TRAINING/CAPACITY BUILDING
We develop grassroots organizers and leaders by providing community organizing skills training, coaching and technical support which are integrated with somatics. Each year, we work with a new cohort of organizers and leaders who come from our growing network. Our training events include the following:
Black Intensive Groundwork (BIG): an entry-level skills training on organizing fundamentals for developing organizers. Trainees emerge from the program having gone through an arc of somatic transformation and with comprehensive step by step tools to build community-based power within their communities and organizations.
School of Leadership Development (SOLD): an advanced skills training for seasoned organizers and campaign leads who are responsible for building a base and/or leading campaigns.
Training for Trainers (T4T): a training to develop more facilitators/trainers who come from our network and will use their skills back home with their organizations, their local ecosystems and, in some cases, as part of the expanded bench of trainers/facilitators for the national MassLib training program.
Through these layered leadership development tiers we are expanding the field of Black and BIPOC organizing and growing a network of strong Black community leaders across the country who are transforming their communities. New and emerging organizers who come through our program gradually matriculate up to advance training and to greater levels of leadership and responsibility in their organizations and communities back home.
MLN also provides technical assistance and other forms of direct support on a case by case basis to our local partner organizations. These requests range from support for basebuilding, campaigns, mediation, conflict resolution and other organizational development areas.
