Immigration Movement Building Training

Las Vegas, NV (4/10-4/11) Reading:  Click here to download the first reading, an excerpt from, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi

Las Vegas, NV (4/10-4/11) Reading:  Click here to download the second reading, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Click here to download a flyer with information about each training!

Click here to download the Montgomery Bus Boycott reading.

Read about Members of Our Current Training Team!

Jose Luis Marantes

Jose Luis Marantes currently serves as National Youth Organizer for the Center for Community Change working closely with the Reform Immigration For America campaign. Marantes also serves as a founding board member and programming chair of the United We Dream Network, a national network lead by immigrant youth working to pass the DREAM Act and Immigration Reform. Prior to joining CCC, Marantes served as the youth organizer for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, organizing Students Working For Equal Rights, a statewide immigrant youth-lead organization working for equal access to higher education for immigrants.  His work has focused on developing young immigrant leaders to become full stakeholders in the struggle for immigrant rights and equality for all youth and their families.

Michele Rudy

Michele Rudy has been organizing for immigrant rights since 2002 with the MIRA Coalition and the Student Immigrant Movement in Massachusetts. Her particular interest is in youth leadership and development. She is currently teaching and training with Professor Marshall Ganz at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Check Out Members of Our Training Teams from our CO & FL Trainings!

Marshall Ganz

Marshall Ganz entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. In 1964, a year before graduating, he left to volunteer as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi. In 1965, he joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers; over the next 16 years he gained experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing and became Director of Organizing. During the 1980s, he worked with grassroots groups to develop effective organizing programs, designing innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and, after a 28-year leave of absence, completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. During the 2008 presidential elections, he was involved in developing curriculum and strategy for mass volunteer trainings for the Obama campaign, referred to as "Camp Obama." He was awarded an MPA by the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000. He teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, organization, and strategy in social movements, civic associations, and politics.

Joy Cushman

Joy Cushman is Organizing Director at the New Organizing Institute in Washington, DC.  Joy grew up on a potato farm in Northern Maine and first learned to organize in the Baptist Church she grew up in during the conservative movement of the 1980s and '90s.  While a student at Bowdoin College, she organized with other scholarship students to defend need-blind admissions and to raise awareness of socioeconomic diversity on campus.  Joy studied American and British labor movements during her doctoral studies at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.  She then returned to organizing as a community organizer for the Merrimack Valley Project, a faith-based organizing project in Massachusetts working on affordable housing and immigrant worker justice campaigns.  Joy worked most recently as co-Coordinator for the Obama Organizing Fellows Program, and as a trainer and Deputy Field Director in several states during Barack Obama's campaign for President.

Jake Waxman

Jake Waxman is a Teaching Assistant in Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government.  Jake grew up on Maui, Hawaii, where he learned the value of community at his family's house, which served both as an informal gathering place for people of all walks of life and a synagogue for the island's small Jewish population.  He first got involved with organizing as a student at Emory University, where he helped found the Emory Living Wage Coalition, through which students joined with the University's service workers to organize for improved wages and working conditions.  Upon graduating, Jake moved to Argentina where he learned the arts of political organizing and Spanish while working at a local NGO.  When he returned to the United States, he returned to the labor movement, organizing healthcare workers in California with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).  Jake recently received his Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School, where he helped teach courses on leadership and organizing.

 
Cristobal Lagunas

Cristobal Lagunas, an immigrant from Chile, came to the United States in 2002. Upon arrival, Cris realized that this journey was not going to be easy. Having to face many barriers due to his lack of immigration status, he realized that it was time to do something to fix the situation. And so he decided to become involved in the Student Immigrant Movement.  The Student Immigrant Movement (SIM) was founded in 2005 by a group of immigrant students from Boston, MA who were faced with the challenge of not having equal access to higher education because of their immigration status. SIM is comprised of the hundreds of students and supporters that have been working on the In-State Tuition and Dream Act Campaigns since 2002. Cris has played an active role in these efforts and hopes to continue fighting for fairness and equality.

Carlos Saavedra

Carlos Saavedra, an immigrant from Peru, came to the United States in 1998. Facing the harsh reality of being an immigrant in the United States, he felt as if no one was working to fix the broken system. In 2001, one of his high school teachers challenged him, along with a group of classmates to discuss these issues and potentially act to make their own situation better. That led to the formation of the Campaign for Equal Access to Higher Education for Immigrant Students. After 2 years of campaigning, Carlos and several other students founded The Student Immigrant Movement (SIM).  As the lead organizer of SIM, Carlos was chosen as the 2006 Recipient of the New Bostonian Youth Leadership Award presented by the mayor's Office of New Bostonians. To this day, Carlos continues to lead the organization, along with a team of organizers, to fight and to obtain justice for our immigrant community.