Community Organizing Training

Training the next generation of organizers

OAP offers essential community organizing training to oranizers and leaders working in community organizations and groups building leadership, relationships, power, and vision for their justice campaigns. OAP’s training includes racial justice analysis, practical skill building and support for all organizers working for racial, cultural, social and economic justice in Minnesota. OAP’s core training program for entry and mid-level organizing is the apprenticeship class where emerging organizers are offered six months of intensive training focused on community organizing and strategic racial justice leadership. In 2011/2012, we are offering training opportunities for both emerging organizers, mid-level organizers and leaders. To learn more about the program, visit the Apprenticeship Program page.

Accomplishments

• OAP has trained over 200 organizing apprentices - the majority from communities of color - and connected them with over 70 mentors working in community organizations and groups across the state.
• OAP alumni are leaders in some of the most important organizing efforts in Minnesota and nationally, and OAP's training for organizers has become a national model.
• OAP organizers are creating and leading new organizations in new immigrant communities, building community wealth in neighborhood or culturally focused Community Development Centers, organizing small farmers for equity in rural Minnesota, organizing youth in neighborhoods and cultural communities and building new youth organizing initiatives, organizing faith communities in urban and suburban Minnesota, creating and running national training programs, organizing politically and fighting for fair elections, organizing within groups that work with American Indians, organizing to close coal plants that are polluting inner city neighborhoods, organizing for new housing, fair housing and renter rights, organizing for public safety and against racial profiling, for jobs, affordable quality child care, affordable health care, for stronger, more equitable public schools, and more.
• The majority of OAP alumni have gone on to play significant leadership roles in organizing.
• OAP apprentices and graduates have come from and worked in organizing projects all over Minnesota, including the Twin Cities metro area, the Fargo/Moorhead area, Duluth and the Iron Range, on the White Earth Indian Reservation, in south central and western Minnesota rural communities, and more.
• OAP’s training work has created multiracial multicultural learning and sharing spaces and connected farm workers and farmers, immigrant community organizers and organizers from Native communities, and urban organizers and rural and reservation organizers.