2027 date TBD
Are you a BIPOC social justice campaigner or other staffer looking to deepen your leadership and responsibility in campaigns?
Ideal candidates for this fellowship can fill a range of roles in movement work: communications, field, organizing, fundraising, volunteer leadership, and more.
This 12-week fellowship is designed to support BIPOC staffers to take on greater responsibility in strategy development, management, and implementation of integrated online/offline campaigns. The fellowship supports participants to become next-level online/offline campaign staff. It combines time-tested organizing with the latest tools, tactics, and skills, including managerial skills. A limited number of scholarships are available.
Capacity will be limited to 30. Get on the waitlist now to be given first priority when registration opens up.
Last year’s inaugural fellowship brought together 34 talented participants and 9 seasoned mentors who guided them through the program. Meet past fellows. SMT is offering the fellowship again in response to demand to support more BIPOC leaders to drive meaningful change in their communities.
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 12-week period. Topics cover:
- Organizing strategy and tactics connecting online and offline power, including strategy development, direct action tactics, and building an effective activist pipeline
- Social media, including Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok, 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 short-form video
- Systems and infrastructure to run an effective campaign, including A.I. use in workflows, campaign management tools, metrics, website, email, and CRM/member database/action tools
- Periodic support meetings with your mentor
- Special BIPOC-only fellowship sessions will include the following:
- Cultivating a Mindset of Abundance
- Effective Campaign Management
Mentors
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 is President of SEIU Virginia 512 and a lifelong advocate for working people, shaped by her parents’ example and a childhood rooted in union values. A 21-year SEIU veteran, she began as an Organizer in Training in 2003 and has led campaigns nationwide, with a deep commitment to organizing in the South where she was born and raised. She served as SEIU Virginia 512’s first Organizing Director, helping shift Virginia into a battleground state, and later as Deputy Director of SEIU’s Healthcare Division, where she mobilized long-term care workers during the pandemic to win critical protections. Elected president in 2023, she now leads a union of local government and home care workers across the Commonwealth. LaNoral is a former board member of the Virginia Civic Engagement Table and The Center for Advancing Racial Equity and Job Quality in Long-Term Care. A proud alumna of Albany State University, her faith and commitment to justice guide her work to build a future where all families can thrive. LaNoral is a graduate of SMT’s Digital Campaigning Certificate Program.
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.

Vanessa Mbonu is a communications strategist dedicated to advancing social justice and building the power of marginalized communities. As NAACP’s VP of Marketing, she builds campaigns that mobilize people for collective action. Her work bridges grassroots organizing with strategic communications to amplify movement voices and create change. Recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 and the UN as one of the Most Influential People of African Descent, Vanessa shares her organizing insights in spaces like the NAACP National Convention and One Young World Summit.
Nancy Treviño is a community organizer, trainer, and campaigner from Miami, FL. She is the Investors Campaign Manager at Stop the Money Pipeline (STMP) and previously served as the Director of Power at Presente.org. Nancy has 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.” She is also the co-editor of “How We Win: Energizing Strategies, Voters, and Agendas.”
Eligibility
- Be 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 six 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.
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Testimonials


SMT taught our staff and leaders to use Twitter strategically, understand the intricacies of Facebook for organizing…They respond quickly, have real world organizing experience, do really solid webinars that leaders and staff can engage with.
The coaching sessions provide practical tools for making our social media move from passive clicktivism to actually doing something.
Our experience to date has been wonderful, helping us make the migration from one CRM to another as painless as possible…a life saver, terrific. Quick to respond, SMT staff provide clear explanations that avoid all the techno-garble.
I wish SMT had existed when I started organizing in 2010! I learned many of these skills on the fly, often through trial and error. Overall it is really helpful to learn about all of the new tools which exist, especially ones that non-profits can use for low or no cost. The presentation did a great job of outlining best practices for many different scenarios.
