Connecting content with lived experience
My approach
One-off trainings rarely have participants leaving with a concept or skill that they can immediately put into use. But far too many trainings are designed with that expectation. Rather than taking with them a functional understanding of the topic, participants tend to latch on to and reinforce their understanding of the ideas they are already familiar with. I’ve found this to be true whether participants are advocacy and organizing professionals or grassroots leaders. Without a program of follow up training and coaching, such an approach at best gives participants a break from their routine and at worst wastes participants’ time.
I have found that a better approach is to create training experiences that spark curiosity and interest in a concept or skill with the aim of motivating participants to seek out coaching and practice after the fact. That’s my goal when I design one-off trainings and workshops. I use popular education, games, and Liberating Structures to open trainings and workshops up to participants’ natural drives to theorize, create meaning, bond with their colleagues, and play. Trainings and workshops are organized around a core concept or skill but a functional understanding of the topic is not the goal.
I strive to facilitate participants making a connection between the topic and their lived experiences, whether in their personal or organizing life. If I can spark curiosity around how the concept or skill can help them further their movement goals, I count the session a success.
Picture This! Tactics Game
With the Picture This! Tactics Game, you and your team can quickly break from formulaic, predictable protest tactics and into creative, exciting new territory with a game that’s fun and accessible for activists and organizers of all backgrounds and experience levels.
A gamification of the Picture This! tool from Center for Story-Based Strategy, this game challenges players to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of social movement protest tactics in response to hypothetical social injustice scenarios. Through the game, players learn how to target strategic points of intervention with their protest tactics in order to disrupt systems of injustice.
Whether you are an organizer wanting a fun way to brainstorm new tactics or a group of friends plotting to take over the world, get the creativity flowing with the Picture This! Tactics Game.
This game is built off the Picture This! card deck from Center for Story-Based Strategy. To play the game at in-person meetings and workshops, order a card deck from CSS and then download the instructions below.
Activity: Learning messaging through telegraph
In this workshop activity, participants travel back in time to a remote company mining town where they must compete against the mining company to get their message out after a major mine explosion.
Why do it: To introduce messaging in a way that draws upon participants’ creativity and critical thinking. The constraints in the activity invite participants to choose their words with intention, which serves as an introduction to the concept of crafting messaging.
Battle of the Story: Immigration and Border Narratives
In this workshop, we break down the right’s immigration narrative strategy that deploys racism strategically to exploit differences and defeat solidarity. We introduce a narrative framework that disarms their strategic racism while also animating our base and winning over the middle.
Battle of the Story: Public Safety
In this two-part interactive remote workshop, participants analyze the stories that are competing for the hearts and minds of the working class about what makes our communities safe. In part one, we break down the liberal and right-wing stories vying for domination. And in part two, we begin to build our own story that connects with the working class and builds support for our demands to defund police and transform public safety.
View a completed interactive slidedeck of part 1 of the training below.
