What is SEAC about? What's a National Council? What are caucuses? What is an alternative group? And other such questions answered...

Running Fun and Effective Meetings

Let's face it: meetings suck. There's always this one person that talks too much, only three people in the group do any work, the others feel alienated, and the meeting's accomplishment is deciding when the next meeting is? Is there a way out? YES! Take this training and find out how YOU TOO can have fun and effective meetings!

Running Winning Campaigns: Campaign Strategy and Planning

Campaigns produce concrete goals, empower members of the group that previously had no power, earn respect for your cause, and create changes that will remain once you are gone. How do you organize an effective campaign? Find out!

Building and Maintaining Groups

So you had sixty people come to your first meeting to eat vegan pizza and lounge around in the student/community center. But the next meeting, no pizza and only five members! What's an activist to do? More pizza is one way to get people to come back, but this training is a better way to ensure that your group will have a steady core membership that won't jump up and down (except at rallies).

Powermapping and Holding Your Administration Accountable

This training shows you how to decide who it is that has the power to make the changes you want. This sounds simple but is a step that many activists leave out in their planning--and end up protesting the president when the dean is really responsible for the bad policy

Organizing 101: How to Build a Kickass Group

You can't change the world by yourself (no offense). So how do you form a really effective group when it seems like there's no one on campus who cares about what you care about?

Youth Conference Planning

Youth Conferences are great. They get people together from a region of the country so that they can talk about common goals. Working in a group is stronger than individually, and working in coalitions of groups is even stronger! So how do you organize a conference that won't suck? Youth Conference Planning will show you!

Handling the Media

"We're goin' to war for freedom"
"Those trees like to be cut down"
"Economic growth in low income neighborhoods requires that these people take more pollution"
"Nuclear power is clean and efficient".

These are some of the things that bombard us in the corporate media. Short of overturning the FCC and the networks, this will always be something your group will have to fight. But this training shows you how to take that challenge head-on so that your message can receive press too.

Direct Action Planning: When, Why and How to Use It

What is direct action? What kind of planning goes into it? Should it be used all the time? What is the best strategy for using non-violent direct action? Who is most at risk during these actions, and how can the group protect them? All this is answered, plus role-playing to help you understand how actions work.

Non-violence Training

What counts as non-violence? Is it violent to block a road or is this non-violence? What if one person from the group is comfortable with something and not another? How do groups negotiate differing ideas about what is appropriate to do as a direct action or protest? What are the methods to de-escalate a situation with police or counter-protesters that might get out of hand? Understanding non-violence is more complex than it may seem, so this training is very important.

Consensus Decision Making

Typically in our society we are taught to make decisions bam bam bam! Done. But is this the best process for maintaining a functioning and democratic group? NO! Consensus process trainings show you how to function in meetings, before actions, and in other situations where participatory democracy will produce better results over the long term for your group.

Meeting With Decision Makers

The president won't meet with you. How do you make him have a meeting with you? When you go, how do you keep from getting the run-around? What kind of planning will help you to get what you want in the meeting and keep the target from evading the issues at hand? Meeting with decision makers is more difficult than it seems. This training helps you get through that with success.

Fundraising

What is good fundraising strategy for your group? This training shows you the ropes to getting the funds you need. Need I say more?

Anti-Racism

In Philadelphia where the SEAC office is, there was an oil spill in the Delaware River. The environmental movement worked hard to warn people of the effects the spill would have on wildlife. But no mention in any reports was made of the communities of color that live near the spill, or of the effects on their health from drinking the water.

How is the white environmental movement subtly racist? How does this racism affect the way white activists frame issues like global warming or nuclear waste desposal? Why do so few people of color feel comfortable working in white-led organizations? Why are white liberals, as Dr. King said, so often the "stumbling blocks" of stuggles for justice by people of color? The various anti-racism trainers that SEAC works with take a hard look at the flaws in activism that are uncomfortable but imperitive to see.

Anti-Sexism

Do men dominate the discussion in your group? In most groups they do. Male privilege is omnipresent in simple things like this, but most men do not even notice what they are doing. Our organizations are often male-led and dominated. Environmental issues also affect women in a direct way that they don't affect men. Being able to organize in a way that is anti-sexist is a valuable skill, and a necessary one if we're going to see justice.

