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Trainings & Events

Empire Health Foundation

At the end of 2023, our Movement Building program partnered with the Empire Health Foundation (based in Spokane, WA) to support them in developing local BIPOC organizing capacity through training their grantee organizations. An all-WoC team led a 2-day Storytelling Workshop, customized to support participants in identifying real world applications for storytelling in organizing, which they got to practice live. We followed that up with a 2-day Train-the-Trainers with a select group of participants from the original cohort, who will be supported locally to continue to transmit these practices to other leaders and organizations.

Video by Empire Health Foundation

For 2024, Empire Health Foundation is seeing re:power as a key partner in developing local capacity and they have asked us to set up a partner contract where we’ll reserve close to 80 seats in public trainings across all our program areas for EHF grantees. We’re excited about the impact that can result from having so many participants from a single region sitting in all our programs and we look forward to continuing to support those organizations in 2024 and beyond.

State Voices Women of Color Cohort

From September to December, re:power facilitated a 9-week Women of Color Leadership Development Cohort for a group of 20 staff from across State Voices’ network, who hold roles ranging from Communications Associate to Organizing Director to Development Manager. The State Voices network now has more women of color staff than ever before and this program is focused on investing in their leadership and growth. 

We deepened our connection to State Voices after one of their staff participated in our February 2023 public cohort and recommended the program to the State Voices network. This participant stated:

“The content shared and worked through was unexpected but so needed—I love how you all connect everyday things that we often use for coping mechanisms as a way to harness our leadership and feel more connected to our inner selves. Thank y’all ❤️ “

State Voices participants from the Winter 2023 Cohort were enlightened and refreshed from their recent cohort experience. Many stated this opportunity helped them connect on a deeper level with other State Voices staff which enhances the work they do across the State Voices table.

“Thank you for the opportunity to be in this space and to heal. We as women of color do need to heal ourselves before we can heal the community.”

WoC – State Voices cohort member

Our WOC Cohort Alum are ambassadors for re:power and they stay connected to re:power by attending additional trainings, becoming facilitators for the cohort, and facilitating opportunities for re:power to partner with other organizations.

We look forward to seeing how our growing base of WoC alumni will continue engaging with us and championing our work in the future!

“This is magical and it works.”

WoC – State Voices cohort member

American Federation of Teachers

What we love about this work is the opportunity to train leaders across different social movements. In August, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) partnered with us to train 25 staff members from the National Political Department in developing a national volunteer activists program, slated to launch in 2024.

The AFT is gearing up to mobilize and organize its members, everyday individuals, and students, ensuring the safeguarding of public education across school board, state, and federal elections in the next five years.

The training introduced state and national staff to a relational organizing approach that can complement their electoral mobilizing strategies and tactics for the 2024 campaign cycle. There was a primary focus throughout the training on how electoral organizing connects to year-round organizing and movement building.

The curriculum included:

  • Developing a Transformative and Winning Field Plan
  • Campaign Strategy Development
  • Base Building and Direct Voter Contact
  • Building a Volunteer Program and Ladder of Engagement
  • Internal Team Management/Building Healthy Campaign Culture
  • Campaign Messaging & Communications
  • Introduction to Digital Organizing and Finding Our People Online

Boston Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement

From May to August, we partnered with the Boston Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement (MOIA) to train 15 immigrant residents of the city in grassroots organizing, as part of their “Immigrants Lead Boston” (ILB) program. The ILB has run for the past 4 years as a civic education project, helping immigrant residents of Boston navigate local government, but was reimagined this year into a unique collaboration with re:power.

Working closely with the Executive Director of MOIA, Monique Tú Nguyen, the Movement Building team rebuilt the program from scratch to focus on community organizing skills—helping the cohort learn how to share stories, build relationships, build teams and strategy, and take action alongside their communities.

re:power Director of Movement Building Programs Conrado Santos speaks at the ILB graduation ceremony. Photo courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office.

The program was a success and concluded with a beautiful in-person graduation ceremony at Boston City Hall, where participants were granted certificates by Mayor Michelle Wu. Our team is also in early conversations about potential new avenues for continuing the partnership, including training graduates on how to lead sessions in their native languages, expanding the program, and more!

ILB graduation ceremony. Photo courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office.
Fresh graduates of the ILB program. Photo courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office.

Inatai Foundation

In August, we partnered with the Inatai Foundation to conduct a two-day candidate training for 29 of their staff in conjunction with partners from the Empire Health Foundation. While some of the staff expressed interest in pursuing public office, the primary goal of the training was to enhance their understanding of power. This knowledge aims to enable them to allocate their funding more strategically, supporting grantees dedicated to building long-term power through the electoral arena.

The training served as an opportunity for our team to update our curriculum, which has been in use since the Wellstone and New Organizing Institute era. We integrated modern updates that directly address the lived experiences of our participants and the current political landscape and pandemic challenges we are all navigating.

