 Welcome everybody. My name is Felix Nate with the campaigns team at the Community Foundation and we're very excited to talk about the Organizer Lab beta version with you. So as you may have read in the emails, the Organizer Lab is an online course that the campaign team is hoping to why is it important for that? So the reason why we're here is basically just talk about the Organizer Lab and also to provide avenues for people to ask questions, provide more information about the project. Alex is going to give us a presentation on the much more details about it and then we'll come in later on and give the floor to people to ask questions. Sorry, I'm trying to add people. So yeah, we'll give the floor at the end of the presentation to people to ask for people to ask questions, time with suggestions or thoughts that you have about the project so far. So Alex over to you. Yeah, thanks. Thank you everyone for coming. Just a reminder, we're going to be recording this so that if someone missed the session, they can watch part of it. We will add it out the little bits of the beginning and the end. We'll not have the Q&A but if you don't want to get caught in the recording by chance with the video, Zoom picks up various bits of stuff and so just make sure you keep your video off if you don't want to get caught in that space. We will not post the Q&A part but we will use that to inform other stuff. Hi, so we are running and I'm Alex Stinson. I'm a lead program strategist for the lower community of foundation. I am focused on campaign organizing for the last few years and we've been doing mentoring and coaching and experimental campaign organizing through campaigns like one-on-one ref and wiki for human rights and in the process of doing this and then responding to movement strategy recommendations we've realized there's a big gap in skills that we are hoping to fill with the organizer lab this year. And we're going to be focusing the gap experiment on climate change and sustainability and I'll explain why a little bit later in the session. So first we're responding to two movement strategy recommendations and designing this course. First invest in skills and leadership development and second identify topics for impact. Why are we going about the approach of training organizers to run campaigns? Because from a topics for impact perspective, campaigns are really good at building my capacity. We've noticed that campaign activities first help local organizers run their first events, get more involved in the international community, connect with topics that they haven't experimented with before. These events are also good at identifying content gaps and getting people active and actually filling them. And these campaign activities are really good for reactivating editors who've maybe encountered the movement in other contexts but haven't been built a habit of contributing. And so we've noticed that campaigns are really good for this but we have this like larger set of problems which is we don't have as many organizers knowing how to design these campaigns. So we're going to be running a course from about October 30th to December 15th. We're still finalizing the dates in part because we want to hear from applicants. One of the best time to do live sessions will be. And this course is going to have 60 minutes in five live sessions and it's going to be content presented in English but we will be ready to support people who need live translation for events and we're also writing the course content and as international English as possible to help folks be able to use things like machine translation to double and triple check what they're learning and comprehending in the language. The reason for this is an experimental course. This is the first time we've run a training for campaign organizers and so we're going to be adapting it and changing it as we go and it's easier to work in one language and logistically for this. In future iterations of course we will likely have other languages and we really want one major thing to be the kind of what we want the participants of course to come away with one major thing that is the ability to lead campaigns targeted at climate and sustainability and to provide and be able to create broader calls to action focused on topics related to focused on topics related to other topics for impact or knowledge gaps on the Wikipedia platforms. We've, sorry, they're getting a little bit of feedback from Christopher trying to mute. So excellent. So we've noticed the world is noticing climate change and the climate crisis and sustainability. This is a moment that the recmedia movement and other movements need to be responding to this larger crisis and we've noticed that the recmedia movement kind of organizing capacity to work on that topic is not as mature as it is and other topic areas such as the gender gap, glam and education and so partly we're focusing on this topic because now is the moment for it but partially we're focusing on this topic because we've learned by working in the education space and in the glam space and observing the gender gap movement that's really important for organizers to cooperate on a shared topic or theme of focus and so we're theming the course to make it easier to learn but we expect everyone to walk out of the course with skills to organize and other topics. We're hoping to include organizers at all level of their organizing experience but in particular we're addressing this gap in movement capacity where local event organizers have plenty of opportunities to run local editathons and events and there's many kind of opportunities to get mentored, approached or trained to do that and very experienced organizers run global activities and campaigns on a very experienced regular basis but if you're partway through your organizing career and you're like I wonder how they run these international campaigns there's no space for that. It's often kind of ad hoc people volunteer but then get thrown in to international campaign organizing without a lot of support and so we want to provide alongside the informal learning space, a formal learning space and so that's who we'd like to have in the course and we'd like to have your help finding folks to fill it. I notice a lot of people in the room who are international organizers have done international work before and we really need to find these medium experience organizers who are kind of the future of campaigns they're the future of other kinds of activities and kind of provide additional space for them. If you're asking yourself do I qualify or does someone I know qualify for the course these are the four basic requirements that we're going to have for the course. First have you run away committee activity before this any activity could be an editathon it could be education program do you want to learn more about the climate change and sustainability organizing space we were we're going to kind of provide an overview of what we've learned about the space would you like to be part of running international campaigns or regional campaigns or would you like to develop campaigns yourself and can you participate with the course content in English the course content in English like I said it's we're writing the course content in English but live sessions can be translated so we're mostly wondering can you engage with written documentation in English and and learn and participate assignments can be turned in whatever language you want to turn them in that's appropriate for your organizing context and we will provide live translation for the folks who who need it most in the in the course when we do live sessions we've had about 75 people apply and so some of you might be asking like do I still have a chance to get in and yes yes you do instead of just selecting folks with the most experience in the community movement we're actually trying to create a really diverse cohort we want a mix of different levels of experience within the movement people who are repetitively new have some medium experience and are more experienced we want the participants to be representative of the whole kind of landscape of organizing in the community movement different regions different languages in which they organize different geographies and we want the course to be gender balanced to do this we're going to be kind of looking at who's in the cohort and and trying to find the right balance within like who's available who's applied and getting this diversity so please apply the more diverse the pool of applicants the easier it is for us to really make a cohort that's representing the movement as this course happens we're going to use this because it's a pilot year it's a beta year we're going to use this to develop a better more well-rounded training in the future and so really this is a test and if you don't get it in this first round we're going to try to create more training opportunities in the future using this as a learning experience just like other programs like the Reading Wikipedia in the classroom program so I'm going to hand it over to Felix who's going to talk a little bit about like what happens after you finish the course what we hope will happen and then we'll open the room up for questions right thank you very much Alex so very insightful things you said Alex so what happens when you finish this course so when you successfully complete the course we're hoping that so applicants will be given the chance to put in like a proposal at the end of the program and so successful applicants would receive some funding through a grant pool that's affiliated to the program and then they can receive funding to run their project during the eth day campaign. Participants will also be receiving certificates of recognition for the AWEC and participation and efforts in the program and so we definitely invite and encourage folks who have been trying or thinking of organizing within the climate space to take this leap and and join this program and take advantage of that. We will also be connecting like folks who complete this course with international organizers from programs like the We Give For Human Rights and then the African Knowledge Initiative. I know the African folks here are wondering like what's the African Knowledge Initiative doing here so if you recollect that I think the second campaign the cycle of campaigns that would be happening on the AKI project is the eth day campaign the African eth day campaign and we are linking this with this program so folks who successfully complete this course will have a chance to participate in this program and also connect with the AKI project and so yeah lots of opportunities for folks who would be joining this program and like Alex said we do have seven five applications but we still want to widen that pool to create a diversity of the first cohort and so please feel free you still have a chance feel free to join us and we will be happy to have you with this cohort. Next slide so yeah apply join us and let's and let's and let's make this call a very um I'm good one some one that we can learn from and improve um future um iterations of this organize a lab um in years to come