INSTITUTE

South Louisiana Organizing Institute Curriculum
Overview
This Organizing Institute is a comprehensive training program designed to develop organizers at every stage of their journey, from first-time volunteers learning to knock doors to senior leaders building organizations that shift power for generations. The curriculum is rooted in the belief that effective organizing is both a craft and a calling, and that the people closest to the problems are the ones best equipped to lead the solutions.
Purpose
This institute exists to close the training gap in organizing infrastructure, particularly in the South and in communities that have historically been underresourced and overlooked. Too often, organizers are thrown into the deep end without the foundational skills, strategic frameworks, or leadership development they need to sustain the work and win. This program is built to change that. Every course is grounded in real world application, designed to be immediately useful in the field, and informed by the lived experience of organizers doing the work in communities like yours. The goal is not just to train individuals but to strengthen the entire ecosystem of organizing by developing a pipeline of skilled, strategic, and values driven leaders.
Curriculum Structure
The program is organized into three sequential tracks and a set of specialized electives. The Foundations Track is built for beginner organizers and includes eight required courses covering the essential skills of voter contact, community engagement, volunteer recruitment, and an introduction to organizing and power. This is where participants build the muscle memory of the work. The Practitioner Track is designed for working organizers ready to deepen their strategic capacity. It includes six required courses focused on campaign planning, coalition management, data, communications, facilitation, and volunteer leadership development. The Leadership Track serves senior organizers and directors responsible for organizational strategy, sustainability, and movement building. It includes six required courses on transformational leadership, long term planning, fundraising, governance, team culture, and ecosystem strategy. In addition, Specialized Tracks offer elective and intensive courses in areas such as electoral organizing, issue based campaigns, disaster response and mutual aid, narrative strategy, faith based and cultural organizing, and Southern and rural organizing strategies. These courses are open to participants across all tracks and allow for tailored learning based on organizational need and regional context.
The Opportunity
This curriculum represents more than a training program. It is an investment in the long term infrastructure of power. By equipping organizers with the skills to plan strategically, build authentic relationships, use data effectively, and lead with accountability and care, this institute strengthens the capacity of every organization, coalition, and community its graduates touch. For funders, partners, and movement leaders, this is an opportunity to support the kind of deep, sustained capacity building that transforms not just individual campaigns but the broader landscape of civic engagement and community power across the South and beyond.
A Case for Knowledge Infrastructure: Driving Field, Funding, and BVM's Future
Angele DeLarge. 2025-2026
2
Foundations Track
Beginner Organizers
This track is designed for new organizers stepping into the work for the first time. Whether you came through a campaign, a community crisis, or a calling you couldn't ignore, these courses give you the core skills every organizer needs: how to talk to people, bring them together, and move them to action. You'll learn by doing, with real scenarios, live practice, and tools you can use immediately in your community.
Transforming Louisiana: Organizing and Power
Understand what transformational organizing actually is and why it works. This course introduces the distinction between organizing and mobilizing, foundational concepts of power analysis, and how ordinary people build collective power to create change. This is where the framework for everything else begins.
Voter Registration and Community Outreach
Master the basics of voter registration: eligibility requirements, form completion, common FAQs, and how to connect community members to broader resources. This course equips you to run registration drives and integrate voter access into your everyday organizing work.
Meaningful Phone Banking
Learn how to make effective voter contact calls from start to finish. This course covers script delivery, active listening, making a clear ask, accurate data entry, and follow-up protocols. Participants will engage in live practice sessions to build confidence and consistency on the phones.
Purposeful Canvassing
Get trained on the fundamentals of door-to-door and site-based outreach. This course walks through turf planning, approach techniques, safety protocols, and the difference between persuasion and informational conversations. You'll leave prepared to knock doors and represent your organization in the field.
Text Banking and Relational Organizing
Explore how to mobilize your personal and community networks through text-based outreach. This course covers peer-to-peer texting platforms, message discipline, compliance basics, and how relational organizing turns everyday relationships into organizing infrastructure.
Successful Community Meetings
Learn how to plan and run community meetings that actually move people to action. This course covers agenda design, facilitation techniques, managing participation, navigating conflict, and ensuring every meeting ends with clear next steps and accountability.
Base Building and Volunteer Recruitment
Learn how to bring people into your organization and keep them engaged. This course covers outreach and invitation strategies, onboarding new volunteers, retention practices, and how to move people up the ladder of engagement from participant to leader.
Meeting with Policy and Decision-Makers
Prepare to walk into rooms with elected officials, agency heads, and institutional leaders with clarity and confidence. This course covers power mapping, meeting preparation, making a direct ask, handling pushback, and effective follow-up to hold decision-makers accountable.
A Case for Knowledge Infrastructure: Driving Field, Funding, and BVM's Future
Angele DeLarge. 2025-2026
3
Practitioner Track
Working Organizers
This track is built for organizers who are already in the field and ready to sharpen their strategic edge. You know how to talk to people. Now it's time to learn how to plan campaigns, manage coalitions, use data, and develop the leaders around you. These courses deepen your capacity to run smarter, more sustainable organizing operations.
