Preparing for an Online Advanced Training: Turning online into an opportunity
Crisis is brutal; there is no way around it. Covid-19 is no different. And many of the folks in our communities are hit harder than most because of systemic oppression. But what we also know is that people in our communities have embodied, practical, living knowledge of how to survive apocalypse (we wouldn’t be here otherwise). In times of crisis, survival individualism encourages us to contract, protect, minimize loss. That is fully necessary at first (if you don’t survive, you don’t get to act tomorrow).
After survival has been ensured, individualism can encourage us to stay contracted, to keep playing it safe. And yet, we have visionary leaders, like Grace Lee Boggs, who teach us how to see the opportunity in every crisis.
“The time has come for us to re-imagine everything. We have to do what I call visionary organizing. We have to see every crisis as both a danger and an opportunity.
It’s a danger because it does so much damage to our lives, to our institutions, to all that we have expected. But it’s also an opportunity for us to become creative; to become the new kind of people that are needed at such a huge period of transition.” — Grace Lee Boggs, 2012
As we decided to shift the Advanced Training (AT), our regular offering to our movement communities, to online, we wanted to lean into the visionary opportunities. We mourned the loss of all the in-person parts of the training and then moved into radical imagination.
One of the ways we visioned was by inviting in the AT Alumni network. In alignment with our belief that imagination is a collective muscle (not an inherent individual capacity), we held two, 30-minute calls and used an exercise we have been working informally called “Remember When.” It’s like our FairyTales tool in reverse. Using a prompt, we re-imagine the past from the future.
Below is the prompt and all the ideas that the 7 alumni and 3 staff came up with (shoutout to Max, Tihi, Harrison, Ruby, Nadia, Eleonore, Celia, Shana, Bernice and Lawrence). Although we obviously can’t use them all, we are weaving many of them into the AT and they’re helping us seed the field for future online trainings… because as Boggs, said: “The time has come for us to re-imagine everything.”
What are you working on that needs re-imagining? We hope this inspires you to pull together your people and make some space to dream.
Prompt: Remember back in 2020 when COVID hit and CSS held that first Advanced Training online? CSS realized there were possibilities to integrate the whole alumni network into the AT and though we can hardly believe it was 5 years ago, that year was the first time we…
Ideas:
Had Campfire conversations (via video chat) can include many folks
AT Alums joined for meals and late night talks
Had a virtual sleepover party!
Social clinics w/ prompts
Had participants dial an Alumni to welcome folks in
Call a friend/alumni for support and resources
Had a media platform revolution and intervention
Had Spontaneous dance party breaks with DNice etc
Started Sharing digital best practices instantaneously
Had people from CSS’s very first AT with people from the most recent cohort
Had People from all the ATs present
Listed all the timezones that are in the US for an event because we had participants from all of them
Had a cohort that was majority from the disability community
There was an icebreaker where people across the network got to know each other through the Projects (now Campaign Labs) they worked on during their AT
Had unstructured virtual free time and play online games together
Had a world-cup version of a game that we could play online (like parcheesi)
Had people use their house as props for activities during the training
Got to meet people’s pets, housemates, and all the people/beings they’re sharing space with
Used real-time, anonymous polling
Added new and virtual points of intervention
Started a movement meme
Put ideas that came up in the labs out into the world immediately and started testing things so that we wouldn’t forget all the amazing ideas we came up with
Broke down silos for powerful new real world story-nerd teams
Had Tihi host a creative writing strategy session and brought an entire cohort of budding practitioners together to develop their own books of poetry and short stories. Now, all those practitioners have all published their works through the Radical Imagination creative publishing house.
Used TikTok to create dope video content for campaigns that went viral
Had a content-focused AT that led to AT Alumni developing our movement-platform called “RadSeeds, RadGeneration, Regeneration” that EVERYONE is using now!
had such a multimodal training experience that it was literally deemed the best training retreat anyone had ever put on during the pandemic