National Training
Calls
Find everything you need for the National Training Calls here, including recordings if you missed the live call! Sign up for ALL the National Training Calls so that you can get the links to join each one!
Agendas and Resources
12/4/24: Trump, MAGA, and 77 Million Votes: How did we get here??
Description:
Millions of us woke up on November 6 horrified, devastated– and stunned. Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college handily, running a campaign with his now-typical playbook of blatant racism, bullying, and outright lies. In the weeks before his election, now is the time to slow down and look deeply at the long historical arc of how MAGA rose to power. We must understand why he won in order to effectively fight back in the four years ahead, and build enough power to beat him and other MAGA candidates along the way.
In this Training Call, we’ll be joined by brilliant movement strategists and organizers, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson and Linda Burnham. We’ll get into the history of the rise of the far right, strategic racism, and how worsening economic conditions and the Democratic party contributed towards the rise of MAGA.
Speakers:
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is an Affrilachian (Black Appalachian) woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. She is the first Black woman to serve as Co-Executive Director of Highlander Research & Education Center. As a member of leadership teams in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Ash-Lee has contributed to the Vision for Black Lives and BREATHE Act. She has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of National Bailout Collective. She is a long-time activist who has worked in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, LGBTQIA+, environmental justice, etc.
Linda Burnham has been an activist, writer, and strategist, focused on women’s rights and racial justice, since the 1960s. She is co-editor and contributor to the 2022 book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections. Burnham served as National Research Director and Senior Advisor at the National Domestic Workers Alliance for nearly a decade. Burnham co-founded the Women of Color Resource Center and served as the organization’s Executive Director for 18 years. In the 1970s, she was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance. Burnham’s writing and organizing are part of a lifelong exploration of the dynamic intersections of race, class and gender.
Additional Resources (If speakers mention any additional readings or resources, we will link them below):
Watch the SURJ Post-Election Video that we showed at Mass Meetings, if you haven’t yet: surj.org/meeting
“The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost” from Elad Nehorai’s Substack
12/18/24: What We're Facing - and How We Fight Back: Building resistance under a MAGA administration
Description:
Right now and in the years ahead, we need to dig deep, stay grounded, and soberly face the hard realities of what is to come: mass repression, deportations, and rolling back of civil liberties and public infrastructure. Then, from this grounding, we can imagine and strategize ways to fight back.
Join SURJ and our partners who have been leading social change work on the frontlines for years. First, we’ll hear their analysis on the conditions we’ll be facing in the years ahead. Then, we’ll hear lessons from movements of regular people who have carried on sustained resistance under repressive conditions in the US and across the globe.
In the training portion of this call, we’ll dig deep with SURJ organizers on a critical part of this work: how to talk to other white people about race. Join us for this education and training webinar.
Speaker Info:
Marcela Hernandez, she/her, is the Organizing and Membership Director at Detention Watch Network (DWN). DWN is a national network of more than 100 organizations building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States. Marcela is an immigrant from Mexico with 15 years of organizing experience previously having worked at youth, worker’s rights and legal non-profits. She was part of the Not1More movement and immigrant youth movement that moved President Obama to stop some deportations via the DACA program. On her free time she enjoys learning about herbalism and hiking with her two dogs.
Rukia Lumumba is a transformative justice strategist, the founding director of the People’s Advocacy Institute, co-director of the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement of Black Lives, and former campaign manager of the Committee to Elect Chokwe Antar Lumumba for Mayor of Jackson, MS. Rukia has spent over 15 years defending the human rights of those inside prison cells, working with community and advocates to alter the landscape of injustice in American courts, prisons, and cities.
Tica Moreno is a Brazilian feminist and organizer. She works with the World March of Women- a feminist, anticapitalist, and anti-racist movement organized in dozens of countries around the world. She’s also on the team at Capire, a media tool created in 2021 to echo the voices of women in movement through interviews, analyses, experiences, and cultural expressions by women from all corners of the world who resist and promote change.
Additional Resources (If speakers mention any additional readings or resources, we will link them below):
1/8/25: The January 6th Mandate: White people organizing other white people for justice
Description:
On January 6th, 2021, the MAGA movement pulled off a white nationalist insurrection at the US Capitol. Four years later, we are reaping what was sown that day– and for decades before it. In the midst of the chaos to come, one thing is clear: we must take seriously the need to organize white people away from the white nationalist agenda of the MAGA movement, and into movements working for justice. This is not everyone’s work, but one of the best contributions white people who care about justice can be making under a Trump administration.
Over 60 years ago, the Black liberation movement issued a call to white people: go back to your own communities and organize them for justice. Founded 15 years ago, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) is an answer to that call. SURJ is the largest organization in the US that explicitly organizes white people for justice. Alongside our POC-led partner organizations, we have contributed to winning campaigns across the country, and take seriously the need for white people to organize our own.
Join SURJ to explore how we organize white people into multiracial coalitions, how the far right uses whiteness as a weapon of authoritarianism, and lessons from organizing white working class people in the South.
In the training portion of this call, SURJ organizers will lead us in how to plan a public action in your community– a skill we will need in the next few months.
Speaker Info:
Erin Heaney - SURJ Executive Director
Carla Wallace - SURJ Co-founder
Paige Ingram - Movement for Black Lives + Rising Majority
Maria Stephan - Chief Organizing at Horizons Project, author of Why Civil Resistance Works
Additional Resources (If speakers mention any additional readings or resources, we will link them below):
Book: Why Civil Resistance Works - Maria Stephan & Erica Chenoweth
Article: How we can meet the challenges of authoritarianism - Maria Stephan
1/22/25: What Power do we have under Trump? Opportunities to block MAGA and build people power this year
Description:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Frederick Douglass
Many of us think about power as a bad thing– wielding power over others or something inherently oppressive. In order to get Trump out of office and block his terrifying agenda and actually work towards the things people need: we need more power. The word “power” gets thrown a lot in politics and organizing, but what does it actually mean? And how do regular people build it?
History and present-day movements for justice are full of examples of regular people coming together to become greater than the sum of their parts, and wielding that power to win campaigns and deliver real changes for working people.
Join SURJ to sharpen our understanding of power and what is possible under an authoritarian administration. The reality is that right now, the far right wields more power than social movements. However, there are and will be openings to build our power even in the midst of a Trump presidency.
Speaker Info:
Coming soon!
Additional Resources (If speakers mention any additional readings or resources, we will link them below):
2/5/25: Program Closing: Where do we go from here?
Description:
Coming soon!
Speaker Info:
Coming soon!