This session will be led by Leiland Woods, Head Organizer of Georgia ACORN, and low-income ACORN members from Florida and other states. Several allied organizations have been invited to join in the organizing of this workshop as well. This session will focus on the nexus of race, class, place, and power. It will focus on the power of place as a locus for achieving racial and economic justice, and for altering broader power relations in society.

The session will start with some participatory exercises to engage and assess the audience, and to make sure the relevant lessons and take-aways are achieved. Specifically, we have some dynamic exercises that are fun and get people thinking about power. The workshop will also use some pre-prepared case studies to highlight effective organizing strategies. We will look at two types of campaigns here:
anti-predatory lending campaigns and living wage campaigns. We will also riff off the issues that bring the participants to the workshop.

Some of the key lessons of the session will be:

*How to think about building mass-based movement organizations that engage oppressed communities in fighting back on their terms;
*Insight and practical street-level organizing lessons that participants can take back to their communities;
*Thoughts on how to manage the inevitable tension between movement and organization, between short term mobilization and long-term organizing;
*Concrete insights into specific racial and economic justice strategies, including those raised by the group.

Some logistics of the workshop include:

*Spanish translation will be provided;
*We will prepare a substantial amount of useful materials, both concrete and theoretical, in English and Spanish.