South Asians for America Offers First-Ever South Asian Organizing Training Series
India-West Staff Reporter
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – South Asians for America (SAFA) will offer a first-of-its-kind organizing training series for the South Asian community to take place on Thursdays, April 14, 21and 28 at 8 pm ET via Zoom.
The series, which is free and specially tailored for a South Asian audience, will include the basics of community organizing, community organizing tools, resources and guides, and best practices for community organizing.
“This training series is a much-needed tool to empower our community during an important midterm election year,” said SAFA National Director Neha Dewan. “When evaluating how best to mobilize our community, we realized that this type of programming is sorely lacking, and to our knowledge, currently not in existence. It is exactly what we need in terms of providing the building blocks so that our community can be successful at the ballot box this November.”
Each session of the series will feature a panel of experts on topics related to community organizing, including types of organizing, such as issue, ethnic, and faith-based organizing, as well as digital organizing tools, youth engagement and leadership in organizing, a press release said.
The first session on April 14 will discuss the basics of community organizing and will include a panel with Executive Vice President and CFO of National Community Reinvestment Coalition and former COO of National Immigration Law Center Adnan Bokhari, National Vice President of Organizing for Brady Campaign United Against Gun Violence Shikha Hamilton, Sierra Club Digital Organizer Nidhi Khanna, and DNC API Outreach Director Eric Salcedo.
The second session on April 21 will delve into an overview of community organizing tools, resources and guides and will feature a presentation on free digital organizing tools by Deepak Puri, co-founder of The Democracy Labs, a nonprofit organization founded after the 2016 presidential election to find and introduce innovative new apps to progressive causes and campaigns.
The third session on April 28 will cover best practices for community organizing and will feature panels on leadership in organizing and youth engagement.
“Our community has a tremendous amount of talent when it comes to organizing, and SAFA is uniquely positioned to connect these experts to the larger South Asian community so that they can share their experiences and learnings. Our aim is that this series will create a pipeline for leadership so that more and more individuals in our community can inspire and educate others on how to organize during a time when the stakes have never been higher,” said Harini Krishnan, SAFA Chair of Community Organizing.
The curriculum draws from many sources, including California Democratic Party Organizing Committee training resources, Democracy Labs training resources, and also includes materials adapted from works by Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education Program in Public Leadership Professor Marshall Ganz.
The series is open to the public and attendees have the option to participate in one or all three sessions by registering ahead of time:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvf-qvpzkuEtferojddz9vl5lAdSffpn0n
