In 2018, Creative Opportunities was selected by Community Organisers Ltd (COLtd), the national membership and training body for community organising, to be one of 10 youth groups across the UK to deliver Community Organisers. They supported us to devise a series of interactive workshops engaging with the key areas of organising, to equip young people with vital knowledge and tools that can be used to engage local communities in activism to bring about long-term social change.
We are now offering this training to youth groups who want to take action and make a difference to the world around them. Here’s what you can expect from our four interactive training sessions:
- Introduction to Community Organising: we’ll look at the foundations of community organising, begin to understand what it involves, and see what it looks like in the real world.
- Listening: we’ll learn about why active listening is important to building trust, uncovering deeper issues, and developing practical skills that can be used during a listening campaign.
- Power: we’ll develop an understanding of what power means and how it can be built within a community to overcome social injustice and create change.
- Action: we’ll explore how you can utilise what you’ve learned to create change through collective action. You’ll find out more about the different types of action, and learn how to develop strategies for change.
Each one of these sessions is designed to give budding community organisers all of the necessary skills, knowledge, and tools to engage communities in social action. We encourage participants to build relationships with each other, as well as with local action groups, and all are given the opportunity to learn how to develop campaigns about issues that are important to them.
The community organisers also receive UCAS points, a certificate and a reference for their participation in the programme.
To read more about the kind of groups we work with, check out Take Back the Power, a group of young people who were affected by youth violence, and were working on a participatory action research project at The Winch. We used the training to work with them on developing ideas for engaging their communities in social actions around youth violence.
If you are a young person or part of a group who would like some training in community organising, please let us know by filling out our contact form, or reaching out directly to [email protected].