Academy for Leadership and Action: Build Your Skills, Learn New Tools, Explore Breakthrough Organizing Strategies



Teaching at the Academy

Our movement is achieving exciting changes while still facing many challenges. Whether you’re working on a specific ballot measure, advancing a piece of legislation or blocking one, the Academy for Leadership and Action can help you build skills and learn new tools and strategies to help forward our movement.

Building Leadership Capacity is Key

Whether you are a board member, an executive director, a supervisor or a member of a coalition – each of us has the potential to increase our impact through stronger networks, more accountable teams, and more effective fundraising. As our movement strives for better and deeper inclusion and equity across lines of differences, we have opportunities to face challenges and build strategies for overcoming obstacles, both within our movement and from our opposition.

We offer training that is bold, innovative and interactive; sessions are facilitated by Task Force staff, as well as colleagues who bring expertise and experience to their roles. This year, we are partnering with Western States, Wellstone Action, Management Assistant Group, Choice USA, OpenSource Leadership Strategies, Inc., and intersections/intersecciones consulting, among others to offer five topic tracks which reflect our core leadership competencies:

1.  ORGANIZATIONAL BUILDING: For leaders seeking to build stronger organizations to last for the long haul by increasing personal and organizational capacity that strengthen skills in fundraising and organizational management.

2.  COMMUNICATION AND MESSAGE STRATEGIES: For anyone responsible for the design and execution of communication strategies and plans – ready to use tools for shaping attitudes and communicating just and progressive values and vision.

3.  ORGANIZING TO WIN: For organizers to learn skills for building a large base of donors and activists to win concrete policy victories through legislation and ballot initiatives.

4.  INCLUSION AND INTERSECTIONAL WORK: For students, staffers, leaders and volunteers – examine how racial justice and LGBT liberation are linked and develop new strategies for working effectively across issues and strategies.

5. PRACTICE SPIRIT, DO JUSTICE: For faith leaders, community members and neighbors – discover how faith based social justice work can teach us about community engagement, winning campaigns and the intersection of mercy + justice.

Pre-Register for Academy Sessions
Creating Change is a wonderful opportunity to network with other talented leaders from across the country, as well as meet new people and learn about the depth and breadth of the LGBT movement. Because our training strives for inclusion and participation, we limit the number of people who can sign up for each session and we request that participants register in advance through our simple online registration system. Academy training is offered at no extra cost to Creating Change attendees. Click here for more information about the Creating Change conference, and here to register for Academy training.

We hope to see you in Minneapolis!