Upcoming Courses and Events

Passion to Action: Learn How to Advocate for Social Housing

Passion to Action: Learn How to Advocate for Social Housing

Brick by brick, learn how to advocate for social housing. 

Are you involved in the housing sector and passionate about making positive social change? This course is for you.

During this 8-week zoom workshop from the Institute for Change Leaders and the Douglas Coldwell Layton Foundation, lead instructors Melanie Matthews and Robb Johannes will teach you how to:

  • Tell your story to motivate others
  • Recruit and keep volunteers
  • Structure your team to avoid burnout and facilitate growth
  • Design a strategy that gets the change you want
  • Choose tactics that move decision-makers

You will learn through lectures and small group activities that will allow you to practice the skills we teach. You will work with an experienced organizer, who will facilitate your group and help you plan your organizing project. You will finish the course ready to tell your story, with a developed organizing statement, and tools to plan your organizing project's strategy and tactics.

This training will be held every Tuesday between April 11th to May 30th from 6pm-8pm ET. 

Crafting Narratives and Taking the Lead

Crafting Narratives and Taking the Lead

Join Sarah ElRaheb-Dagher, an educator and coach who specializes in teaching public narrative, organizing and leadership, for an in-depth series on the public narrative.

This training will take place over zoom, on April 5th, 2023. The session will be 3 hours long, from 6pm-9pm ET. 

Session Breakdown: 

Session #1 - Introduction to "Leading Through Disruptive Change": In this introductory session, participants will learn, experientially, how narrative responses in moments of disruptive change can either enable your "us" to act with agency, or inhibit the agency of your people. Public narrative is about exercising leadership by translating your values, and those of others, into the emotional capacity to respond to challenges with strategic agency, as opposed to reacting with avoidance or fear. In this part, we focus on how to meet the leadership challenge of building an empathetic bridge through which we can enable others to respond with agency to four key forms of disruption: loss, difference, power, and change.

Do you have a desire to step up and fight for a better, fairer, more just world? Our trainings are for you.

The Institute for Change Leaders (ICL) teaches the skills that organizers, activists and campaigners need to win social change. Our core curriculum comes from Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor who codified the relationship-building organizational framework we teach after years of organizing with the Civil Rights and United Farm Workers movements.

"This was the best training I have completed in many years. The instructors were knowledgeable and the feedback from them has helped me in addressing the challenges in my advocacy campaigns. I highly recommend this training to anyone who is thinking of changing our world for the better."

- 2021 spring program graduate

Our flagship training on the fundamentals of community organizing teaches how to build power and win change. Usually held once per week over eight separate two-hour sessions, the Building Skills for Change program is based on the mastery of five key leadership practices: telling stories, building relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, and acting:

1. How to articulate a story of why we are called to lead, a story of the community we hope to mobilize, and a story of why we must act now.

2. How to build intentional relationships as the foundation of purposeful collective actions.

3. How to create structure that distributes power and responsibility and prioritizes leadership development.

4. How to strategize turning your resources into the power to achieve clear goals.

5. How to translate strategy into measurable, motivational, and effective action.

We offer a number of different training options, in-person or online, from multi-day courses on the fundamentals of community organizing to single evening sessions on specialized skills like social media and public speaking.

Take a look at our course offerings below. Don't see what you're looking for? Drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll work with you to develop a custom program that meets your needs.

Seniors’ care first. Bickering later.

We are calling for a true national plan for seniors’ care. 

Celebrating 10,000 Stories of Change: ICL's 2022 Annual Report

Learn about the incredible impact that ICL has made this year in our 2022 Annual Report!

Rahat's Story

Rahat's Story

Learn about Rahat's amazing story of health justice and equity!

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The Institute for Change Leaders is a Canadian registered charity that can issue official donation receipts (no. 763310679 RR 0001). ICL is brought to you by the Faculty of Community Services at Toronto Metropolitan University.

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