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Anne Braden Program

Catalyst Project runs the Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training Program (ABP) for white social justice activists and organizers in order to strengthen racial justice vision, strategy, analysis, leadership, and organizing skills in white communities. ABP is an intensive program designed to support white activists and organizers in becoming accountable, principled anti-racist change-makers. This program is part political education, part leadership development and personal transformation work, and part organizing training.

Catalyst Project launched the Anne Braden Program in 2008. Since that time we’ve offered many rounds of this intensive organizer training program, both online as well as in-person in the San Francisco Bay Area, Philadelphia, Columbus and Orlando. More than 500 ABP alumni are engaged in anti-racist organizing and movement-building across North America.

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
  • Build grassroots fundraising skills and raise money for a BIPOC-led organization
  • 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
The READING LIST for the 2022 program is available here.

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 core 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.

Who is Catalyst Project?

Catalyst Project helps to build powerful multiracial movements that can win collective liberation. 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 and organizers 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.

Screenshot of five-by-five Zoom meeting with one participant in each box, smiling at their cameras from their homes.

Online Program

Connect with other anti-racist organizers from across the country in weekly online sessions.
Three rows of smiling people with light and medium-light skin tones pose together in the grass under a large tree on a sunny day.

In Person Program

Connect with other anti-racist organizers in-person over 3 4-day training weekends.

TESTIMONIALS

The Anne Braden Program is many things. It is deep and wide, it is heavy and it is joyous, but above all, it invites, it demands, that us white folks look critically at our place and power in the struggle to dismantle white supremacy. And it gives us the tools to do this. In our organizing, in our organizations, and within ourselves.
—Tyler Offerman, ABP 2022, Food Justice Organizer, Kentucky Equal Justice Center
My experience in the Anne Braden Program was transformational beyond measure and came to me at the perfect juncture in my life. The program afforded me the tools to be grounded more deeply in understanding my stake in collective liberation rather than seeing myself as a tag-on in the liberation of others. Since I've returned from the program, I have been able to take a stronger and clearer role in multi-racial movement building through my work and have also felt deeper joy and interconnectedness even with the difficult times we are in.
—Chris Furino, ABP 2019, Executive Co-Director, Central Florida Jobs with Justice
Graduating from the 2009 Anne Braden Program blew my mind, broke my heart & opened my eyes to my family’s stake in ending white supremacy & racial capitalism. This brought me permanently in movement and changed the course of my life. People need training like the Anne Braden Program to unlock their most strategic, joyful & principled place in movement. Let’s help get it to them.
—Chanelle Gallant, ABP 2009, Board of Directors, Showing Up for Racial Justice

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Catalyst Project organizes, trains, and mentors white activists and majority-white organizations to be bold, strategic and accountable anti-racist leaders as a part of multiracial movements for liberation. Support this work with a gift today.
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Catalyst Project: A Project of the Tides Center