For BIPOC staff involved in campaigns

Are you a BIPOC social justice campaigner or staffer looking to deepen your leadership and responsibility in campaigns?

Do you lead an organization that seeks to fill more senior campaign roles with BIPOC campaigners and want to lay the groundwork for existing staff members to fill these roles?

This fellowship is designed to support BIPOC staffers to take on greater responsibility in strategy development, management, and implementation of integrated online/offline campaigns. Ideal candidates for this fellowship can fill a range of roles in movement work: communications, field, organizing, fundraising, volunteer leadership, and more. The fellowship supports participants to become next-level online/offline campaign staff combining time-tested organizing with the latest tools, tactics, and skills, including managerial skills.

Duration: 3 months, April 2 – July 2

Location: Entirely online

Cost: $3500 per person (Scholarship assistance is available based on funds raised. We will work hard with each accepted candidate and their organization to make it possible for them to attend. Apply as early as possible if you think you will need scholarship aid.) 

Program outline

• Achieve Advanced Certification in SMT’s Digital Campaigning Certificate Program.
• Time commitment: 3-hour class once a week, plus 2-3 hours per week to complete assignments over this 13-week period (April 2- July 2 2024). Topics cover:
  • Organizing strategy and tactics connecting online and offline power, including direct action tactics, and building an effective activist pipeline
  • Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, live streaming, building online communities, and online ads
  • Outreach tools, including email, WhatsApp, and mobile messaging
  • Making content that drives action via personal & public narrative, graphic design, and video
  • Systems and infrastructure to run an effective campaign, including metrics, website, email, and CRM/member database/action tools

• Periodic support meetings with your peer buddy, and with your mentor 
• Special fellowship sessions and assignments held in April and late June/July will include 3-4 of the following (and other possible topics) based on interest:
  • Online/Offline Campaign strategy, including in coalitions
  • Ad campaign strategy and practice
  • Effective hiring and supervision practices, with special emphasis on hiring and supervising digital staff
  • Campaign and team management, with special emphasis on tool options and team implementation best practices, as well as managing up and laterally
  • Building cohesiveness among departments such as comms, field/organizing, digital, development and executive leadership
  • Managing contractors to get their best work
• Reading and discussion of important recent books on organizing
• Each Fellow will:
  • develop and lead a training on a core topic, and lead a coaching session to share a specific skill, with other participants as trainees
  • practice giving and getting feedback in these sessions
  • make a self-development plan with next steps 

Mentors

Isel Cuapio is an experienced radio and video journalist, communications expert, and community organizer skilled in storytelling, radio broadcasting, and organizing digital Campaigns. Isel joined the California Native Vote Project (CNVP) in 2020 to support and advance the electoral justice work to increase Native political power in California. She led campaign efforts to ensure a complete and fair count in American Indian and Alaska Native communities across the country when The U.S. Census Bureau shortened the count deadline. She also served as a digital expert across multiple social justice organizations in Indian Country. Isel has led and organized paid and volunteer phone and text bank programs to build digital capacity in Native communities in California. When the Native Power Political Action Committee (PAC) launched in 2020, Isel ran an Independent Expenditure (IE) program in partnership with the Working Families Party for the progressive candidate, Jackie Fielder, who ran for State Senate.

For the past 2 years, Isel has led CNVP’s integrated voter engagement (IVE) strategy to ensure Native and Indigenous communities in California are exercising and strengthening their Native political power. More recently, she is working with CA Native Vote Project to sharpen their narrative strategy now that the organization has doubled up on staff and campaign efforts around education, decarceration efforts, housing, digital equity, and more. In addition, she works as a communications organizer with Keep LA Housed Coalition, a coalition of tenants, tenant rights advocates, public interest lawyers, and community based organizations with the goal of eliminating rent debt, evictions, and other harmful consequences of rent debt accrued during the COVID-19 pandemic in the city and county of Los Angeles. She earned the DCCP certificate with SMT in 2021. During her spare time, Isel enjoys writing poetry, crafting, and organizes mutual aid spaces in their community.