“I really enjoyed the training and it was structured in a way where I felt like I learned content and had the chance to practice what I learned and I know this will help me retain all the information. I found it especially helpful that all the trainers pushed the folks in the training to use critical thinking / scenario mapping as it helped me absorb and practice applying the information. I’d love to participate in future trainings from this group if possible!”

Inatai Foundation training participant

Throughout the training, participants immediately applied their newly acquired skills by engaging in a mock scenario. They were organized into teams to manage a fictional candidate campaign and present their campaign field plan, showcasing their learning on various topics covered.

Incorporating new facilitation techniques and methods, we aimed to inject dynamism and spaciousness into the training environment. This involved eliminating a strictly time-bound agenda and integrating team-building activities and icebreakers. These additions helped alleviate the intensity and information overload experienced throughout the day.

“Just a really well-prepped and high quality training. You all were able to take really big concepts and make them digestible to the group. So appreciative of everything you all did. I continue to hear nothing but excellent feedback from colleagues about the training. Not only has it increased folks’ understanding and knowledge of campaign planning, but it has also spurred folks to action.”

Inatai Foundation training participant

Voices From the Frontlines: What Organizers Need in 2022

On Monday August 22nd re:power is hosting a movement briefing to discuss these findings and most importantly to dig deeper into the solutions we’ve listed below. We hope to see you there!

Register

In March 2022, re:power launched our 2022 Organizer Survey in partnership with Analyst Institute. Our goal was to survey organizers spanning the progressive sector to understand their short and long term challenges and needs. We were particularly interested in understanding the needs of BIPOC organizers. 

re:power engaged organizers to participate in our survey through our partners. Partners were sent unique URLs to share with their staff, volunteers, and networks. In the end we had 349 completed surveys. Unfortunately, despite a concerted effort, we were unable to reach the majority BIPOC audience we were striving to reach*. Despite this limitation, we were still able to subset Black organizers and BIPOC women organizers for deeper analysis.

* Note: re:power is thinking deeply about how we might change future survey dissemination tactics to better reach the audience we hoped to reach. As a primarily BIPOC organization, we are also keenly aware of the ways in which information has often been extracted from Black, Indigenous and other communities of color in ways that did not serve that community. 

Question: Select any and all of the following racial/ethnic categories that you feel describe you

Respondent Demographics 

60% of respondents self-identify as White, 20% as Black or African American, 11% as Latinx or Hispanic and 10% as Asian or Asian American. 71% self-identify as women and 3% as transgender. 22% of respondents self-identify as having a disability. About 28% are first or second-generation immigrants and 34% are re:power alumni! Among the alumni, the training that was most commonly attended was Intro to Digital Organizing. The majority of respondents have at least 5 years of organizing experience and many have 10+. The majority of respondents work in community, electoral and/or legislative organizing and coalition building.

Key Findings

So what DID we learn from organizers? The short answer is that the number one threat to our movement is not external — it’s coming from within. Organizers on the whole are most concerned with organizer burnout in the short-term and long-term. This was consistent across all types of organizing. 

BIPOC women and Black organizers also cited the disconnect between power-building and bettering people’s lived experiences as a top short-term (next 18 months) challenge in addition to organizer burnout. We can draw two conclusions from this finding: 1) Black and BIPOC women organizers themselves are struggling to see the impact of their work on bettering their lived experience and 2) these organizers are concerned that the lack of progress in improving their communities’ material conditions will erode the power-building work they are currently doing.

In the long-term (next 5 years), organizers cited as their top challenge entrenched powers external to organization preventing change, followed closely by organizer burnout. For Black organizers, lack of funding and organizational sustainability were the top two challenges. For BIPOC women organizers, entrenched powers external to organization preventing change and organizer burnout remained at the top followed closely by lack of funding and organizational sustainability.

While none of this is new information for our movement, we found it particularly affirming to see these challenges named so plainly and to see the clear differences in the challenges Black organizers are facing when compared to the movement as a whole. Our survey also asked organizers to think about what they need in order to address the challenges they are facing. 

Short-term and long-term needs across organizers were consistent: more funding for their organizations’ work, more or better collaboration with other orgs, and more support to address or prevent burn-out. BIPOC women and Black organizers named training opportunities as an additional short-term need, superseding the need for improved collaboration among those groups.

Overall, our survey showed that the challenges and needs described by all organizers, and especially Black and BIPOC women organizers, point to a major problem that we must address as a movement: ORGANIZER BURNOUT. And when thinking about burnout, organizers are not just focused on individual self-care mechanisms but rather how all of the challenges and needs they named are leading to a burnout issue that is more prevalent and holistic. Our movement is powered by people and if our people are exhausted, overworked, underpaid, and underinvested in, then we won’t have the momentum we need to achieve the big wins that can lead to improving our communities’ lived experiences.


