The product of over two decades of experience, Global Action Project's Media In Action Curriculum is available here for free download. Grab it, read it, use it, adapt it, and tell us how it worked (or didn't) for you. Global Action Project developed the Media In Action Curriculum through its after-school media arts programs and, more recently, its Media in Action trainings. Media in Action runs multi-day, intergenerational trainings for community organizers who want to harness the power of youth media to move their work further, faster.

This packet has been compiled to facilitate a workshop which aims to introduce ideas of anti-oppression, privilege and ally-hood in a friendly and accessible way.  The text is a compilation of various sources (see our “References” in the Further Resources section), along with the authors’ own thoughts and editions. 

We hope this will be a “living” document, constantly open to change and reinterpretation.  Our understandings of anti-oppression will always be changing and growing.  We hope that in the meantime, the information here can serve as a useful tool in working towards social justice! 

This training can help identify what systems exist to support base-building work, and how your organization can create and maintain these systems. This training is geared toward new and emerging organizers and leaders.

Goals:

- Review and solidify the basic framework of base-building.

- Present the “why” and “how” of creating and maintaining base-building systems.

- Complete assessment of current base-building systems and identify next steps.

Note: This workshop can be used as a stand-alone training, but was developed as a follow-up to Base-Building 101. We recommend training Base-Building Systems with groups that have a solid understanding of the material covered in Base-Building 101.

This workshop is designed for Unitarian Universalist congregations, but could be adapted for any group as an introduction to thinking about basebuilding, leadership development, and one-on-ones.

Here's more:

It’s easy to be absorbed by the activities of our justice work – setting up the table for coffee hour, trying to understand the everchanging policy context, and planning the next event. This workshop looks at the importance of relationships, recruitment, and leadership development as key and often-neglected pieces of our organizing work. How might we focus more on building our relationships, “base,” and leaders? People-focused organizing opens doors to more effective, spiritually rich, and demographically diverse organizing. Together we’ll talk about why a focus on people matters, learn a framework for assessing who’s in our activist crew, and play with various tactics for more effective and spiritually grounded recruitment and leadership development. 

This is a group drawing activity that invites participants to tell their stories about how they came to be anti-racist activists/organizers.  We use it at the beginning of a long program, so that participants can reflect on their lives and what brought them to the room, and then use those drawings as a way to get to know each other.  We do this after we have shared a little bit with the group about our own paths. We like to take a break after this exercise and invite people to look around the room at the gallery of paths, talk to each other about their paths, etc. 

Note: We also like to use a version of this exercise at the end of a long program, as a way for participants to reflect on their experiences through the program, evaluate the program, see where they’ve come and how they’ve changed.

This is a fun and interactive way to do a large group written evaluation of a workshop series or intensive training.  It gives participants a chance to reflect on what they've learned and how they'll apply their learning, as well as a chance to see/hear from other participants about their own reflections.

Goals of Organizing Training

Who: Training to be used for new organizers, for members of community groups, refresher courses in community organizing, and wherever understanding community can be useful to leadership development.

Objectives:

To identify six basic goals of organizing and a list of organizing skills associated with each goal.

*   Winning issues 

*   Building Organizations 

*   Empowering individuals

*   Changing institutions

*   Fostering democratic values

*   Overcoming Isms Used to Divide Us