The Let's Go! Trainers network is composed of experienced organizers & trainers from around the country who can provide in person and digital trainings to help your group become more organized and effective.
Coaching
The Let's Go! Coaching Cohort provides long term coaching and mentorship for local struggles, helping groups think through the problems they're facing and get moving to become more powerful and more effective. We'll set up a phone consult with you, and then work collaboratively to provide resources and help you strategize about your goals and how to meet them.
Training
We are currently offering ICEBreaker trainings for community defense against ICE, and Organizing 101 trainings that provide a framework for groups to meet this moment. We're also able to offer tailor-made trainings in group organization, campaign strategy, power mapping, tactical escalation, conflict resolution, risk assessment, security, preparing for repression, and more.
To request a training or to connect with the coaching cohort,
Our Trainings
This 3 hour training offers a participatory framework for understanding the new political moment we are in since November 2024, an introduction to power and strategic thought, and an introduction to direct action and strategic escalation. Perfect for newly activated people looking to get involved, or for groups that want to take their organizing to the next level.
Based on an assessment conversation with your group, we will tailor this 101 training to meet your needs. All sections include a didactic element, a participatory element, and a debrief focused on integrating new knowledge and skills in the context of your life and community. We will focus on strategy and power, polarization, how to work together with different groups using different approaches, tools for assessing possibilities in your local context, and embodied introductions to direct action. Your group will leave with a shared orientation, tools for thinking and planning together, and a better sense of your own risk tolerance and what you need to succeed.
Maybe you are someone who wants to do something but don’t know where to start, or maybe you are a seasoned organizer and your local ICE struggles have hit obstacles that feel insurmountable.
That’s where this training comes in. We believe we can win against ICE but it will take new tactics and strategies, experimentation, and sharing what works across regional and national networks.
ICEBreaker is a 3 hour training that gives people the political and relational tools to win by creating broad-based, popular struggle against ICE. These tools include relational and compositional skills, lessons in how to be effective in spaces with many different protagonists, and how to keep often very different groups together enough to be successful in our fights.
We'll share these tools, as well as a full array of tactics gleaned from successful anti-ICE struggles around the country, including front-line struggles in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis. We will help participants understand the range of tactics and practice how to select and pivot depending on local contexts, and will discuss common obstacles to present struggles and how they can be concretely overcome. Most importantly, this training, led by experienced organizers who come from a variety of different political backgrounds, develops participants' confidence in their own agency and ability to intervene. Remember: making people feel powerless is the first step of their plan—don’t let them take away your belief that we can still act!
Effective groups are the basic building block of any serious political campaign. This training covers the basics of bringing people together for a shared purpose, planning and facilitating effective meetings, tracking tasks, building resilient group culture, and intentionally building group capacity.
Fighting a specific target? Trying to oppose a data center or detention center project? This training introduces the notion of a "campaign arc" to help you think through systematic escalation while building popular power. From the ballot box and the city council meeting to the streets and the construction sites, we'll work with you to think through not only how to protest, but how to win.
Who really has the power to make the decisions that affect your community? And how do we find pressure points that can force them to change their positions? Power mapping is a tool for understanding the tangled webs of politics, money, reputation, and social influence in your community--and for understanding who is susceptible to pressure and who is a potential ally. This information is a basic step in building out a cohesive strategic campaign.
Municipal strategy running up against a brick wall? Local politicians and bureaucrats unmovable? These are signs that it's time to move beyond appeal and protest towards resistance and disruption. This training will help you identify locally appropriate techniques systematically raise the stakes and bring more pressure to bear on your targets. We'll help you think through what the established "normal" limits are for protest and disruption in your context, and how to push the envelope just a little bit further, while having fun in the process. We'll also provide tools for risk assessment, safety planning, and identifying roles--everyone has a part to play!.
Conflict is inevitable, and part of being human. But groups focused on activism and political organizing often do not have the deep ties and trust built that allow them to effectively move through and transform conflict, unlike friend and familial relationships. This training focuses on some basic building blocks of establishing trust and relationship, on anticipating conflic and putting guardrails up in advance, and in how to move through group conflict and use it to strengthen and deepen our work.
Risk is real--no matter what we do. This training provides tools for thinking systematically through assessing risk, and for working effectively across groups with different levels of risk tolerance.
Repression is the way that those in power protect themselves from challenges, by destroying, delegitimzing, or neutralizing threats in the form of social movements, groups, and rebellion. By studying the past and paying attention to the present, we can identify patterns that make us more vulnerable, or more resilient, in the face of repression--as well as learning how to turn repression into a catalyst for solidarity and collective power. This training focuses on building relational security--the kind that emerges from having strong connections to many different people and groups--and on preparing ourselves for repression so that we can make it backfire.