Central to the work of Together West Michigan Education Fund is teaching ordinary people the skills and practices of effective community organizing. The Industrial Areas Foundation has been teaching these skills to people from all walks of life and often in our nation’s poorest, most disenfranchised communities for over 60 years. We have developed a curriculum or a body of knowledge that we refer to as “universals of social change.” We teach these universals through “institutes on public life.” Each of these institutes teach an important aspect of politics or public life that, if embodied, are transformative of the practitioner. The institutes can be taught in one hour, in a half-day setting or more comprehensively over the course of several days.

TWM Education Fund has taught these institutes to non-profits, synagogues, churches, service agencies, and other community organizations. If you’d like us to provide this kind of training to your organization or institution, contact us today!

DESCRIPTIONS FOR SOME OF THE INSTITUTES OFFERED:

Who Decides? – Understanding Power

Understanding the power dynamics at work in your city, your state, your community, your congregation, your work place. That is a critically important skill for the savvy leader. Why is it that some public initiatives move forward without difficulty and others never get off the starting block? Is it just money?

Is it something else? How do we figure that out? This Institute will explore the differences between Relational and Unilateral Power, the theology of power, its definition and its application.

Why Do Politicians Kiss Babies? – Public vs. Private Relationships

Why do politicians always kiss babies? Why does the modern workplace now encourage a kind of clubby, informal, first name only atmosphere? What’s problematic about the “church as family” paradigm? Understanding the distinction between the relationships we form in the public world and the private world is vitally important if we expect to be effective in either. This Institute will teach the important distinctions we need to understand between public and private relatedness.

Other Institutes We offer:

Effective Action on Root Causes

What is Broad-Based Organizing

Learning the Craft of Building and Sustaining Public Relationships