2013 Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program
Session 14: Reflections and Lessons from Volunteer Placements

Required Readings

1. School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), “Organizing Process Diagram”. (1 page PDF: Organizing_Process_Diagram_SOUL). (bio).
2. School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), “Strategy Chart”. (2 page PDF: Strategy_Chart_SOUL). (bio).
3. People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), “Where to From Here?” chapter 4 of Towards Land, Work and Power: Charting a Path of Resistance to U.S. Led Imperialism. (14 page PDF: POWER_Where_To_From_Here). (bio).

Recommended Readings

1. Larry Salomon, “No Evictions: We Won’t Move!  The Struggle to Save the I-Hotel”  from Roots of Justice: Stories of Organizing in Communities of Color. (6 page PDF*: No_Evictions_Salomon). (bio).
2. Larry Salomon, “You are Now on Indian Land: Native Americans Occupy Alcatrazl”  from Roots of Justice: Stories of Organizing in Communities of Color. (7 page PDF: You_Are_Now_On_Indian_Land_Salomon). (bio).

Readings are provided free for use by participants studying in the Anne Braden Training Program for Anti-Racist Organizers, a noncommercial, nonprofit educational program. We encourage everyone to buy the works from which excerpts have been taken – please support these authors and publishers.

Author Biographies

People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) was founded by a group of welfare recipients in 1997 so that low-income people could have a space to impact the policies that affect their lives. Since that time, POWER has helped thousands of low-income people find their own voice and find ways to end poverty. Now approaching its 12th year, POWER continues to build the power of low-income people in San Francisco to improve the conditions in their communities and in their workplaces. The backbone of POWER’s work are our two organizing projects: the Bayview Organizing Project, which unites low-income residents of San Francisco’s last-remaining African American neighborhood in a fight for affordable housing, living wage employment and environmental justice in the face of corporate developers’ attempts to gentrify the community; and the Women Workers’ Project which organizes domestic workers who are mostly immigrant and women of color to win justice in an industry that thrives on our exploitation.

Larry R. Salomon teaches in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.  The stories in the collection Roots of Justice are based on his “Movement History” column, which appeared in Third Force magazine from 1994 through 1997.

School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) is a school to build a movement.  SOUL is working to lay the groundwork for a powerful liberation movement by supporting the development of a new generation of young organizers – especially young women, young people of color, queer youth and working-class young people.  They believe that – in order for young organizers to build an effective movement for fundamental social change – they need support to develop the nuts-and-bolts organizing skills they need to mobilize their communities and to deepen their political analysis and their visions for fundamental social change. SOUL is a training center designed to support the growing youth sector of the social justice movement. They run political education and organizing skills training programs, designed specifically to meet the particular needs of our generation of emerging movement leaders.

* Note: number of pages refers to pages within the PDF file to provide a sense of the download size, not the number of pages of readings included. Links to external web sites open in a new page.

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About the Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training
Program for white social justice activists