Francesca Dulce Larson and Shadawn Smith met at the Women’s Convention in October.

The convention, in Detroit, was organized by the team behind the Women’s March in January with the goal of bringing women around the country back together to coordinate activism and political action for 2018 and beyond. That meant speeches by female activists and politicians, panel discussions, and, sometimes, impromptu conversations. Smith and Larson arrived at one session to find out the speaker hadn’t shown up. “So a group of us just formed a circle, everybody stayed, and we had a frank conversation about race,” Larson said.

She said the purpose of the convention was to act like the center of a maze: “There’s a lot of entrances out of the center, and each one of those are the different issues that we’re tackling, and so we all kind of run in the different directions outside, and that means our voice is in more spaces.”

It was an apt description of what the Women’s March has become since January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. From an event bringing together more than 2 million people around the world, it’s grown into a movement — or, perhaps more accurately, a hub for a variety of movements. Over the past year, the organizers of the original march have taken a broad-based approach, putting together events in partnership with groups focusing on racial justice, disability, and LGBTQ rights, to name a few. The result is less a unified front than a collection of organizations and individuals working for gender equality and social justice in their own ways.

Sometimes that structure can lead to division, as groups with different priorities or strategies chafe against one another. But it’s also allowed the influence of the march to persist and grow. A year out, the voices of marchers are in more spaces than ever — in voter registration drives, in conversations about #MeToo and sexual harassment, and in political campaigns across the country, as women gear up to run for office in record numbers. And those voices, taken together, are a potent force in American politics in the Trump era.

The Women’s March has helped women channel their post-election energy into political action

After the marches last January in Washington, DC, and around the world drew enormous crowds — and reportedly angered the new president — the organizers of the Washington march stayed busy. Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Bob Bland, along with others, planned the convention in Detroit in October, where more than 4,000 people heard speakers such as Me Too campaign founder Tarana Burke and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and participated in panels and training sessions on topics like running for office and confronting racism.

This Sunday, on the one-year anniversary of the first march, the organizers will hold another big event, the kickoff of a nationwide voter registration initiative called #PowerToThePolls. Hosted in Las Vegas, the event will feature speakers like Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, as well as a video message from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). It will also launch a multi-state tour during which Women’s March organizers hope to register 1 million voters.

In addition to the Las Vegas rally, marches around the country are planned for Saturday, January 20. Some of these events, held in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and many more cities, are directly affiliated with the national Women’s March organization, and some are not. Information on many of the marches is available on the #PowerToThePolls website.

This year’s voter registration drive is emblematic of the march’s growth from a single protest into a force in electoral politics. This growth started early — EMILY’s List, which works on behalf of pro-choice Democratic female candidates, held a training session the day after the 2017 march for women interested in running for office. Around 500 women attended that day, and more than 26,000 women in total have reached out to EMILY’s List about running since the presidential election in November, more than 20 times the number the group usually sees in that period of time.

“We saw a sort of coalescing moment” around women’s activism, said Muthoni Wambu Kraal, the vice president of national outreach and training at EMILY’s List. “The Women’s March was an incredibly important part of that coalescing moment.” But it wasn’t the only part.

Around the time the march was being planned, EMILY’s List staffers noticed that more than 1,000 women had signed up for training through the group’s website after the election, Kraal said. The women were reaching out of their own volition, without any promotion on the group’s part (the link to sign up was on “a sleepy little part of our website,” Kraal said). That spike in signups led EMILY’s List to organize the event after the march. To some degree, both the march and subsequent candidate training sessions — Kraal led one in Detroit in October as well — harnessed enthusiasm that was already there, looking for an outlet.

That enthusiasm was on display in November 2017, when female candidates posted historic victories. A record number of women were elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, including the state’s first Latina, openly transgender, and Asian-American female delegates. Ashley Bennett, who had never run for office before, decided to run for the Atlantic County Board of Chosen Freeholders after a male member made fun of the Women’s March; she ended up winning his seat.

Lawmakers who attended the Women’s March have also taken its energy back to their states. Teresa Fedor, chair of the Democratic women’s caucus in the Ohio House of Representatives, was at the march in Washington last year with other Ohio women. Since then, she’s been working on a bill to improve protections for people reporting sexual harassment in Ohio, and she will be marching on Saturday in Toledo.

For Fedor, the Women’s March has helped change the way ordinary people talk about political action. “Even two years ago, it wasn’t cool to talk about politics or politicians,” she said. “We’ve transitioned into the realization that we make the difference.”

