Training for Change was founded on Martin Luther King`s birthday in 1992, a carefully chosen birthday for a group that spreads the skills of democratic, nonviolent social change. Since then we`ve led hundreds of workshops for nonviolent activists around the world with our unique direct education approach.They`ve included crowd control workshops for Mohawks, strategic planning retreats for Greenpeace, civil disobedience workshops for nursing-home workers, strike trainings for steelworkers and civil disobedience classes for ACT-UP.



TFC`s vision is to have activist trainers in every social movement who can deliver high-quality training to help activists become maximally powerful. To build towards that vision, we share training tools that have success across cultures and in different movements.



We`ve spent decades developing a training approach that liberates participants, helping them break limiting patterns and become more effective change agents. It works so well we just can`t keep it to ourselves. We`ve gone to Russia to help the prodemocracy movement build its training network. We`ve gone to Indonesia to train the international teams protecting Aceh`s human rights workers. When activists in South Africa were working to bring down apartheid, we went there to train the movement`s trainers. At home in the US, we`ve trained over 1000 activists and organizers how to lead trainings the TFC way.



Experiential learning is the hallmark of our trainings. We believe that trainees are able to apply more of the information if they learn it in active rather than passive ways. We find that trainees can usually find the answers they need in their own experience; as we see it, the trainer`s job is to create designs which empower the trainees to see for themselves what to do next.



We work with an incredible variety of people, from rural coal miners, to urban ACT-UP-ers, to Buddhist monks in the farthest reaches of Cambodia. Some examples of our diverse client base: We trained the United Mineworkers field staff in preparation for the successful Pittston Coal Strike [1989-90], as well as the Duquesne, Pennsylvania, local of the United Steelworkers in their campaign to save their steel mill. We`ve also led workshops for farm workers in Michigan, residents of a low income neighborhood group in the Bronx, and leaders of the African American community in north Philadelphia. We`ve done conflict resolution workshops for maximum-security prisoners, as well as led group dynamics trainings for the Haymarket Fund`s wealthiest donors and board members.