Courses

Organizing 101

Course Category

  • How to Mobilize and Organize

    Trainer: Sara El-Amine Explore how organizing will allow us to better mobilize in the future and dive into the components of successful issue-based and electoral campaigns, focusing on the importance of the people involved in those efforts.

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  • Public Narrative

    Learn the fundamentals of telling your story of self, from trainer Marshall Ganz. Understand why public narrative is key to being a leader who can create and maintain action-oriented relationships, develop organizing strategies, and communicate authentically with voters.

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  • How to Build Relationships

    Leadership involves helping others achieve purpose through relationship-building. Luis Avila well help you learn how to identify leaders through one on one conversations, building capacity within groups, and achieving effective action over time.

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  • How to Make Volunteer Calls

    Struggling to bring in new volunteers and retain the ones you have? Charlotte Hall will teach you the three types of calls that are essential for every organizer and community leader: volunteer calls, confirmation calls, and recommit calls.  

Team Building

Course Category

  • How to Hold a House Meeting

    Everything you need to know to plan and hold a house meeting. Kate Catherall, co-founder of the Arena, teaches us why we hold house meetings, how to use house meetings as an organizing tool, and what actually happens at a successful house meeting.

    Preview this course - (5 preview lessons)

  • How to Build a Team

    Explore how individuals can discover their ability to lead. Learn types of leadership and organizing structures from Marshall Ganz, and build a toolkit based on how individuals across the world have launched their own teams.

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  • Theory of Change

    Prepare to launch a winning strategy, with theory of change and power-mapping frameworks. With trainer Jessie Ulibarri, learn how to achieve political change through problem analysis, identification of solutions, and assessment of political landscape.

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  • Strategic Planning

    Learn the steps of political strategy design with Heather Booth, from creating organizational goals and mapping out allies and opponents, to figuring out which methods constituent groups can best use to make their power felt.

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  • How to Coach Public Narrative

    When it comes to coaching Public Narrative, it’s easy to fall into traps like avoiding critique or talking rather than listening. Take a look at the following coaching videos from Marshall Ganz’s Teaching Team, so you can help others tell their story.

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Contacting Voters

Course Category

  • How to Knock on Doors: Persuasion Canvass

    Learn how to have a persuasive conversation at the door with former Obama and Clinton staffer Jason Gray. We'll provide you key tips and give you a proven framework to use.

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  • How to Knock on Doors: Commit to Action Canvass

    Jason Gray will teach you the tricks and best practices of how to knock on doors in order to commit someone to an action - whether you want them to sign a petition, register to vote or turn out to vote, this training will help.

    Preview this course - (5 preview lessons)

  • How to Launch a Canvass

    Canvassing is one of the most effective methods we can use when talking to voters. In this training, Conor Hand will help any organizer or volunteer who wants to learn how to prepare and execute a canvass launch event.

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  • How to Register Voters

    Everyone knows how important voter registration is. This training will explain the rules of voter registration, how to reach and have a conversation with unregistered voters, and general best practices.

    Preview this course - (3 preview lessons)

  • The Power of Texting

    Texting is quickly becoming one of the most used tactics. Yasmin Radjy and Kim Kargman will help you learn how to use text messaging to support a campaign or cause you care about by understanding the steps involved to make an effective texting program.

Building Movements

Course Category

  • How to Communicate Your Values

    By using history and teaching the tools of value-based communication, Tim McCarthy will help you explore how to develop a compelling frame and narrative for initiating meaningful conversations that build bridges and connect people.

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  • How to Sustain the Resistance

    The best movements are built from aligned impacts and goals, and based on tangible metrics. Michael Blake will help you learn how to build coalitions using the unique expertise of many individuals and sustain movements over long periods of time.

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  • How to Have Engaging Conversations

    Organizer Aquiles Damiron-Alcantara will help you learn how to engage in productive and joyful conversations while improving the quality of your listening and increasing the effectiveness of your message.

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  • Radical Listening and Deep Canvassing

    This training will break down two essential ways to implement listening in order to make movement building supported, sustainable, and effective. Learn how to develop listening partnerships and how to deep canvassing.

Resistance School @ Berkeley

Course Category

  • Communicating Across Difference

    By drawing from his own experiences and knowledge, the legendary Robert Reich teaches us how to communicate effectively and convincingly with audiences that might not share the same values.

    Preview this course - (2 preview lessons)

  • Strategic Messaging and Metaphors

    Anat Shenker-Orosio will focus on concrete skills to build strategic messaging by using framing and metaphors to activate your base, persuade the persuadables, and minimize the impact of those who will never agree.

  • Transforming Resistance into a Social Movement

    Saru helps people and groups situate their individual work within broader social movement theory, and think about how to make transformative change by building coalitions across organizations, issues, and sectors.

  • How to Defeat Dog Whistle Politics

    Professor López details a method of fusing race and class to combat Dog Whistle Politics and teaches us to identify racially coded political rhetoric and build response messaging which fuses arguments of race and class to unite, rather than divide.