UFE doesn’t just do trainings. With our Training of Trainers and workshops, we use popular education to equip participants with the tools needed to be trainers themselves, encouraging everyone to go forth and change their communities. In this way, we work with leaders from all backgrounds and are creating a powerful, multiplying effect for economic justice!

Helping previous participants to go out in the world and hold their own spaces and training is a core part of our “training the trainers” strategy. This work is transforming because of Covid, but physical distancing is a barrier that can be overcome. For example Eroc, our cultural organizer and popular educator, spent much of the summer holding healing circles with people affected by the virus and the uprising, while also passing on the tools and knowledge to help folks hold their own healing circles in their communities.

Earlier this year, before COVID hit, Kaleia Martin attended a Training of Trainers hosted by our North Carolina Training Network Coordinator, David Dixon. Kaleia did a circle for black folks only around what was happening, and our popular educator Eroc Arroyo-Montano helped design it. In this way we’re helping folks to do their own circles. We are consulting, co-creating, and co-designing. After the training, Kaleia shared this: “Thank you for helping me work through the agenda, it made all of this so much easier! Cheers to more collaboration.”

Kaleia attended our Training of Trainers in North Carolina earlier this year before COVID (pictured above)

Each one of these virtual Training of Trainers has a strong, multiplying effect as new facilitators across the country are introduced to the powerful ideas of popular education and skills needed to facilitate deep, intersectional conversations about inequality in their own communities, even during times of social distancing.

Our executive director, Jeannette Huezo, also displayed UFE’s ongoing commitment to this leadership development work in her recent webinars with Familias Unidas in New Orleans. The Executive Director of Familias Unidas, Leticia Casildo, reached out to Jeannette requesting information on one of our educational activities, the “Sound of Inequality.” Leticia had attended our intensive Training of Trainers, so we were excited to reconnect and offer support. Soon after, Leticia presented the interactive activity, an exercise to show the exacerbation of wealth inequality in the US, as part of her workshop on Migration and Economic Inequality. The workshop was attended by 87 participants from organizations working mainly with immigrant communities in the Mississippi and New Orleans area and was a huge hit.

We can all be trainers and leaders in the movement for justice. Now, Leticia is proud to be a great multiplier of what she learned from UFE’s ToT. You can learn more about our upcoming events and how you can multiply the movement for economic justice on our Facebook page!