Training Programs

Building Community Power Together: How Organizers & Movement Lawyers Collaborate

March-May, 2024
Fordham Law School
Lincoln Center, New York

What can we do when inequitable systems and power serve some but harm many?
We can collaborate!

This innovative training, consisting of 8 weekly 90-minute virtual sessions followed by 2 immersive in-person days, will explore how community organizers collaborate with movement lawyers to break historic patterns of discrimination and build equitable grassroots power.
 

This program is for organizers, lawyers, and other community leaders eager to learn from each other. Advancing justice through structural change calls for targeted skills, knowledge and strategies around:

• Social Change Theory: Understand and apply frameworks for social change commonly used by community movements.
• Movement Lawyering: Explore how legal tools and strategies can (i) address systemic inequities driving poverty and harming marginalized communities; (ii) advance progressive grassroots campaigns; and (iii) discern what is legal and what is just.
• Community Organizing: Examine how organizers use base-building, direct action, legislative advocacy, and coalition work to build movements.
• Campaign Development: Learn about designing, implementing, and sustaining effective campaigns; power mapping and identifying allies and adversaries; building capacity to make change; and leverage points for impactful campaigns.
• Storytelling: Communicate clear and powerful narratives to drive change and inspire action.
• Collaboration: Create and sustain organizer-lawyer partnerships and community relationships to overcome systemic barriers and other obstacles to change. 

The time is now. As we encounter erosion of democratic principles and blowback against hard-earned gains for oppressed groups, it has never been more important to fight racism, poverty, and other systemic inequities by supporting community empowerment and creating greater opportunity.

The program will be led by expert facilitators well-versed in organizing and movement lawyering.

Facilitators