I view organizing in a whole new light. Everybody should have the opportunity to go through this experience, and get these tools, and start organizing.
This is great for C3's to understand what they SHOULD be doing during elections. I think there is much more space for C3s to take the GOTV initiative.
SMT is an amazing resource for starting digital organizing and communications and maintaining a program that engages members and moves them to action. There are a bunch of free and super reasonably priced webinars available so you can jump right in and focus on what you need to improve.The webinars have just been stellar. I've learned so much, especially from the Top Tools and Tactics to bump up your organizing game. I used the templates and resources to set up an editorial calendar and to track stats for our new social media channels. It was very easy to take what was presented in the training and apply it to my union immediately.
Super helpful process with our staff and leaders to ID new tools we can use to reach our target folks.
The online coaching sessions have been really good for helping us make decisions about what makes the most sense for us to incorporate…and what we can let go.
The one-on-one sessions have been invaluable given the expertise of everyone on the SMT team.
SMT helped us launch our first petition campaign…great experience, ended up with vastly higher profile for our work.
I want to express my continuing and deep appreciation for SMT’s staff. We’ve made great strides and SMT has been catalytic…Among other things–fast, smart, patient, thorough, skillful handling of the website makeover. You guys pulled it off quickly and affordably.
I found the email coaching course to be extremely helpful. I thoroughly enjoyed that this exercise involved everyone working from the same assignment. It made the feedback that much more helpful. I think this has been one of the best SMT sessions that I've taken.
SMT’s knowledge of the organizational use of different CRMs and migration between them was very helpful.
Last year, we worked with SMT on a census campaign with Native Voice Network, and we got so much direct campaign support, one-on-one coaching. I spent a lot of time doing just one-on-one coaching support with ads. after that I felt super empowered and fearless to just navigate all these different tools in the universe. So it was a really great and helpful experience for us.
SMT was really responsive to my questions and needs, and to customizing a training that met those needs. We had a collaborative relationship of understanding each other's needs and expertise, agreeing on outcomes and approach, and developing content.
"Skye's growth in confidence and strategic acumen through the SMT program has been a huge boost for our organization. She's also been able to bring tools, trainings, and ideas back to our entire staff team, making us more effective and responsive."
Great information on how to make emails more impactful and spur action. Great to get direct feedback on a sample email.
I strongly recommend SMT. Their strong organizing background, preparation and thoughtfulness made our strategy assessment with them enjoyable and really helpful.
We hired SMT to help with some ad campaigns. Folks are professional, experienced, and communicative. Knowing what was happening at different stages helped me understand what was going on in our programs. I was never embarrassed to ask questions. The SMT staffer explained everything that would happen, why he was doing something, how he'd accomplish it, which was great. It made me feel like we were working collaboratively. SMT also provides a lot of great trainings to the progressive community to equip people and organizations to do this work on their own.
[SMT's WhichCRM tool] helped me make a side by side comparison without having to spend hours sifting through demos and websites on my own. Invaluable!
The trainings are terrific–geared for every level of experience. And being rooted in social change movement, especially helpful to organizers.
Design firms told us our current site couldn’t be mobile optimized, but SMT did it cleanly and affordably. The site looks great and SMT was easy to work with and addressed any concerns we had.
SMT helped us create a social media presence to expand our cannabis worker organizing campaign. Our organizers have enhanced their social media capabilities. We have succeeded beyond our expectations. Working with SMT has been a great experience. They really understand organizing and communications.
SMT helped us choose an appropriate database for our organization. Its focused training sessions are valuable tools that have helped us further a conversation with our grassroots leaders about strategically building a more powerful, goal-oriented organization.
I would recommend SMT to anyone looking to be more effective online. We are definitely going to experiment with the directions SMT gave us in our strategy session. Very valuable to have consulting from organizers who are keeping up with all the latest.
