Here is a collection of trainings offered

Community Engagement: In this highly interactive training, we’ll look at the different approaches groups often use to engage people in their  (geographic, identity, or issue-based) community – and reflect on common pitfalls. We’ll then provide frameworks and tools for how to support and truly engage the wisdom and expertise of your community with dignity, respect and love so that the outcome has the power to ignite collaborative and broadly supported work.

TO for activists and educators: An experiential workshop exploring the intersections of Theater of the Oppressed and Critical Pedagogy. Discover your creative self while learning dope new approaches to theater-based practice. We promise you will have fun, build community and deepen your understanding of social justice teaching and learning.

Theater of the Oppressed as Intervention: Theater of the Oppressed is an arsenal of theater techniques designed to create participatory actions or rehearsal for action. In this workshop we will design and rehearse either a Forum, Image or Invisible Theater piece that can be used to engage a public audience in the streets, or in a store, restaurant, conference etc.

Exploring the Intersection of Whiteness and Femaleness: (Facilitated through White Noise Collective) Drawing our inspiration from generations of anti-racist white women, we will explore how internalized sexism and white supremacy impact our work for racial justice. This is an intermediate-level workshop and we expect participants to have some working knowledge of systems of privilege and oppression. Through dialogue, interactive exercises, presentation, and Theater of the Oppressed activities, we will collectively investigate patterns common among people socialized as both white and female, and how they may show up or limit the potential of our anti-racist work.  We will also use critical media analysis and discussion to look at the historic and current mythologies of white women as virtuous victims that are used to justify violence against people of color and co-create strategies for countering them.

Popular Education For Educators and Organizers; Theory and Practice – Not just a Methodology! (Facilitated through Practicing Freedom Collective) This workshops covers guiding principles of popular education and co-creating processes for conscientization with people you work with, whether they be students, community members or co-workers. We will dialogue about dialogue, question asking, problem posing, capacity building, connecting the personal with the political, power dynamics, and review tools that support popular education like participatory theater and participatory action research. We will also problemitize mainstream concepts of popular education as a methodology.

Paulo Freire 101: What is popular education really? How can organizing be truly liberatory and build capacity for long term movement building that catalyzes community based knowledge for reflective and strategic action. How do we make education a practice of freedom? What kind of education and organizing is relevant in 2011 given the social, economic and ecological situation we find ourselves in? These are some of the questions we will be exploring through dialogue and participatory activities with a focus on principles and tools that organizers and educators can apply directly to what you are already doing. While we will review the broad scope of Freire’s work, we will also explore together Freirian practice (and praxis) by starting with the practices participants are currently working with (if any) and include Dialogue, Popular Education, Participatory Action Research and Ecopedagogy.

Ecopedagogy for educators and activists: In this highly interactive workshop we will explore key concepts including Post Issue Activism, Planetary Citizenship, Arts Education/ Arts Activism, Care, Ecological Justice, Praxis, Vision and Strategy, Sustainability and Resiliency. We will also provide tools for designing a relevant curriculum, problemetizing environmental education, and integrating ecological justice, love, care, respect, and creativity into every aspect of your classroom or training.

Curriculum design: Have a training, course, or process to facilitate and want support in making them more interactive, participatory, engaging? Starting from objectives, we can either write, or support you in writing lesson plan/s and a learning sequence to support those objectives.

Strategic Arts Action Creation: This workshop begins with collectively deciding the primary message and audience your through a story based strategy process. Then we’ll brainstorm the mediums that will work best for your context and audience – including a full range from theater to banners, to flash mobs to posters or some combination thereof. Next we’ll devise work groups and create prototypes or storyboards for feedback then get to work to make it happen!

Giant Puppets and Masks: Paper Mache at any scale – In this workshop we will design and collaboratively create big beautiful puppets using a mold made from the earth, clay or cardboard and learn paper mache recipes and techniques to create our puppets’ “skins”. We will then develop a storyboard for the characters and rehearse.