Anti-Classism

The first outreach coordinator for SEAC worked for hours in work-study to remain in school, so he had to stay up late to do his homework. His roommates complained, and told him that he should "just quit" and get "meaningful volunteer job" like them. He was hurt, but he couldn't explain why to their faces--even though they were supposedly progressive activists.

Classism is the power structure of, as George Bush says, "people who have, and people who have more--my base" and how these people interact. How is the activist world beholden to classism? Where does our money come from? How do we organize? What is valued as "activism" and what is not? How can middle class activists address the classism that is inherent to even activist work on the left? This training begins to unravel class and classism.

Anti-Heterosexism

Straight people have incredible privileges in our society. But what does this have to do with environmental activism? Everything. While straight people are affirmed in every aspect of culture, queer folks find themselves marginalized. This training is not for rabid homophobia, but for people who may think they've overcome heterosexism but probably still have subtle remnants of it in their actions and organizing.

Tampaction

Tampaction is SEAC's eco-feminist campaign. It is about the unhealthy consequences of tampons on menstruator's bodies, and how corporate control in general and male-corporate control in particular has affected people who mestruate (not all menstruators identify with female gender roles). The Tampaction campaign demands that the healthy alternatives to tampons that already exist be available in our communities and on our campuses.

Militarism and the Environment

The Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the United States. Forget Dow. Forget Exxon. It is the DoD that is the worst. It creates more hazardous waste than the five largest chemical companies--combined. The DoD acts with impunity, burying nuclear waste, perchlorate, heavy metals, and other substances hazardous to human health in the ground. It does this disproportionately in poor communities and communities of color. Militarism destroys at "peacetime" as well as during the act of war, which leaves depleted uranium weaponry, burnt and destroyed buildings, and wrecked infrastructure in its wake--not to mention ruined lives.

The Militarism and the Environment connects environmental destruction with the human costs of war, and aims to involve the environmental movement with the fight for peace and justice.

Youth Power Shift

Youth Power Shift is connected to the larger movement against global warming and for clean energy. But YPS adds a new dimension to its demands--one which the white, middle class community has long ignored. Dirty energy hurts communities of color and poor people disproportionately in this country. But many of the "alternatives" such as trash incineration do the same--raising cancer rates in neighborhoods under the false guise of environmentalism. YPS sees these communities as part of the environment. It demands realclean energy as an alternative to nuclear and fossil fuels.

Mountain Top Removal

In places across West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, corporate interests cut the tops off of mountains to get coal. They argue that it creates jobs, but it does no such thing--taking jobs from those who used to mine the coal. They argue that it is good for the area, but it is not. Mountain top removal fills up streams that normally carry off water and gets rid of trees--both of which lead to flooding. It fills hollars (valleys) with sludge and sediment which causes mudslides and avalaches. People's homes are destroyed, forests are removed, people and the world they live in are put in danger. And when the company is done, they leave devalued and endangered communities behind them and a scarred landscape that looks like pictures from the moon.

SEAC activists in West Virginia are part of the movement against Mountain Top Removal. Find out about how you can take part in this campaign for justice too!

Vieques

Vieques is a small island off of the mainland of Puerto Rico. Two-thirds of the island was used as a bombing range by the Department of Defense. The people of Vieques challenged this bombing with civil disobedience and direct action, and today the Department of Defense no longer bombs there. Nonetheless, the quest for justice is far from over, as the land is scarred and polluted, and the people impoverished by the government's abuses. The speakers on this topic are not part of SEAC, but took part in the civil disobedience movement itself in Vieques. SEAC is honored to be able to list them on our website, and we hope that you'll learn from them.

Ford is Addicted to Oil

Ford is the least-environmentally friendly car producer in the world. It's cars use oil more heavily than any other brand affiliation. The Rainforest Action Network is demanding zero emissions through solar power in its Jumpstart Ford campaign.

Weyerhauser Eats Old Growth Trees

Weyerhauser destroys forests at a greater rate than any other corporation in the United States. Rainforest Action Network is running a campaign to stop Weyerhauser before it destroys our forests.