Question: Please select up to three potential challenges you are most concerned about at your organization in
the short term (i.e., in the next 18 months)

Question: Please select up to three potential challenges you are most concerned about at your organization in
the long term (i.e., in the next 5 years)

Addressing Organizer Burnout

Our survey asked organizers what solutions they had in addressing organizer burnout. Organizers responded to this question in a long-text format and responses centered around the following themes:

  • Value and support organizers
  • Devote resources to preventing burnout
  • Use sustainable funding to support better work environments
  • Support organizing staff with holistic and realistic approaches
    • This theme was the most prevalent across all responses

“Employers [need to] care about not harming their organizers and build in care considerations and an acknowledgement that sometimes things don’t get done on schedule if the conditions changed, new needs were revealed, people needed more time to learn something, etc. Reality.”

Survey respondent

Addressing Training Needs

As a training organization, re:power was also very curious to understand the training needs of organizers across the movement. As we now know that Black and BIPOC women organizers listed training opportunities as one of their top short- and long-term needs, we were eager to go deeper into this topic. 

Organizers on the whole expressed interest in Building Organizing Relationships, Power Mapping, and Finding Our People and Building Community as the training topics that would benefit them and their organizations most. The most popular training topic that interested organizers most was the Women of Color Leadership Cohort. 


Question: Which of the following types of training would benefit you or someone else at your organization?
(check all that apply). Additional trainings selected by fewer respondents are included in the tables.

Nearly half of respondents are more interested in a cohort-based training format that includes staff from their organizations and peer organizations. This finding aligns with both the finding of the need for more or better collaboration with other orgs, and comments from several organizers about the need for more community-building within the progressive community. 

Data Needs and Challenges

re:power was also interested in understanding the data practices, challenges and needs of the organizations we surveyed. On the whole, we learned that a variety of tools are being used to manage data, from Google Sheets to VAN/EveryAction. Most organizers also cited that at least some data needs are not met with existing tools. Organizers reported needing the most data-related support around conducting their own research, improving data collection practices, and improving systems for storing data.


Question: Do the data management tools your organization is using now meet your organization’s needs?

“I wish we had more accurate data that was obtained in a relational way. I wish we had more technology and training in various programs that could help accurately reflect what we are trying to obtain.” 

Survey respondent

Another major challenge respondents often cited was data on marginalized populations being inaccurate. Specific needs include: 

  • “Information on marginalized communities including Native American and recently incarcerated, for example, who need direct health outreach.” 
  • “Data that is more granular than just race (ethnic communities in Latinx communities, AAPI communities, more granular data on Black communities).” 
  • “Data on the invisible citizens who do not vote; better data on Spanish speakers.”

“We have no real way to measure the impact of our work since we work in partnership with many other organizations and with campaigns. We can only measure output, not impact.”

Survey respondent

Funding Challenges 

As is no surprise to us, organizers are extremely worried about short- and long-term funding challenges impeding their progress and work. In the short-term, 50% of respondents are concerned about getting enough funding to expand CURRENT programs and staffing to desired levels. In the long-term, organizers described concerns relating to obtaining and maintaining sustainable funding including: 

  • Competition for sustainable funding that is aligned with org priorities
  • Threat of donor fatigue/ loss of interest
  • Getting funding for ONGOING work
  • Lack of support for longer-term organizing strategies.

“While more funding is essential, organizers are not just describing a need for more cash, but rather a need for more FOCUS. Long-term infrastructure investments need long-term timelines to bear returns. Organizers are asking funders and donors to make multi-year investments, support ongoing work—not just the new shiny thing—and to redefine wins!”

Survey respondent

Conclusions 

It’s clear that our movement has needs to meet and challenges to overcome, especially as we set all of this work against the backdrop of COVID, continued violence against Black and Brown bodies, climate change and more. Despite the feelings of overwhelm that can arise when we see this, there are many actionable solutions that have come out of this research:

  1. Provide sustainable multi-year funding, including for longer-term organizing work, avoiding the pitfalls of “boom and bust” funding. 
  2. Work toward improving the data on marginalized populations through relational data collection to support the work of organizations who are engaging and serving these populations.
  3. Support organizer-driven research on their own programs including supporting improvements to data collection systems and practices.
  4. Fund training and provide continued support post-training. 
  5. Address (and if possible, prevent) organizer burnout at a systems level rather than at the individual level.
  6. Demonstrate the impact of power-building work on bettering lived experiences, potentially through redefining wins. 
  7. Support the work of network-building and community-building among organizers as a response to burnout as well as the need for more collaboration across organizations.

“We need sustained investments by individual foundations—more money over a longer period of time. Conservative foundations have invested in an infrastructure […] Progressive funders need to adopt similar strategies if we are to gain the traction we need to build a stronger base.” 

Survey respondent

Executive Summary

Want to dig deeper into the data? Download the full Executive Summary of our 2022 Organizer Survey below.

2022 Organizer Survey Results Executive SummaryDownload

On August 22nd re:power is hosting a movement briefing to discuss these findings and most importantly to dig deeper into the solutions we’ve listed above.