Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training Program

Anne Braden - white hair, glasses, blue turtleneck speaks into a megaphone, orange shadow behind her. Text reads: Anne Braden Program - The Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training Program is a 4-month intensive program designed to support white activists in becoming accountable, principle anti-racist organizers in multiracial movements for justice.

***The next Anne Braden Program will be in fall 2023, sign up for our email list to receive the call for applications.***

Catalyst Project launched the Anne Braden Program in 2008 and since that time we’ve offered many rounds of this intensive organizer training program. More than 450 Braden alumni are engaged in anti-racist organizing and movement-building across North America.

This 4 month political education and leadership development program is designed to support the vision, strategy, and organizing skills of white activists in becoming accountable, principled anti-racist organizers building multiracial movements for justice.

Participants in the Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program:

  • Develop an understanding of white supremacy as it interconnects with patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, imperialism, settler-colonialism and the state, and how this should impact our vision and strategy
  • Learn about histories of resistance and liberation, and about social justice movements today
  • Learn about transformative organizing and develop anti-racist organizing skills
  • Receive mentorship and anti-racist leadership development
  • Gain skills for anti-racist strategy development,  leadership development, and alliance-building

This program is a good fit for people who are trying to build these skills:

  • Organizing white people into more effective racial justice work, and developing other social justice leaders
  • Building alliances with organizations led by people of color and building stronger relationships with organizers of color
  • Moving racial justice from an “issue area” into a centralized strategy and approach to all of your organization’s work
  • Strengthening anti-racist culture in your organization by aligning your internal policies and practices with your mission and external work
  • Centralizing anti-racism in your campaigns, communications, and membership work
  • Moving from a diversity-based approach to a racial justice approach, and having a more historically grounded & systemic analysis of current issues
  • Supporting and building the leadership of people of color in your staff, board and/or membership without being tokenizing
  • Organizing in complicated political contexts, connecting with what keeps you in this work for the long haul, and being able to take more risks for collective liberation
  • Developing racial justice politics and practice that are class-conscious, feminist, and anti-ableist.

Click here to read our comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions.

The READING LIST for the 2018 program is available here. (And if you are looking for the previous readings, these are from the 2015 program and these are from the 2013 program.)

Who is Catalyst Project?

Catalyst Project is a center for political education and movement building based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We organize in majority white sectors of social justice movements with the goal of deepening anti-racist commitment in white communities and helping to build multiracial movements for collective liberation. We do this by creating spaces for activists to collectively develop deeper political analysis, vision, strategy and organizing skills. Our work is based in the belief that all people have a right to dignity, housing, food, healthcare, meaningful work and healthy communities. We organize with the understanding that anti-racism can be a catalyst for challenging all forms of oppression and creating fundamental change.

Who was Anne Braden?

Anne Braden was a white anti-racist organizer and leader in racial justice movements rooted in communities of color in the South, including the Civil Rights Movement.  She brought a working-class based socialist analysis and community-organizing model to the struggle of rooting out racism in the hearts and minds of white people, and worked from the perspective that white people have a self-interest in dismantling white supremacy.  Anne Braden’s legacy as a white anti-racist organizer has deeply inspired Catalyst Project and many of our comrades. In naming our program after her, we hope to honor her memory and the movements of which she was a part.

Click here to listen to a radio show about Anne Braden and an interview with Catalyst Project staff member Molly McClure about the Anne Braden Program.

For more on Anne Braden check out the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research.