"Fundamentals of Organizing" to Hit the Road
Let us know if you'd like us to come to a town near you.
Last year, my co-trainer, Jenn Carrillo and I, ran our five day, ninety-minute a day Working Class Campaigns training for four cohorts, online. We had a blast, the reviews are the best of any training we’ve been a part of, and we are ready to hit the road.
If your organization or a handful of organizations are interested in hosting this training, fill out this little form, and we’ll follow-up, likely with more questions to see if there’s a fit. We are looking for organizations or groups of organizations dead serious about organizing working class people and organizations that are committed from top to bottom to learning and applying good organizing fundamentals.
Here’s what people are saying about this training.
“If you wanna grow as an organizer and have hella strategic campaign tools in your toolbelt, attend this.” - Lindsay Turner, Organizer, Take Action Minnesota
“I can’t recommend it enough! It’s a low time commitment and the content is incredibly useful, presented in a super simple, digestible, applicable way, and most of it I have not seen anywhere else.” - Austin Smith, Lead Organizer, Down Home North Carolina
“You all have modeled very well, I think better than any organizing training I've ever been in, how to make this stuff simple, and how to talk about it without getting super jargony and intellectual. You've made it accessible in a really, really cool way.” - Bill Hogseth, Organizing Director, Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin
Every organizer should experience the feeling of a growing base, leaders developing in ways they had never imagined, and the joy of winning on issues chosen by people in the community. This kind of organizing builds organizations that go into the next, bigger fight, with more confidence, skills, and power. It is exactly what we teach in our Working Class Campaigns training.
The five-part series includes:
Issues That Have Heat. Nothing beats organizing a campaign on issues that people in the community chose themselves. We show you how to find the ones that will inspire lots of new people to join the fight.
Cutting An Issue to Win: A forgotten secret sauce of organizing is building campaigns to win as a way to defeat cynicism and build confidence in organizing. We show you how to rack up wins along the way to taking on larger and more structural fights.
Down & Dirty Power Analysis: Your strategy is never better than your power analysis. We’ll teach you how to run one and do it with members of your organization, including a unique wrinkle you are unlikely to find anywhere else.
Simplified Campaign Strategy: Campaign plans don’t have to be complicated, but you do need one. We provide a simple framework for developing campaign strategy, and turning that strategy into a plan to win.
Building a Base, Developing Leaders: One of the most essential of the soft arts is helping people develop into leaders. Everyone says “go develop leaders,” but we are rarely taught how. This session helps you figure out where you are stuck and what you can shift in your organizing to help people develop into leaders.
If you learn and apply these fundamentals you will build a base, win things, and develop the trust and relationships needed to help members make new meaning on the issues used to divide working class people from one another.
Who should apply:
Organizations that are organizing working class people who are not already progressive on all things.
People hungry for the hard skills needed to build a working class base of leaders, find the issues they most want to organize on, and build campaigns to win on those issues.
This series is not for organizers who want to debate ideology or are seeking political education-style conversation or training. We believe this kind of training is important, but this is not that.
To the greatest extent possible, we will not use the language of the non-profit progressive sector. This grows from a belief that to organize more people we need to detach the organizing field from a non-profit progressive bubble that makes organizers less relatable to more people by the day.
We'd be glad to host one in the San Francisco Bay Area through Democracy Labs.
Pls email me directly to follow-up. Thanks.
Deepak (Deepak@thedemlabs.org)