Now, the Women’s March and its partners have their sights set on the midterm elections, in which Democrats hope to retake the US House of Representatives. EMILY’s List has already trained more than 2,400 women for the 2018 election cycle, and has endorsed a number of female congressional candidates in currently Republican-held districts, including Sara Jacobs in California and Gina Ortiz Jones in Texas.

“A really powerful convener of women”

The Women’s March has been “a really powerful convener of women around the country and around the world,” Kraal said, an apt description for a group whose influence has come, in large part, from its ability to bring together other groups.

Though the march last January was criticized by some for focusing on the needs and feelings of white women, the organizers have made clear that they view issues like racial and economic justice as part of their cause. The Women’s March is committed to “taking down the silos between issue areas, between identities, encouraging folks to organize together for a better impact,” said Bland, one of the organizers.

The group has worked with organizations from Black Lives Matter to the immigrant youth organization United We Dream to Our Revolution, the national political organization that grew out of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. The Women’s March has been especially effective at coalition building, Bland said, giving people around the country “a reason to come together, when otherwise they might be doing work in parallel and not communicating with each other.”

That coalition-building power has been evident at events like the Day Without a Woman strike in March and the March to Confront White Supremacy in September (which the Women’s March organized along with Color for Change, the Movement for Black Lives, and other groups). It’s clear on the march’s social media channels, which the organization uses to promote a variety of gender equality and other social justice causes and groups. Recent tweets have highlighted United We Dream’s push to pass a clean Dream Act and the Time’s Up campaign started by actresses and others to combat sexual harassment.

The Women’s Convention, which Bland described as “the largest women’s convention of its kind in over 40 years,” was another opportunity to bring people and their concerns together. For people at work on different types of activism, gatherings like the convention offer a sense “that we’re all in this together,” Smith, the convention attendee, said in October. “We’re not alone, chipping away at the ice block.”

“What I really have gotten out of the women’s movement is the common ground among women in all different scenarios across the United States,” said Larson when I caught up with her on Friday. Larson, who is from New Jersey, marched in Washington last January before attending the convention in October to speak on a panel about the campaign to put a woman on the $20 bill. “I don’t think I felt as strong connection to a woman in Kansas before as I do now,” she said.

With breadth come divisions

As is perhaps inevitable with any group that aims to bring together so many people, the Women’s March has faced conflicts from the beginning. In addition to concerns about the inclusion of women of color, the march last January drew criticism from women with anti-abortion views who felt excluded. Women with anti-choice views were not barred from marching, but an anti-choice group was removed from the march partners list, and the Women’s March “unity principles” include support for legal abortion. In March, some women who identify as Zionists objected to a call for the “decolonization of Palestine” in the women’s strike platform.

Now there are disagreements about tactics between the Women’s March and a group called March On, founded by women who organized sister marches outside Washington last year, according to Farah Stockman at the New York Times. Some March On leaders believe protests organized by the Women’s March aren’t as effective in red states, and the group has launched its own voter registration and education effort, called March On the Polls.

The Women’s March and March On have had some disagreements over branding, according to Stockman, with Women’s March leaders asking March On not to advertise their events as “Women’s March” actions. But the groups have not criticized one another directly, and, as sociologist Jo Reger told the Times, divisions like this are par for the course in the history of feminism.

“We think it looks so chaotic and full of factions and what it really looks like is every other social movement,” Reger said. “Often those factions end up coming back together later on.”

It’s not clear yet how the Women’s March coalition will evolve. But the organizers, their partners, and individual marchers are looking forward to 2018 with excitement. Silver State Voices, an organizing hub for voter registration groups and other grassroots organizations in Nevada, is gearing up for the rally on Sunday, said Emily Zamora, the group’s executive director. Organizers will arrive at the event around 8 am and spend the day registering new voters and helping others update their voter registration. After Silver State Voices registers women on Sunday, “our organization will continue to be in contact with them, and engage them throughout the election cycle and beyond,” Zamora said.

Larson, for her part, plans to march on Saturday in Morristown, New Jersey, with her mother, who is currently being treated for lung cancer. Her hopes for the coming year center on her mom’s experiences: “When she walks in and gets to speak with a doctor, I want that doctor to listen to her and see her as a human who has just as much intelligence as he does.”

“I want her to receive the same respect and belief that what she’s saying is true that other patients receive,” she added. “I think those moments are where lives are changed.”

Larson has kept in touch with Smith since they met in October. Over drinks that started at happy hour and stretched into the evening, they continued the conversation they started at the convention, Larson said.

In October, Smith was hopeful that the movement the Women’s March represents would have a real impact on the country. “I’m not optimistic about a lot of things at this moment,” she said, “but I am optimistic about that.”