Community Organizer Training Program
Building a Pipeline of Organizing Talent
Like becoming an excellent teacher, becoming an excellent organizer requires intensive training, support, and ongoing development by other seasoned professionals in the craft. Without significant training, feedback, and counsel from experienced practitioners, new organizers often fail and frequently burn out. Organizations with the desire to organize parents or communities find themselves hiring organizers who lack any experience or expertise, who then find them failing and burning-out, because they don’t have the necessary training and support. Similarly, education organizations lack in-house expertise to manage organizing staff, and end up asking them to do other important work, rather than continuing to prioritize long-term parent empowerment.
Innovate gets requests nearly every month to grow its organizing work into other regions of the country, or to provide training and ongoing consulting to help organizations build their parent leadership capacity. To begin to meet this need and scale successful community organizing efforts, Innovate created a nine-month Community Organizer Training Program designed to meet the needs of organizers and organizations through quality professional development sessions on community organizing theory and practice.
Program Highlights
Through reading, seminars, reflective writing assignments, observation, and critical feedback, the program will include these topics:
- Technical skills of doing relational “1-1” meetings and house meetings – building a powerful network of relationships
- Issue and strategy development
- What is an Organizer? What is a Leader?
- Using data to fuel your campaign
- Grassroots leadership development
- Mapping, understanding, and navigating the public arena
- The culture and norms of a strong Parent Leadership Team
- Working with public officials
- Role of self-interest in political philosophy and organizing
- Developing an orientation toward power and values
- Training parents to organize and lead effective meetings with public officials
- Understanding the education justice movement
2018-19 Schedule (Tentative)
- October 22-24, 2018 (includes 2 overnights)
- November 13-14, 2018 (includes 1 overnight)
- January 10-11, 2019 (includes 1 overnight)
- February 7, 2019 (remote – only for non-Bay Area orgs)
- March 28, 2019 (only for Bay Area orgs)
- April 25-26, 2019 (includes 1 overnight)
- May 20-21, 2019 (includes 1 overnight)
A three day Parent Leader Institute will take place over a weekend (Friday – Sunday) in February 2019 for Bay Area organizations, and in March 2019 for all other participating organizations.
Parent Leader Institute
Participant Expectations
Applicant Requirements
Participants job description should include a minimum of 5 “one-to-one” meetings each week with individual parents and stakeholders, as well as a clear goal of building a parent leader team focused on advocacy and action. We will be teaching participants to move along a trajectory of professional work that leads to building organization, developing a political presence through public meetings, and taking public action toward the goal of creating, supporting, and sustaining world-class public schools, particularly for underserved groups of children.
Cost
Organization’s sending 2 people = $10,000
Organization’s sending 3 people = $15,000
This includes lodging and meals during training sessions but does not include any travel expenses.
Contact
The Latest from the blog
El trayecto al Capitolio del Estado de California
Nuestro compromiso con el liderazgo de los padres y la equidad educativa En Innovate Public Schools, creemos en el poder del liderazgo de los padres para impulsar un cambio significativo en la educación. Nuestra dedicación a la lucha por la equidad educativa va mucho...
El LAUSD, el segundo distrito escolar más grande del país, se asocia con Innovate para crear conjuntamente una herramienta destinada a aumentar la abogacía de los padres
En noviembre de 2022, Padres Líderes en Los Ángeles abogaron por que LAUSD involucrara a los padres como socios para ayudar a los estudiantes a recuperarse y prosperar. Como resultado, Innovate se asoció con familias y LAUSD para crear una Guía para Familias sobre el plan estratégico de LAUSD.
Padres líderes de CA responden al presupuesto estatal 2023-2024 del gobernador Newsom
On December 15, 2021, we sent Governor Gavin Newsom a letter to let him know that Innovate parent leaders want to ensure that these funds fulfill their promise of a full academic, social, and emotional recovery.