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In-Person Anne Braden Program

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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.

Program Description

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. We ask that applicants already be actively engaged in grassroots organizing work and commit to staying in and reflecting on that work for the course of the program.

Participants will:

  • 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
  • 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

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.

FAQ's

The Anne Braden Program is designed for activists and organizers with white privilege who are already involved in political work and are looking for ways to bring a deeper racial justice analysis and practice to what they do. Poor and working-class folks, rural organizers, women, LGBTQ+ folks, Jewish people, and members of grassroots social justice organizations are highly encouraged to apply.

The in-person Anne Braden Program usually includes 3 4-day training weekends over the course of 4 months, in addition to small group meetings, homework, research, grassroots fundraising and meetings with a mentor, facilitator and leadership team member. Sign up for our mailing list for details on the next in-person Anne Braden Program! (link to mailing list sign-up).

Participants should be prepared for an average of 5 hours of work per week for the course of the program in addition to the 3 4-day training weekends. This will include: homework, research, grassroots fundraising and meetings with a mentor, facilitator and leadership team member. The work starts when participants are accepted into the program.

The cost of the program/participant is $5000 but our sliding scale goes from $0-$7000. Our sliding scale goes down to $0 because we are committed to making this program accessible to people regardless of ability to pay, and we are committed to building poor and working class leadership in our movements. We ask that those with more access to resources, whether that be from family wealth, income or organizational support/professional development funds pay as high on the scale as you are able to in order to support poor and working class leaders’ ability to participate in this program. These solidarity rates also help us cover childcare and missed wage stipends for those who need it. Please use our sliding scales (one for people paying individually and one for those with organizational support) to determine your program fees. 

Payment is due in 4 installments over the course of the program with 25% due when accepting your spot. 

Childcare, Travel, Lodging and Lost Wages Support

We will offer full and partial childcare stipends for poor and working class people who will need to pay for extra childcare in order to participate in the program.

We will offer full and partial travel stipends for some participants in the program whose organizations will not cover their travel costs. We will prioritize these for poor and working class participants, but may be able to offer partial stipends to middle class participants who wouldn't otherwise be able to come.

We will offer community housing or lodging stipends for some participants in the program whose organizations will not cover this. We will prioritize these for poor and working class participants, but may be able to offer for other participants.

We may be able to offer missed wage stipends for people who will not be able to participate in the program without them.

If you have questions, contact elisabeth@collectiveliberation.org.

All online workshops will have closed captioning, and we are committed to doing the best we can to meet other access needs. If accepted into the program, you will be given the opportunity to share more information about your access needs. If you have questions about access, email rahula@collectiveliberation.org.

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 class consciousness and a 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.

We at Catalyst Project believe that white supremacy is a major barrier to ending all systems of oppression, including capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, and others. We believe that white people have a stake and a role in fighting for racial justice, and that not only our humanity but also our collective liberation depends on ending white supremacy. We see working with other white people as a strategic way to support building multiracial movements for justice. In order to do this we believe it is important to have curriculum designed for white people to explore the historical development of whiteness and the processes by which we internalize white superiority. We believe that there is specific curriculum that helps white activists develop anti-racist consciousness and skills to develop proactive anti-racist organizing strategies. We believe that anti-racist political education can and should happen in different types of ways--- within multiracial spaces, people-of-color-specific spaces, and white-specific spaces, with an understanding that which form it takes should be context-specific.

Since the end of the Challenging White Supremacy (CWS) workshops (a 15-week anti-racism training institute that the Catalyst Project grew out of in 2000), there has been an acute need and a consistent request for a training space such as this. We believe political education should be directly tied to on-the-ground organizing, and shaped by the social justice community of which we are a part, so we developed a community input process. This included meetings with Sharon Martinas, who ran the CWS workshops and other movement elders, getting feedback and ideas from all of our advisors, having ongoing meetings with racial and economic justice organizations and organizers, and holding a community meeting to get feedback and ideas on how this program can most effectively support multi-racial movement building and struggles for social justice. Our intention is that this program will directly support racial and economic justice organizing work that is already happening in the Bay Area and nationally.

TESTIMONIALS

I entered the Anne Braden Program a strong organizer and by the time I completed the program, I was also a revolutionary, a sharper strategist, and fully committed to doing my part to build the multi-racial class solidarity movement we need to win. I have embraced my leadership in this political moment as a working-class white woman from Appalachia who is organizing a movement so that my people have a path to multiracial class solidarity instead of falling into the divide-and-conquer racist rhetoric of the Right. There are people, places, and experiences that change the course of our lives and the Anne Braden Program was one of those transformational experiences for me.
—Beth Howard, writer, SURJ’s Appalachian People’s Union Director, and Rednecks for Black Lives Founder
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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