Portland Immigrant Leadership and Organizing Training (PILOT) Program

By enhancing the skills, analysis and organizing ability of emerging immigrant and refugee leaders across cultural groups, the Portland Immigrant Leadership and Organizing Training (PILOT) Program will build long-term relationships between diverse immigrant and refugee communities in Portland and build the capacity and voice of new communities to affect change.

PILOT Program Approach:
The PILOT Program seeks to address the challenges faced by emerging immigrant and refugee leaders and groups through strategic support and skill building convenings. During the next 12 months, Center for Intercultural Organizing (CIO) will:

• Identify and support individual leaders from various immigrant and refugee communities to build a shared analysis for organizing;
• Strengthen the capacity of immigrants and refugees to build power for their communities through in depth skill building, leadership development and mentoring; and
• Develop a long-term multi-ethnic coalition of immigrant and refugee leaders, who can work together on issue campaigns in Portland.

PROGRAM ELEMENTS

Training and workshops: Over the course of 12 months, participants will convene quarterly (four times per year) for two and a half day weekend retreats, where they will participate in workshops such as: basics of city government; introduction to community organizing; politics of oppression; power analysis; issue selection and campaign planning; cross-cultural community movement building; conflict resolution; base-building; media strategy and many more aspects that are relevant to the experiences of immigrants, refugees people of color overall. The trainers of these workshops will be coming from local, regional and national institutions, who have extensive expertise and are among the best in their field.

Field Training for Participants: During this program, participants will put their training into practice by learning how to testify at City Council, hold press conferences, attend public meetings and implement short term issue campaigns or community projects, which they will then evaluate. Project work and check-ins will be scheduled monthly.

For more information, please contact:
Kayse Jama or Margot Kniffin at (503) 287-4117 - kayse@interculturalorganizing.org, margot@interculturalorganizing.org