Organize, Mobilize: Leadership for Social Change

• Program: Leadership Institute
• Course Code: CESO0912
• How to Apply

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Course Description

Organize, Mobilize: Leadership for Social Change is a course designed to provide engaged students and young activists with the tools and theory needed to become successful community organizers. This course explores how grassroots movements can transform communities, cultural norms, and global systems. How are campaigns developed, initiated, and orchestrated? What factors determine a campaign's success or failure? How can one person turn a vision for change into reality?

Students will engage in various hands-on workshops and simulations, such as identifying an issue, developing a realistic timeline, publicizing your campaign, engaging the press, catering to your audience, and choosing effective tactics. Through case studies of various movements--anti-sweatshop, civil rights and Black Panther, prison reform, environmental justice, and movements around identity (lgbtq, race, immigration)--students will learn strategies and skills for building and initiating a localized campaign.

Students will enhance their leadership abilities and broaden their ideas of what is possible through readings, films, meetings with community activists and movement leaders, and participation in workshops, role-plays, and activities. Participants will leave this course with an "insider" understanding of the evolution and anatomy of a social movement campaign and develop an Action Plan to bring to their home communities. Students already engaged in a campaign, students who are or hope to become activists, and students invested in social change are encouraged to apply.