Using a customized curriculum, we bring our successful training program to unions across the country looking to more effectively organize and mobilize support.
Wellstone Action's Labor Program Wellstone Action believes that 2006-2010 will be critical building years for the progressive movement. Permanent, skilled and sophisticated organizing and infrastructure are needed at the local level in key states to successfully win back political power and reassert a progressive workers agenda at both the national and state levels. We believe this power will be built in part by aggressively ramping up labor organizing, which will require an extensive effort to train thousands of union members across the country.
Wellstone Action's Labor Program (WALP) aims to partner with progressive labor organizations committed to building this infrastructure, leadership and capacity within local unions and with community partners. We take an integrated approach to organizing and advocacy. Union grassroots organizing, advocacy, and electoral work need to be better integrated so that electoral infrastructure and mobilizing capacity do not come and go with each electoral cycle, and that community and political relationships built during election cycles provide foundations for more effective union organizing and advocacy work outside the electoral arena.
Effectively integrating these components within individual unions requires a customized curriculum that can meet the strategic goals of the partner union. Wellstone Action works directly with unions to tailor each training to specific needs. We combine this customized curriculum with a general approach to organizing, based on Paul Wellstone's model of effective grassroots organizing. This model combines long-term grassroots organizing with effective political strategy, complemented with a detailed discussion of how power is built, exercised and contested, and the critical importance of a clear and relevant message as a basic organizing principle. Wellstone Action's labor trainings take three broad directions depending on the individual union:
1. Grassroots Organizing and Advocacy School.
This school focuses on basic organizing and advocacy skills as part of building grassroots support for specific issue agendas. Specific skills include: building relationships and 1:1 conversations, community organizing and coalition building, volunteer recruitment, base building, message delivery to various audiences (labor and non-labor), strategic planning, and grassroots advocacy and lobbying (around specific issue agendas).
2. Grassroots Campaign School.
There are two versions of the Grassroots Campaign School - the basic Grassroots Campaign School, for participants less experienced with electoral work, and the Grassroots Campaign Leadership School for more experienced campaign workers designed to develop campaign management skills. Skills addressed in the Campaign School include: grassroots field organizing and voter contact (ID, Persuasion, GOTV), electoral canvassing (door-to-door and phone), running phone banks, volunteer recruitment and working with (and managing) volunteers.
3. Train the Trainer School.
This school focuses on building capacity around basic electoral and grassroots organizing skills through training staff and key union activists, stewards and officers how to train others. Train the Trainer Schools are customized to meet to the specific needs of the union and experience of the trainers.
Our labor training work has a proven record of success. Since 2004, we have held 20 labor trainings across the country and trained 1,150 union members in effective organizing skills.