Activist Training Lab

The best candidates for 6-week training courses are staff, interns, or volunteers at conservation organizations or community groups who are either currently working on a grassroots campaign or planning to launch one soon. For example, a good candidate might be currently organizing or intending to organize around passing an important wildlife bill, banning a harmful pesticide, stopping a local developer from destroying critical habitat, updating a state agency’s wildlife management plan, or expanding access to green space in their region for communities of color.

Candidates can have previous experience with grassroots organizing or be totally new to it.

We give priority for this course to staff, interns, and volunteers with Endangered Species Coalition member groups but also happily accept staff, interns, and volunteers with non-member organizations and community groups. 

The 6-week training courses are short but intense and require participants to commit two to three hours per week for six weeks. 

This includes attending a one hour workshop each week and doing one to two hours of “homework” (such as readings and exercises) outside of workshops. 

Participants who commit to setting aside the necessary time to complete the course will see their skills of grassroots organizing grow immensely in six weeks and will bring this valuable perspective, knowledge, and capacity to their campaigns and home organizations. 

Any conservation organization that is actively working on or intending to work on grassroots campaigns to protect biodiversity. If this applies to you and you need support, advice, or resources, please reach out to see if we can help you! Send Sarah an email at [email protected]. 

At the Endangered Species Coalition, we believe that biodiversity loss and environmental degradation disproportionately impacts women, youth, people of color, and Indigenous communities. We believe that ensuring biodiversity’s benefits are shared equitably by all communities needs to be at the front and center of the movement for conservation, and we believe that movement should be inclusive and representative of the diversity of our country. 

The Activist Training Lab in particular has prioritized diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in our programs over the past three years. We especially encourage people who identify with traditionally marginalized communities, including people of color, Indigenous peoples, youth, seniors, and LGBTQIA+, low-income, and immigrant communities to reach out to us about our programs or apply for our capacity-building course. We are particularly excited to work with organizations and individuals who work at the intersection of biodiversity conservation and environmental justice, and we may prioritize creating space in our programs or delegating funding to those organizations and individuals. 

Here are some of the skills we cover between our on-demand trainings, capacity-building course, and upcoming video course: 

• History and theory of grassroots organizing
• Strategic campaign planning
• Setting campaign goals
• Power-mapping
• Campaign strategy
• Strategic & creative tactics
• Campaign messaging & narratives
• Recruitment
• Leadership development
• Leadership ladders and leadership pitches
• 1-on-1 meetings
• Training & coaching volunteers
• Retaining volunteers
• Movement-building & movement structure
• Act, Recruit, Train cycle
• Grassroots tactics
• Petitioning 101
• Canvassing 101
• Phonebanking 101
• Art actions
• Building and managing coalitions
• Lobbying
• Bird-dogging
• Earned media
• Opinion media
• Distributed organizing
• Grassroots fundraising
• Event planning
• Facilitating meetings
• Fostering a feedback culture in campaigns

All of our programs are provided by the Endangered Species Coalition as a free service to our member groups and allied organizations who are fighting to protect biodiversity and advance biodiversity justice. 

The Activist Training Lab is a relatively new program and our funding model and structure is subject to change. However, for the foreseeable future, it is free for all participants. 

Yes! The Activist Training Lab used to have a yearlong grassroots organizing training fellowship. Three cohorts graduated from the yearlong program, and our awesome alumni from those cohorts are still out in the world making a positive impact for the environment and justice.

After much thought and consideration, we decided to end the yearlong fellowship program in 2023, replacing it with our current programs. We made this choice in response to feedback from alumni, needs expressed by our member groups in our annual survey, and our own vision for the future of the Activist Training Lab program. While the end of the yearlong program is bittersweet, we are excited for the future of the Activist Training Lab. 

The best way you can support our work is to spread the word. Share this webpage with your organizational partners, friends, family, colleagues, and community so we can reach as many people as possible. We hope that people and organizations all over the country who are passionate about biodiversity will know that this resource exists and be able to access the programs when they need them. We especially hope to share our YouTube video course far and wide, and you can help us do that by subscribing to our channel and sharing our videos.

The Activist Training Lab exists because of the generosity of donors who believe in our mission of protecting biodiversity through grassroots organizing. If this mission resonates with you, too, please consider making a donation the program. Your donation will help us provide training and coaching to greater numbers of organizations and individuals who are fighting to conserve our most precious resources.