Community Organizing for Climate Justice as Faith Active in Love
"La Lucha," mural in PLTS classroom by Cristian Muñoz and Pancho Pescador © 2019.
Empower Your Community, Transform Our Climate Future
Join our 2025 faith-based leadership program for climate justice
Applications open until December 1, 2024. Course runs January 22-May 14, 2025 and is fully online
Transform your community through faith-based climate action. Our program equips leaders with the tools, knowledge, and networks to implement impactful climate resiliency projects.
Course Description
The Community Organizing for Climate Justice Program seeks to equip leaders with a climate justice framework and practical tools to implement team-based climate resiliency projects in their communities. A three-day online training followed by 12 weeks of weekly coaching and leadership development, will allow program participants to understand themselves as leaders, expand their capacity to enroll others in collective action, and understand the roles of teams in creating change.
This program is offered by the PLTS Center for Climate Justice and Faith.
Course Schedule
What You'll Gain
- Climate justice framework
- Practical community organizing skills
- Leadership development
- Networking opportunities
- Mentorship from experienced organizers
Who Should Apply?
- People of faith interested in climate justice who are interested in putting their values into action
- Professionals currently working in the field of climate justice who would like to expand their tools and skillset via a praxis project
- Early career organizers who would benefit from structured coaching or exposure to theological underpinnings for climate justice work
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to do the following with some proficiency:
- Identify climate justice issues within one's context, their related systemic root causes, and climate resiliency needs within their local community.
- Understand the intersection between climate justice and racial justice and how community organizers are integrating these concepts into their campaigns.
- Center climate justice in their theological framework.
- Build a set of community organizing skills for engagement in their community. [examples: relational meetings, building a team, power mapping]
- Construct a project proposal that requires collective decision making and action, utilizes community organizing praxes, and addresses the realities of climate change.
- Expand connection to the larger community of climate and faith-based organizing.
- Know how to continue to develop their proficiency with these skills beyond the course.
Tuition:
$300.00 including both training sessions and the mentored practice period. Tuition assistance is available.
Our Instructors
Community Organizing for Climate Justice as Love in Action is taught be Via Consulting Cooperative. Via Consulting Cooperative is a collective of evaluators, faith leaders, and community organizers with over 50 years combined experience in community organizing and both qualitative and quantitative participatory program evaluation in community development, education, and faith-based contexts.
As long time leaders in communities affected by racialized capitalism, members of our collective have done the work of local level response and disaster preparedness and have led both climate justice campaigns – connecting stormwater management to green jobs, green new deal for housing and climate action in community – CR boxes, measuring air quality.
Maureen Okasinski
Maureen integrates academic rigor with practical, community-led practices in her work. She has 20 years experience in leadership, program development, research, design and evaluation, grant writing and management, budget management, and direct practice. This includes nine years of social work teaching, fourteen years of social work practice and six years in consulting. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan, where she earned an MSW
Meghan Sobocienski
Meghan is a Co-Founder and Director of Grace in Action Collectives in Southwest Detroit. Meghan spent five years as a Community Organizer with the PICO (Faith in Action Network), and five years working as a Co-Organizer for the Organizing for Mission Cohort (Network) through the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Through this work Meghan guided congregational leaders to utilize their land, financial, and community resources to create social justice projects in their communities. Meghan has an MDiv. from PLTS (CLU), an MSW from Eastern Michigan University, and is an ordained Deacon in the ELCA.
Bianca Vazquez
Bianca is the Program Director at Beloved Community Incubator in Washington, DC. Neighborhood listening sessions led to her engagement with small micro-business projects with local residents, which led to the founding of BCI. Bianca is trained in community organizing by the Industrial Areas Foundation, Faith in Action Network, and Gamaliel Network. She works in Washington, DC, where she has shaped the creation of mutual aid disaster response networks and led worker campaigns for almost a decade.
Questions?
Contact: Via Collaborative