Community Organizing: People, Power & Change

Catalog description

Organizers ask three questions: who are my people, what challenges do they face, and how can they turn their resources into the power they need to meet these challenges? Organizing requires leadership: accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty. Organizers identify, recruit, and develop leadership; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community. In this fellowship course, students will build their coaching and leadership skills to support other students in the craft of community organizing. Students will be introduced to the five core leadership practices: public narrative, building relationships, structure, strategy, and action. In the first module, students will learn what coaching is and how to coach one another through leadership challenges. We will then focus on public narrative in the context of organizing. Students will learn to tell their own public narrative, coach one another on their public narratives, and learn how to use public narrative to analyze responses to leadership challenges. Students will receive the opportunity to coach other students at a public narrative workshop week 4 of the quarter. We will build off of the knowledge and skills students gain in the first module by diving into the remaining leadership practices: relationships, structure, strategy, and action. Students will apply the organizing principles by viewing the fellowship experience as a campaign - who is our constituency? What is our strategic goal? How will we reach it? Students will leave the retreat with a draft of our collective strategic plan. In the remaining three sessions, students will take the lead in facilitating and practicing the activities and skills modeled during the retreat in preparation for coaching at the Winter Intensive.