Organizations

There are many great organizations across the country that train and provide resources to popular educators and facilitators. Here are a few:

Alliance for a Just Society executes regional and national campaigns and build strong state affiliate organizations and partnerships that address economic, racial, and social inequities.  They offer trainings on organizing skills, running campaigns, and financial management. They also run a Justice Leadership Academy – a year long training and support program for JLA Community Fellows.

Highlander serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South. We work with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability, supporting their efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny. Through popular education, participatory research, and cultural work, we help create spaces — at Highlander and in local communities — where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. We develop leadership and help create and support strong, democratic organizations that work for justice, equality and sustainability in their own communities and that join with others to build broad movements for social, economic and restorative environmental change.

  • Instituto de Educational Popular del Sur de California, Los Angeles, CA

    IDEPSCA works to create a more humane and democratic society by responding to the needs and problems of disenfranchised people through leadership development and educational programs based on Popular Education methodology. Specifically our goal is to organize and educate immigrants concerned with solving problems in their own communities.

IISC catalyzes the will and skill of the diverse public to create social justice and sustainability. We do this with people in communities, organizations and movements through training, facilitation, network building and public engagement. IISC brings our commitment to equity, love and trust to all of our work.

The Midwest Academy is a national training institute committed to advancing the struggle for social, economic, and racial justice. From local neighborhood groups to statewide and national organizations, Midwest Academy has trained over twenty-five thousand grassroots activists from hundreds of organizations and coalitions. Midwest Academy teaches an organizing philosophy, methods and skills that enable ordinary people to actively participate in the democratic process.

Praxis Project is a national, nonprofit organization that builds partnerships with local groups to influence policymaking to address the underlying, systemic causes of community problems.

The Practicing Freedom Collective supports communities to generate and enact their own solutions while strengthening their relationships through Popular Education practices. We amplify the liberatory, participatory and humanizing potential of programs, schools, campaigns, organizations and businesses working to create systemic social and cultural change. We believe that if we want our institutions, and political and economic systems to be participatory and democratic, then each step of the process to transform them should be participatory and democratic as well.

Project South is a Southern-based leadership development organization that creates spaces for movement building. We work with communities pushed forward by the struggle– to strengthen leadership and to provide popular political and economic education for personal and social transformation. We build relationships with organizations and networks across the US and global South to inform our local work and to engage in bottom-up movement building for social and economic justice.

Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) builds grassroots power to create social and economic justice for low-income, female, immigrant, black, and brown communities in Los Angeles. To do this, SCOPE organizes communities, develops leaders, collaborates through strategic alliances, builds capacity through training programs, and educates South LA’s residents to have an active role in shaping policies that affect the quality of life in our region. Justice, respect, responsibility, integrity, and voice:

SOUL is a school to build a movement. SOUL is working to lay the groundwork for a strong social justice movement by supporting the development of a new generation of organizers rooted in a systemic change analysis -especially people of color, young women, queer and transgender youth and low-income people. We believe that – in order for organizers to build an effective movement for fundamental social change – they need support to develop the nuts-and-bolts organizing skills they need to mobilize their communities and to deepen their political analysis and their visions for fundamental social change. SOUL helps to build the capacity of organizers and leaders of grassroots organizations to win systemic change.

For over 20 years, Training for Change has provided activist training for groups standing up for social, economic, and environmental justice through strategic nonviolence.  We’ve led hundreds of workshops and trained thousands of people – from striking steelworkers to interfaith coalitions for immigrant rights – in the skills they need to effectively create change.  Using our unique experiential approach, we create learning environments that provide the practical tools and insights that activists can use, as well as opportunities for real growth, transformation, and empowerment.

Wayside Center for Popular Education is a not-for-profit movement resource hub which aims to foster social change through training, rejuvenating and connecting activists and organizers with an emphasis on directly affected communities. We believe that a better world is possible – one built on justice, dignity and solidarity. We also believe that a broad-based social movement is the only way to get there. Wayside is a place where diverse peoples can come together to reflect on the problems confronting them, heal from the traumas those problems have inflicted, and collectively craft solutions. At and through Wayside, community members and organizers build a regional network of people equipped with the skills and web of relationships needed to mobilize for long term, radical social change.

UALE includes a broad range of people involved in labor education, including union- and community-based educators as well as academics. The Popular Education Working Group will work to ensure that the organization serves the needs of those of us who work in a non-academic setting or who are able to use non-traditional and transformative teaching methods within the academy. We will promote the use of Popular Education methodology in working with adult learners by soliciting proposals for popular education workshops at the UALE conference; sharing techniques, activities and materials; and any other means at our disposal.

We help workers understand the policies that have created the problems that they face everyday. Our Economics for Everyone Workshops document inequality and offer members of our partner organizations the opportunity to collectively and democratically develop political analysis.Using popular education methodology, we facilitate trainings for movement leaders and give them tools to illustrate and explain this economic analysis in accessible and relevant ways.

Western States Center’s mission is to connect and build the power of community organizations to challenge and transform individuals, organizations and systems to achieve racial, gender and economic justice. We envision our movement achieving a just society where we all flourish in sustainable, caring and connected communities.