Training Programs

Building Community Power: 
How Organizers & Movement Lawyers Collaborate

March-April, 2026

Fordham Law School
Lincoln Center, New York

What can we do when inequitable systems and power serve some but harm many? 
We can collaborate!

This innovative training, consisting of 6 weekly 90-minute virtual sessions followed by 3 immersive in-person days, will explore how community organizers collaborate with movement lawyers to break historic patterns of discrimination and build equitable, grassroots power.

This program is for organizers, lawyers, and other community leaders eager to learn from each other.

Advancing justice through structural change calls for specific skills, knowledge and strategies around:

• Social Change Theory: Understand and apply frameworks for social change commonly used by community movements.
• Movement Lawyering: Explore how legal tools and strategies can address systemic inequities driving poverty and harming marginalized communities by advancing progressive grassroots campaigns.
• Community Organizing: Examine how organizers use base-building, direct action, legislative advocacy, and coalition work to build movements.
• Collaboration: Create and sustain organizer-lawyer partnerships and community relationships to overcome systemic barriers and other obstacles to change.
• Campaign Development: Learn about designing, implementing, and sustaining effective campaigns; power mapping to identify allies and adversaries; building capacity to make change; and leverage points for impactful campaigns.
• Storytelling: Communicate clear and powerful narratives to drive change and inspire action.

Virtual Sessions:

Each virtual session will be followed by an optional 30-minute “Office Hours” for participants to discuss projects they are working on or to do a deeper dive on topics of interest.

In-person Sessions:

Apply Here

The time is now! As we encounter erosion of democratic principles and blowback against hard-earned gains for oppressed groups, it has never been more important to fight racism, poverty, and other systemic inequities by supporting community empowerment and creating greater opportunity.

The program will be led by expert facilitators, well-versed in organizing and movement lawyering.

Facilitators