occupation. “I noticed that no matter what, wealthy donors had more of a voice than the grassroots.”

The initial success of Occupy Wall Street allowed Shapiro “to see the power of this different way of organizing,” she says. The occupation’s decentralized style, which left plenty of room for grassroots experimentation, provided a paradigm that made sense to her, and brought her back to the profession she’d been trying to leave.