Micky Jordan is a Black Southern, transmasculine, and queer graphic designer born in Florida but currently lives in Durham, NC. Micky believes that art can open the door to make liberation in our lifetime a reality. Good identity design & storytelling should showcase the values of the organization, give the audience a chance to see themselves, shift culture, and move the base into action. He has spent over ten years developing and growing his graphic design and communications skills with organizations and campaigns that are intersectional and justice-oriented: through his current role as a Graphic Designer at National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), his 7-year relationship with Southerners on New Ground (SONG) from member to Organizing Fellow to Communications Director; as the graphic designer for Nicole Townsend’s Asheville City Council run; and as a Staff Partner and instructor for Social Movement Technologies (SMT)’s Graphic Design Apprenticeship for Organizers 2019 – 2023. In his free time, he hosts a podcast called Taking TV Too Seriously with his cohost Michelle, board games, and hanging out with his friends and dog, Jolene.

LaNoral Thomas, President of SEIU Virginia 512, is the daughter of a retired labor leader who along with her mom taught her the importance of hardwork, integrity, and leading with love. By experiencing the union difference throughout her childhood, she developed a respect for labor unions and the need for working people to have a seat at the table. Ensuring all families have the the opportunity to live with dignity and the ability to build generational wealth continues to drive her.

LaNoral has worked for SEIU for 21 years, joining the union as an Organizer in Training (OIT) in 2003. She has worked on campaigns in all three divisions, from coast to coast, but her passion is fighting in the South where she was born and raised. She has developed her skills through several roles from OIT to Deputy Director. From organizing worksite actions, to bargaining contracts, and marching with workers through the nation’s capital, LaNoral has led numerous mobilizations while organizing thousands of members and using every opportunity to elevate members and develop staff.

She served as the first Organizing Director of SEIU Virginia 512 helping them become a political powerhouse and a key component of the shift of Virginia to a battleground state in the last fifteen years. While working as the Deputy Director of the Healthcare Division of SEIU she galvanized long term care workers during the pandemic and launched a national action team of home care and nursing home union and not yet union workers across the country. These workers successfully lobbied and won personal protective equipment (PPE), hazard pay, and led the fight to save lives daily while risking their safety to protect others. She was elected as President of SEIU Virginia 512 in September 2023. Virginia 512 is a union of city and county employees in Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, Richmond, and home care providers across the Commonwealth.

She served as a board member for the Virginia Civic Engagement Table and The Center for Advancing Racial Equity and Job Quality in Long-Term Care. She is a member of Bunton CME Church, where she is the Chair of the Christian Education Department. Her passion for social, economic, and racial justice is fueled by her desire to create an environment for her children to thrive safely and equitably. She received her BA from Albany State University, a HBCU in Southwest Georgia.

Deivid Rojas is an organizer, storyteller, communicator, and visual artist with 10+ years of experience supporting and building organizing campaigns that tightly intertwined field organizing, communications, and digital, including over six years as the Communications Director at Fight For 15 Chicago, where he led the communications work for hundreds of actions, strikes, and protests. He developed and coached dozens of workers to become effective campaign spokespeople and landed national stories with national and international press, created content shared thousands of times online, and produced iconic protest visuals. Deivid has also led communications and digital organizing with SEIU National Fast Food Workers Unions, SEIU Local 73, and UFCW 881. As a queer man from Colombia, he is fluent in Spanish and has deep experience working with groups focusing on labor, Latine, racial justice, Black/Brown solidarity, and LGBTQIA+ issues. At SMT, Deivid is a senior coach.

