Getting Involved

You can sign up with ACT to receive information about upcoming events and courses. Joining the ACT outreach list also provides the opportunity to share your ideas for workshops and your knowledge about popular education, social justice activism and practicum learning opportunities.

Why Should I participate?

You’ll connect with communities of people interested in the relationship between theory and action. You’ll learn to function as a collective and represent shared interests, visions, and goals. You’ll learn from activists who train and empower individuals and organizations. You’ll develop skills to promote and extend your knowledge and practice, and to share your resources. All of ACT's programs are designed to give you the tools you need to promote the issues and coordinate the projects you care about in practical ways.

We welcome groups and individuals from diverse backgrounds to participate in: activist retreats and workshops, innovative courses, practicum learning opportunities, networking and research.

Through ACT's workshops and programs you can learn a number of skills that will contribute to self-empowerment and a sense of hope for social change. You’ll learn how to; network and consolidate, support one another’s efforts, learn about issues that affect us all, stay informed, and inspire others to care about the good of the whole, move beyond individual lives/interests/investments, see how we intersect to affect social policy, champion issues that redress inequities, challenge the status quo. Through ACT you can explore opportunities to connect and work with others. This is how we can make a difference.

How do I know that anything I say or do can make the world a better place?

DOING SOMETHING IS BETTER THAN DOING NOTHING.

What’s in it for me?

Skill building:

First-hand, up-front, grass roots, on-the-street knowledge about how an organization

• tackles issues, runs programs, builds capacity/community;
• represents its interests and advocates for peace and justice;

with a focus on tool boxes, community-based learning, integrated approaches that relate theory and practice.

Learning to:

• lobby and advocate;

• develop plans and actions that will speak forcefully and alter the status quo;

• share knowledge within the classroom and the community;

• encourage intersections and interactions that build bridges among learning communities;

• take on specific course actions that respond to issues as critical as the genocide in Darfur.

Inch by inch and step by step -- becoming friends to one another in this way.

Immersion in the work of organizations committed to promoting peace, justice, equity, literacy:

• direct, hands-on involvement that extends our understanding of the work to be done;

• opening up of perspectives, challenging assumptions and expectations, feeling and seeing what our contributions look like, how we matter in relation to how the organizations matter;

• making -- and seeing -- the connections between theory and practice;

• building lifelong learning capacities and commitments beyond the end of an individual course and beyond the boundaries of the institution that runs the course;

• intersecting with activist initiatives in the community