Define community organizing and explain it in one paragraph between 5-10 sentences.

Team Assignment Part 2: Direct Action Plan (including a Media Strategy)
For this portion of the assignment, you will develop a direct action plan that would pressure the target of your campaign and write up a plan to implement it and garner news coverage about it. Your group will develop a single document that should be approximately 3-5 pages and include a “run of show” or a minute-by-minute breakdown of the action. It should include:
● A brief review of your campaign outline: your strategy, your target, and your demand
● A discussion of how this particular action will put pressure on your target to meet your demand
● A minute-by-minute table with the breakdown of your action (what will happen at what time
and who will do it)
● A discussion of the participants in the action and their positionality and how this affects their
participation (e.g. documentation status, work schedules, childcare responsibilities etc.)
● A Safety & Security plan
● An outline of your media strategy:
o Which outlets will you contact? Why?
o Who is your audience?
o What is your key messaging? What story are you telling with the action? o What social media will you use? How will you use it?
Include a short (only a paragraph long) press release

1. Define community organizing and explain it in one paragraph between 5-10 sentences. Use an example from the film “The Hand that Feeds”. Also cite from slides.
2. Review PowerPoiunts attached, primarily focusing on 5-10. 5, 6, and 7 are critical to understanding Community Organizing.
3. Read the advocates for youth toolkit attached. It is developed for youth and youth organizing
4. You must develop a strategy and power analysis for a campaign. This is different than program design. This is NOT a program design.
5. The attached paper does a great job creating a program design but that is simply not the assignment. The assignment is to develop a campaign. In a sense it’s an educational campaign. But it is not a community organizing campaign.
6. Keep the topic from the previous paper. Just adjust it. I’m requesting heavily the same writer.
7. Focus in on NE Queens in NYC.
8. Use examples of LGBTQIA organizations in Northeast Queens
9. Reference five other campaigns you are pulling from. You must use the Black Lives Matter trans movement as one of them that you pull from. There are a lot of other things impacting the trans movement. Pull from them. She likes the Audrey lorde reference. More like that.
10. Your target is not the people. It is the decision maker.

Create an original power map using the following:

Primary target: superintendent
Secondary target: our decision makers put assembly members in queens and possibly the mayor
Voters and funders
PTA
Education Associations
UFT Teachers Union
Violence against trans women in the school system
Demands are focused on the curriculum
1. One book with transgender content written by a transgender person/people each year of high school – As a way to address the violence, address cisnormativity in the curriculum
2. Include writings by and about trans people in the curriculum
3. Ze/zir/zirs taught non binary pronouns in high school curriculum
5. He or she pronouns. Students can sign up using preferred pronouns, not birth certificate gender

NE Queens
District 26
Organizing people to bring them together.

Who are you organizing? high school students

Audrey lorde project that you mentioned
Target aren’t the people
Target is the decision maker
We demand that our leaders change this policy
If you want to focus on education, this trans related content
In which case
Board of Ed
Superintendent primary target
of the
district and our school board
Funders –
NYC – government of NYC
Financial – Comptroller
District leaders
NYC Assembly
Mayor
Follow the money
Who funds the money?

MAKE SURE TO USE Transformative organizing
Organizations that align with our values and impacting people on an individual level
Good campaign
Community guidelines

Focus in on the primary text youth advocate toolkit. Lots of pictures. How to develop a strategy. How to do a power analysis.

Have your targets. Have your demands.
One on ones with the students.
What are you doing at the meeting
Get involved in the organization
Facilitating
Supporting them in that process
How change happens
You’re organizing them
In order for them to create the change
Develop strategy together
Leap of the faith

GSA – Gay Straight Alliance already exists in the school. Go in. Hear from the students themselves about their struggle. Brainstorm ideas and inspire them to align with your campaign strategy for the curriculum.

You were brought in as an organizer
This school has a couple of folks You’re brought in to work with this group of youth. Youth leaders. Develop an organizing campaign to start focusing on creating change. Just one school. Bigger section on spreading to nyc schools. Focus in specifically on that school but don’t get too lost in the details of that school
Often times happens one school at a time

We are Addressing cisgenderism and to have gender inclusive readings in all schools. Gender inclusive readings
Long term goal

Immediate demand : I am going to focus in on my school to mandate that all classes read a minimum of one book by and about trans folks

Papers have to be gender inclusive non binary language

Work with students

Students have these demands

Sick of not being included

Queer and trans youth, professors papers in Michigan

Students get involved
Maybe pta
Maybe board of Ed
Plenty of people you’ll find as Allies. Who are your Allies?
Who are going to be people against you?
Include on the original power map

All of this above was strategy

How to escalate the tactics
What tactics

Hiring you as an organizer

You can be an intern doing a fellowship

Generally you start with a meeting

If the principal says no, a sit in happens much later. It’s a last resort in your plan.

You start with:
Flyers
Influencers
Start a petition
Hold a rally

Worst case scenario:
Then you hold a sit in and demand that they leave
Students protest. Maybe you stage a walkout

Lose possibilities of negotiations with decision maker

Organize people to go to pta meetings
First target is local pta
Politically diverse families
Possible that the pta is conservative but principal agrees and feels that pta is too conservative
Pta might be target
Take a look at the advocates for youth
One of the things you want to be doing
Who are your people?
How are you going to get them involved?
Organizers aren’t running campaigns
People who are the transgender students and other students supporting them are who you are organizing
You are Providing scaffolding
Facilitating process
Base building
Power as an organization
If you participated in any gsas omg the issue is this. Focus groups with transgender youth for instance.
They tell their story
Giving an opportunity to talk to each other
Engage in practice
And then you have the external facing. They’re developing a campaign. Who is for their campaign. Who is against their campaign. They might want to do it to their gender violence organization. What movement can you make against gender violence organizations? What gender violence organizations are in ne queens?
Cite examples of trans violence in high schools in ne queens. If no examples, use that age group violence outside of schools. Reference social media bullying

More likely they are to have an impact
Think of it strategically

How are you going to win your demands?

Provide context about experiences of trans youth. Violence of trans folk in trans schools. What do we know about trans folk in queens. Might not be able to find out. But maybe in youth not in schools. Triangulate data to understand the issue. Young trans people in queens.

Racial justice movement.

Trans youth drawing upon.

Black trans lives matter. To what extent is it drawing upon these movements.

YOU MUST START WITH A Strategy chart. use the one from youth activist toolkit attached.

It’s a little easier and more relevant

Power map that is on there but level of power. Don’t think about
Level of opposition and support
Include a power map and a strategy chart
Each part of the strategy
How you’re going to build leaders and do base building

Send strategy chart FIRST to get it approved

This is all the teachers feedback. They won’t accept the last paper

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