Popular Education Workshops 2025-2026

What does it look like to truly trust in the wisdom of the collective? To intentionally create spaces where that wisdom can come forward both playfully and intellectually? How can we, as organizers, educators, and community-based facilitators build a practice of deep democracy every time we hold space for groups?

Exploring these questions and more with hundreds of practitioners from all over the country, especially given all that's happening politically, has been powerful. It has reminded me that...

We are not alone.

Both in-person and online, so many practitioners who join us express how good it is to connect and remember that we are not alone in our efforts to build truly democratic spaces, where community members experience being genuinely seen and heard. 

True democracy takes re-humanization.

Popular education means 'education by and for the people.' It is inherently democratic because popular education involves people coming together to assess an issue via their own lived experience and then to engage in creative problem-solving together to address the issue in ways that contribute to our collective liberation. That is, in and of itself, how we remember what it means to be truly human. I think this is one of the reasons people leave our popular education trainings energized. Reconnecting to ourselves and each other is energizing. Remembering our power to affect change and transformation is liberating.

Dialogue is magical.

The exchange of insights and ideas to better understand and transform our conditions, or dialogue, is one of our most valuable skills as human beings. And yet, we hardly use it. Dialogue has been replaced with diatribe and one-directional discourse. And yet our capacity for dialogue is right there under the surface like a seed waiting to be watered. As facilitators of popular education we can create the conditions for groups to see themselves as sources of collective wisdom and to seek that wisdom together to accomplish shared goals. In one of our last popular education workshops, we had a dialogue about whether or not a true democracy was possible in the United States. Wide-ranging opinions arose, but when we shared the thoughts and values behind our stances, people saw themselves reflected in one another. Through dialogue we were able to align on a shared, nuanced, stance about the possibility of true democracy in the US.

We are looking forward to many more Popular Education workshop spaces where we connect to rebuild democracy from the grassroots up.