Date: Sept 30th (Part 1) and Oct 6th (Part 2)
Time: 8pm Eastern / 5pm Pacific
Duration: 90 minutes each session
Join us for a free two-part training on September 30th and October 6th to learn from two experts on people’s assemblies: Dr. Camila Vergara, an academic and organizer who was deeply involved in numerous assemblies held in Chile between 2020 and 2022 as part of the effort to enact a transformative new constitutional structure, and Denzel Caldwell, an organizer with the Black Nashville Assembly working to build black political power in Tennessee.
Camila and Denzel will share their hard-earned practical and theoretical knowledge with us during each 90-minute free training.
You must register for each session separately.
People’s assemblies are the most basic form of direct democracy: bring the community together, discuss issues of concern, and develop plans for moving forward. They represent a viable and powerful form of organizing that is already being used to respond to the ecological crisis, push back against capitalism and other systems of oppression, and build grassroots power around the world.
But actually organizing assemblies isn’t as simple as getting together with friends. It presents numerous challenges for organizers: How do you inform the community and build legitimacy? What’s the best way to facilitate discussions and move forward during meetings? How often should assembles occur? How are agendas determined? Who should take on what roles? How can we deal with internal disagreements or disruption? The answers are here.
Dr. Camila Vergara is a London-based critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and the possible solutions to systemic corruption and ecological destruction. She is a Research Fellow at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Director of Research at the International University College Turin, Italy, co-Director of the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (FREE), and Partner-Advisor of CELDF. She is the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020) and her work on constitutional theory, participatory democracy, corruption, and populism has been featured in leading international journals. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr Vergara is a global public intellectual, with more than 45 keynote speeches and public lectures across Latin America, the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, and dozens of interviews and media interventions, as well as an activist advising and collaborating with grassroots organizations on rights, deliberative democracy, and community-based forms of governance.
Denzel Caldwell is a community organizer, economist, and popular educator dedicated to Black Liberation. Born, raised, and currently organizing in Nashville, Tennessee, Denzel graduated magna cum laude from Morehouse College in 2014 with a bachelor’s in economics, and from the University of Oklahoma in 2018 with a master’s in economics. For over 10 years, Denzel has been committed to local organizing work focused on prison and police abolition, establishing a local and state-wide guaranteed basic income, and building self-determined Black communities in Middle Tennessee. Currently, his political home and work is concentrated in the Black Nashville Assembly, a participatory democracy project he co-founded with several other comrades to build the self-determination capacity and political power of working-class Black people in Nashville. At the Highlander Center, he is the Program Manager for the Economics and Governance team (aka the Electoral Justice Researcher and Educator), where he facilitates workshops that ground participants in the theory and practice of solidarity economy. His most recent work has been the People Practicing Power series, where he and his co-facilitators dive into civics from a radical lens to help participants builder sharper policy campaigns, direct actions, and strategies for building people power.
You must register for each session separately.
