for Grassroots and Youth Empowerment

Staff Education and Training

These workshops strenghten your organization or campaign by deepening individual and collective understanding of issues. They also build self-esteem and leadership identity.

I use a ''popular education” approach to staff development and training. These activities are dialogical and participatory, designed to engage each person to expand her or his consciousness and see oneself and the work of the organization in its broader context.

Problem-posing sharpens awareness of  the organization's focus- and enables members to understand root contradictions, see connections with other issues, and make more substantive contributions to the work.

Participants also have their social biographies recognized and appreciated, and their personal narratives put into the context of the organization's focus. This deepens staff unity as well as expands one's sense of individual value to the project.  

Getting the Big Picture: Putting Our Work in Perspective

Understanding the historical context of your issue or mission is

key to offering comprehensive services or doing effective organizing. What are the
economic, social, historical, political, and spiritual causes and effects of the problems we face and
strategies we develop?

Connecting the personal to the political raises the questions, Who am I

in this community? Do we make a difference- or hope we make a difference-

and how do we know the diference?  This introductory activity designed

for service and advocacy organizations helps staff and members

locate themselves and their work in the larger spectrum of social change.

Keeping it Real : Strengthening Organizational Consciousness, Strategy, and Integrity

This activity sharpens members/staff consciousness of the organizational mission and its political and historical context. It builds on the existing collective analysis and skill of the members/staff, and employs problem-posing to provide a process to re-evaluate, reconsider, and reconnect. The 'social biography' segment allows members to reestablish themselves with one another as persons and allies, as well as co-workers.

Keeping It Real  is an advanced workshop of conjunctural analysis  for critical consideration of the real impact of the 'work-' as a factor of change.

Education as a Practice of Social Change

This is an introduction to a Freire-based and liberation-centered theory and method. Participants “learn the theory by doing the method.”

The introductory workshop surveys basic theories, practices and elements. Advanced sessions include teacher/facilitator training, work with practitioners, and extensive theoretical inquiry and study.