ABOUT US

PROGRAMS

Education & Capacity Building Program

Since its inception, NNIRR’s Education and Capacity Building Program has introduced and popularized the use of popular education methods to over 500 organizers, trainers, advocates, community organizations, and has reached over a thousand individuals and organizations through the BRIDGE curriculum. (Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Era).  Through BRIDGE and the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Training Institutes (IRRTIs), NNIRR creates spaces in our movement for practicing and experiencing individual and collective growth, shared analyses and mutual understandings.  These spaces are grounded in our values of building a multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual movement that works to dismantle oppression and create dignity and justice for all.  We strive to centralize the needs, concerns, and leadership of those bearing the brunt of injustice and oppression. The Education and Capacity Program also provides support, develops new workshops and popular education modules and shares best practices through BRIDGE Popular Education Trainers’ Circle, a nation-wide network of popular educators in the movement.

Why We Do What We Do:

The Education & Capacity Building Program supports the work of community organizers and activists using popular education and community dialogue to discuss and tackle critical issues related to immigrant and refugee rights. Building on the work of the BRIDGE curriculum, which is based on over two years of community input and testing, the Education and Capacity Building Program provides opportunities and support for training, leadership development, and community education. In addition, we develop and lift up best practices and curricula that responds to the needs of community organizations and gaps in the movement, while continually to improving the existing BRIDGE curriculum to reflect shifts and changes in our realities.

The Education & Capacity Building Program works to:

• Innovate: Develop & deliver popular education curriculum and training modules that respond to the needs of base-building organizations, particularly on key issues and in the context of the wider the immigrant and refugee rights movement
• Build: Highlight and lift up best practices in our movement, cross fertilize between different movements for social justice, increase the understanding and capacity of all members of our movement to engage in participatory and popular education approaches to the work
• Accompañar: Accompany organizing and leadership development processes in immigrant and refugee communities, with an emphasis on building capacity in underserved or under-resourced regions and /or with underrepresented communities
• Gather: Organize Regional and National Immigrant and Refugee Rights Training Institutes as spaces for collective analysis, reflection and dreaming, spaces that practice and reflect  NNIRR's values and goals of popular education, allowing  us to bring our whole selves to our movement and social justice change work
• Unite: Support and increase networking between organizations; highlight member’s work when the opportunity arises, popularize and disseminate NNIRR’s viewpoints, analysis, and approaches to movement building

Get Involved!

• Participate in an upcoming Immigrant and Refugee Rights Training Institute (IRRTI)
• Request a training for your community
• Learn more about our popular education curriculum, BRIDGE (Building a Race & Immigration Dialogue in the Global Era)
• Join the Education & Capacity Building Program Trainers’ Circle