Campaign Strategy and Field Planning
Learn how to build and execute a campaign plan from the ground up. This course covers goal setting, target identification, timeline development, resource allocation, and escalation strategies that move campaigns from activity to impact.
Data and Metrics for Organizers
Move beyond gut instinct and learn to let data sharpen your strategy. This course covers contact tracking, outcome measurement, turf analysis, and how to use organizing metrics to evaluate what's working, adjust in real time, and tell a compelling story about your impactt.
Strategic Communications for Organizers
Learn how to control your narrative and get your message out. This course covers message development, narrative framing, message discipline under pressure, rapid response strategies, and earned media basics: everything you need to shape the public conversation around your campaigns.
Coalition Building and Partner Management
Explore how to build and sustain effective coalitions across organizations with different missions, cultures, and capacities. This course covers alignment strategies, defining roles and expectations, navigating conflict, and maintaining accountability across partnerships.
Facilitation and Political Education
Develop your skills as a trainer and political educator. This course covers curriculum design, popular education methods, managing group dynamics, and how to build political education programming that develops community members into informed, confident leaders.
Volunteer Management and Organizer Coaching
Build the systems that turn volunteers into volunteer leaders. This course covers leadership development pipelines, training design, coaching techniques, accountability structures, and how to create a culture where people grow into greater responsibility.
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A Case for Knowledge Infrastructure: Driving Field, Funding, and BVM's Future
Angele DeLarge. 2025-2026
4
Leadership Track
Senior Organizers and Directors
This track is for experienced organizers and organizational leaders responsible for strategy, staff, and sustainability. The work at this level isn't just about running campaigns. It's about building institutions that outlast any single election cycle. These courses prepare you to lead organizations, develop resources, and think at the scale of movements.
Transformational Leadership and Power Building
Examine what it means to lead organizations that build durable, long-term community power. This course explores transformational leadership frameworks, the relationship between personal development and organizational impact, and how leaders cultivate a base that drives change beyond individual campaigns.
Organizational Strategy and Long-Term Planning
Learn how to think and plan across multiple cycles. This course covers strategic planning processes, institutional growth strategies, sustainability models, and how to position your organization for long-term relevance and impact in a shifting political landscape.
Fundraising and Resource Development for Movement Leaders
Demystify fundraising and build your confidence as a resource developer. This course covers grassroots fundraising, donor cultivation, grant strategy, and narrative fundraising: the art of connecting your mission to the people and institutions that can resource it.
Governance and Organizational Management
Understand the operational foundations that keep organizations healthy and accountable. This course covers board development and governance, legal compliance, staff structure, financial oversight, and the systems that allow mission-driven organizations to function effectively.
Leading Teams and Organizational Culture
Develop the interpersonal and structural skills to lead high-functioning teams. This course covers feedback practices, accountability frameworks, conflict management, and how to build an organizational culture rooted in care, clarity, and shared purpose.
Movement Strategy and Ecosystem Building
Step into the big-picture work of movement architecture. This course covers coalition strategy at scale, statewide and regional alignment, ecosystem mapping, and how to position your organization within a broader network of aligned power to achieve transformational change.
A Case for Knowledge Infrastructure: Driving Field, Funding, and BVM's Future
Angele DeLarge. 2025-2026
5
Specialized Tracks (Electives / Intensives)
These courses go deeper into specific areas of organizing practice. They are open to participants across all tracks and can be taken based on interest, organizational need, or regional context. Each course is designed to provide both strategic frameworks and hands-on tools for the particular challenges of specialized organizing work.
Electoral Organizing and GOTV Infrastructure
Build the systems that turn voter engagement into a year-round operation. This course covers voter file management, turnout planning, Election Day operations, compliance requirements, and how to sustain electoral infrastructure between cycles so you're never starting from scratch.
Issue-Based Organizing
Learn how to build and run campaigns rooted in the issues that matter most to your community: housing, environmental justice, education, healthcare, and criminal legal reform. This course covers issue identification, research, base engagement, and escalation strategies specific to policy-based campaigns.
Disaster Response and Mutual Aid Organizing
Prepare your community to respond when systems fail. This course covers rapid response coordination, mutual aid frameworks, resource distribution, and long-term community resilience strategies, grounded in the understanding that the communities most impacted are best positioned to lead their own recovery.
Narrative Strategy and Disinformation Response
Equip yourself to fight for the truth in a noisy information environment. This course covers narrative strategy development, identifying and countering misinformation, building trusted messenger networks, and digital strategy for protecting your community's story.
Faith-Based and Cultural Organizing
Tap into the organizing power of churches, cultural institutions, and trusted community spaces. This course covers relationship-building with faith leaders, culturally rooted engagement strategies, and how to honor and leverage the traditions that already hold communities together.
Southern and Rural Organizing Strategies
Organize where you are, not where the models were built. This course addresses the unique challenges and strengths of organizing in the South and in rural communities, including historical context, place-based strategy, relationship-driven approaches, and building regional power in areas often overlooked by national movements.
A Case for Knowledge Infrastructure: Driving Field, Funding, and BVM's Future
Angele DeLarge. 2025-2026
6
Angele Jackson-DeLarge, 2026