SMT has worked with us to develop and implement a broad and integrated social media strategy. They helped our leadership understand the importance of such a strategy and taught our activists the basic skills to execute it. From website maintenance to targeted twitter campaigns, they are there when you need them and they understand that it is all about movement building.
Love it!” (mobile optimization of TheStand.org)
The Digital Campaigning Certificate Program is a great course to get to know all the different aspects of digital campaigning. What I like most about it is the consistent focus on building power.
SMT’s staff is friendly, flexible, competent, creative…Efficiently implemented cutting-edge strategies and designed great-looking materials to communicate our message to our members. I’ll come back to SMT in a heartbeat.
Our staff have taken SMT’s excellent trainings over the past five years. Mastering the strategic use of digital tools is essential to advance social change online. SMT’s offerings are a much-needed and unique resource. And they are responsive and committed to meeting the needs of participants. We’re thrilled to partner on the new Global South track of their Digital Campaigning Certificate program, which is a need that we expressed and they acted on promptly. Thank you SMT!
Super useful and practical strategy session. Great to learn what we can do to our website and Facebook page to make them better tools, described in a way I can explain to my board.
"I have found the webinars and trainings by SMT to be timely, relevant and incredibly useful in my work.
I work often at the intersection of climate and labour and have been thrilled to see the trainings you organize have met my needs in advancing my work."
[The Digital Campaigning Certificate Program] is a wonderful course with a great amount of information to get you started on understanding how digital can work for your own organization.
The coaching has been fantastic. Staff has extensive understanding of the online landscape and strategy…jumped right into working with our members too, personable and supportive…great to work with someone who felt like a comrade and not just another non-profit consultant. I was amazed at SMT’s ability to connect us with experts or representatives of different online tools.
Great ability to eloquently name a few top communications gaps that we could easily fix and increase our impact. The summary document is highly valuable; we will refer to it in our future planning!
"I learned so much about different labour movement actions. The digital part was huge, along with actually just understanding the range of tools that are available to organizers. I knew about petitions, about actions in the street, but seeing how differently they could be appleid in so many unique contexts was really exciting. I feel like I got an entire history of the labour movement.
Our strategy sessions with SMT have really energized our vision for what we need to do…In 90 minutes, we were excited and encouraged about how we could better our media and communications work.
SMT is a great resource if you’re looking to improve your organization’s social media presence and strategy.
[Story-Based Strategy] was awesome. It was sort of a refresher and a reset for me as an organizer and a social worker. I took a great deal of notes.
All of SMT training is packed and powerful!
SMT helped us build an integrated, strategic approach to a union contract campaign. SMT’s work is sophisticated and flexible–their support was invaluable.
Great coach for executing our group's livestream plan! Often we have little time to do comprehensive analysis or comparison of newer technologies, so it's important to consult with those with their hands on the tools, and have seasoned coaches in your corner who can help you execute plans.
Incredibly knowledgeable…Weekly coaching has been a great experience. Keeps us on track. Staff is flexible, creative.
SMT was like a breath of fresh air in its approach to empowering small nonprofit organizing efforts. With not much funding, we were able to connect SMT to a few organizations in our network to provide analysis, coaching and hands on technical support. Here at Universal Health Care Foundation of CT, SMT gave us strategic help to up our game with our online organizing and engagement…particularly helpful in guiding us to a more savvy, productive use of social media.
This was a fantastic training experience and I learned a lot about emerging technology with lots of support!
The benefits to us of regular coaching sessions were immediate.
We hired SMT to lead a discussion about online strategy with some of our union’s staff. It re-kindled my desire and commitment to using emerging technologies in my organizing!
SMT is the only training I know of that speaks our language of activism and uses the tools we use everyday in the field. They are a go-to resource to help raise the bar for communications in the labor movement.
We worked with SMT to get tech support on our virtual townhall event. It was helpful getting advice from an expert on how to prepare for the livestream, and how to best make it smooth. It was a big lift off our shoulders being able to rely on someone who has experience doing it.

