Ten Year Anniversary

Report on TFC's01 work

By George Lakey

In ten years TFC has led 6 three-week intensives, travelled to 14 countries on over 50 training trips and led 500 workshops for over 10,000 participants. Donors, interns, staff, Training Associates, the board, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting of Friends, and countless volunteers together made this achievement possible.

2001 saw Training for Change turning its track record for high-quality workshops into influence on the future of training and education for activists. Signs of this include: TFC's convening in San Francisco a gathering of the most notable trainers of the anti-globalization movement; an invitation to upgrade its training by the most famous environmentalist training group, the Ruckus Society; an invitation for George Lakey to become a ZNet Commentator (serving 5,000 activist subscribers); publications in other periodicals; 16 presentations listened to by about one thousand people; the contract to create a training curriculum for the most ambitious effort yet to create a global "peace army" to provide human shields for people caught in war.

In01 TFC conducted 44 workshops for a total of 1350 participants: 17 diversity workshops (race, class, gender, sexual orientation), 6 organizational development and leadership workshops, 10 nonviolent action workshops, and 10 training of trainers workshops. 17% of the participants were of color. The training of trainers included TFC's sixth Super-T, the program that attracts activists from four continents to increase the training capacity of social movements back home.

Activist Dialogue Project

The protests around the Republican National Convention in00 left a raw and wounded set of relationships among Philadelphia activists, especially across the generational divide. TFC hired staff and launched a year-long project (ending May02) to assist activists to air their differences and identify common ground. The aim is to increase everyone's learning about how to be more effective in working for change. In01 the program set up one-on-one dialogues across generational lines; in02 the emphasis shifts to group dialogues. The staff represents three groups: older activists, student activists at the University of Pennsylvania (which is a co-sponsor of the project), and young community activists especially grouped around the anarchist center in West Philadelphia. Seen as an experiment, the year's dialogue work will be analyzed for lessons learned and a manual created for other cities, available on the TFC website.

New international work

For the first time TFC worked in Indonesia and the Balkans, and led a workshop for indigenous leaders from around the world. TFC also continued its relationship with Thailand, leading an advanced training of trainers there and agreeing that our partners there will host the first Asian Super-T in02.

The Indonesian work was in two parts: a nonviolent strategy workshop in Jakarta with student activists, and team-building work in Aceh with Peace Brigades International which is protecting human rights workers there.

The Balkans work builds the leadership of young adults to create democratic civil society among the ruins of war. The first workshop was literally in the rubble-filled city of Vukovar, Croatia, and the second was at the site of the sponsor of the work, the University of Bologna in Italy. The third workshop is already scheduled for July02 in Romania.

The United Nations Institute for Training and Research invited leaders of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities from six continents to gather in Geneva, Switzerland, for advanced training in handling the interface between their peoples and other world actors. TFC led the part of the training on how to strategize for using nonviolent action to become more powerful in pressing the claims of these forgotten and oppressed groups.

Global training for third party nonviolent intervention

TFC also launched the curriculum development project for third party nonviolent intervention, in cooperation with a new international nongovernmental organization slated to be founded in late02, the Nonviolent PeaceForce.

Although conceived before September 11, the project addresses the fear of violence now contaminating the U.S. political climate. The new sense of insecurity makes it harder than ever for major gains to be made for justice and the environment in the U.S. TFC believes that nonviolent alternatives need to be further developed for handling lethal conflict. Peace Brigades International and others have shown that third party nonviolent intervention shows promise as one of those alternatives.

TFC has a track record in direct training of volunteers and training the trainers for organizations that already do this work on a small scale. This new curriculum will be designed for large-scale work, and is scheduled for completion in03.

Change in TFC itself: Strategic planning for TFC's future

In01 the TFC office moved to center city and the board and staff started a strategic planning process for its future. One outcome of the process has been the decision to create a new slate of board members which would be drawn from around the U.S. and Canada rather than locally. Another outcome is to focus future TFC program much more on training trainers and distributing curriculum based on the innovative design approach which is catching the attention of popular educators internationally as well as in the U.S. The new strategic plan will be completed in02.

Expenses in01 totalled about $219,000, including the move to center city. Income totalled $262,000, from individual donations and foundations as well as workshop fees and consulting. Income included a special grant from the List Foundation to support strategic planning.

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