Daniel Carrillo is the Forest Campaigns Director at Rainforest Action Network where they lead a global team in campaigns against multinational corporations responsible for deforestation and human rights violations. They grew up in Los Angeles in a large mixed-status Mexican family. He got their start as a youth organizing against anti-immigrant Prop 187 and successfully defeating a proposed power plant in their neighborhood in Southeast Los Angeles. Daniel has over 20 years of experience organizing and campaigning in the social justice movement. They won corporate campaigns and successfully negotiated contracts at SEIU, AFSCME, and CWA in the US and the independent unions in Mexico. Daniel also co-founded the Prison Divestment Campaign which successfully pressured union pensions, universities, and cities to divest over $6 billion from the prison industry. Daniel co-founded Stop LAPD Spying, the New York Worker Center Federation, and Freedom Cities. Recently, Daniel was a Fellow at the Cornell University Worker Institute.

Irene Rojas-Carroll has over a decade of experience in policy advocacy, grassroots campaigning, and multi-issue electoral organizing. As Bay Rising’s communications director, she runs communications and digital organizing skill-building and mentorship programs as well as narrative work for the regional alliance.

Irene has led communications for multiple successful candidate campaigns, including campaigns facing over half a million dollars in opposition spending. She helped the Oakland Fair Elections Initiative win with over 70% of the vote and establish the second democracy dollars program in the country. Irene has also run ad campaigns with over 1 million impressions in Spanish, Cantonese, and English, earned story placements at outlets including the Guardian and the SF Chronicle, and served as Bay Rising’s interim ED. Irene is a graduate of SMT’s Digital Campaigning Certificate Program, and has guided cohorts of coalition member staffers through the program. Bay Rising is an ongoing coaching partner with SMT.

Kenyatta Muzzanni Robles lives at the intersection of organizing and the arts, having been a participant in social movements and a writer since they were young. While working at the Katal Center for Equity, Health and Justice, they waged campaigns in New York and Connecticut against mass incarceration and for justice in the legal system, developing and implementing campaign strategy and training organizers. Kenyatta had an instrumental role in the #LessIsMoreNY campaign, which resulted in the most transformative parole reform legislation in the country to date. Kenyatta has a longstanding history with SMT, and is a graduate of the intensive Digital Campaigning Certificate Program.

Nancy Treviño is a community organizer, trainer, and campaigner from Miami, FL. She is the Director of Power at Presente.org. Prior to her role at Presente.org, Nancy worked alongside hundreds of grassroots community organizations across the U.S., collaborated and campaigned with national and international human rights organizations, and continues providing strategic organizing, digital, and communications support to advance social justice movements. She has trained hundreds of activists across the country, won multiple local and national human rights campaigns, and is a contributor to the book, “Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency.”

Yaissy Solis García is a campaigner, organizer and graphic artist based in rural Southwest Florida. She is the Digital Organizer for Economic Justice campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. Her organizing roots began in the farmworker justice movement, where she spent a decade co-directing the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Campaign for Fair Food. At CIW, she played a key role in the organizing and communications strategy of the national Wendy’s Boycott, including successfully organizing students to sever campus licensing agreements with Wendy’s. She has led grassroots organizing for mass direct actions of up to 3,000 people, and fundraising efforts raising up to $170,000 per campaign and expanding recurring donor bases. At SMT, Yaissy coordinates the BIPOC Organizers Fellowship.  

Staffing

Coordinator: Yaissy Solis García, [email protected]

Instructors:

SMT’s regular team members, supplemented by additional experienced BIPOC online/offline campaigners 

Eligibility

• Identify as a BIPOC campaigner (involved in campaigns regardless of your title)
• Be able to commit to an average of 5-6 hours/week to sessions and assignment completion over the three months 
• You should have a significant role in a campaign that involves some sort of offline action (direct actions, electoral work, events, etc.) It does not have to be your full-time work. You do need to be able to implement what you’re learning and share from your experience in real campaigns. 
• You may be based anywhere in the world. However, you must be available for live sessions, which will be held within this time block: 11 am – 2 pm (EST).
• This program is not for consultancies or agencies. It is for staff of NGOs/non-profits. You may also be an unpaid officer of an organization, who works on campaigns extensively. 

Application Process

• We are no longer accepting applications.