Event – Engagement Organizing – Harnessing People Power: A Training Workshop for Environmental NGOs

This day-long workshop will take place on Friday February 6, 2015, 215 Spadina Ave. Suite 120, Toronto, Ontario. There is a growing trend towards people-centred campaigns, enhanced by technology and data. NGOs that wish to be a part of this trend need to retool around the best practices of organizing and engagement. Advancing our various issues has now become about how we best support citizen mobilization and leadership.’Engagement Organizing’ is an approach that strives to marry organizing, technology, and a culture of developing leadership in others. It represents a shift away from expert-driven, direct mail groups toward a model that focuses on nimble, data-driven, learning organizations that place relationship building and mobilization of supporters at the heart of their work. The result can build resilient, effective organizations that continue to advance their work in an ever-more competitive world. The goal of the workshop will be to share the theory and practice of developing successful engagement organizations. Session leaders will describe real world stories and techniques of others doing this kind of work, and also tap into lessons from participants in the room.

The workshop will be co-led by Matt Price and Graham Saul. Matt Price has worked with a wide variety of environmental organizations in Canada and the U.S. over the past 15 years, from the grassroots to the giants. He now assists NGOs in implementing engagement organizing. Graham Saul has worked on global justice and environmental issues for 20 years and is Executive Director of Ecology Ottawa, a group that has embraced this model and that therefore has real world experience to share – successes and failures both.

This workshop is funded, in part, by The Gosling Foundation which supports land protection, environmental education with special focus on nature appreciation and awareness.

Registration is $75 per person and includes a full day of instruction, lunch, refreshments and handouts.

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