Fundraising Drive to Build Anne Braden Program

Dear Friends,

We are reaching out to you today with a special request: to help us bring forth a hopeful new vision, the Anne Braden Antiracism Training Program! We have deeply appreciated your generous support of Catalyst Project in the past, and our work is strengthened and sustained by your commitment to it.

Starting this February and running through June, the Anne Braden Antiracism Training Program will be a political education and leadership development program designed to support the political development, skills, and analysis of white activists in becoming accountable, principled anti-racist organizers building multiracial movements for liberation. Since the end of the Challenging White Supremacy workshops (a 15-week antiracism training institute that Catalyst grew out of in 2000, there has been an acute need and a consistent request for a training space such as this, and we are humbly committed to bringing it into being in order to support local and national racial and social justice organizing and movement building.

The Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program will include…

Learning about systems of oppression and privilege in a collective liberation framework
Building our understanding of white supremacy along with patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism, imperialism, anti-semitism, the gender binary system and the state
Learning histories of resistance and liberation, and about movements today
Anti-racist organizing skills for working within majority white organizations/settings and for working within multiracial organizations/settings
Grassroots fundraising skills
Volunteer placements in racial and economic justice organizations
Mentorship and antiracist leadership development

Friends, we need your support in order to launch this exciting new project! We just brought on three new interns and our second paid staff person to help get the Anne Braden program up and running. This is a critical time to show your support— your donation of $250 covers a scholarship for one participant in the program, and any amount you can donate helps us cover materials, room rental, photocopies, honorariums for guest speakers, and more for this 17-week training.

As you may know, Catalyst Project operates on a shoestring budget (under $25,000 last year) with minimal overhead and maximum use of volunteer labor, so your donations go right to the work. We especially encourage you to become a monthly sustainer of Catalyst— you can sign up using the enclosed form, or on our website. Monthly sustainers boost our financial stability, since the overwhelming majority of our budget comes from grassroots donors like you.

We are excited about the possibilities of this new area of work, and hope you are too. Along with developing the Anne Braden Program, we continue to build our Anti-War Program and sustain our New Orleans Solidarity Program, as well as do local and national political education, organizing, and leadership development, all of which you will hear about in our annual report coming out spring of 2008. We hope we can count on you to support the Anne Braden Antiracism Training Program with a donation today!

With much respect and gratitude,

Amie Fishman, Clare Bayard, Ingrid Chapman, Molly McClure and Chris Crass