About Us
“Organizing places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all.
Ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it.”
Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts
Organizing for Power is a global training program teaching the fundamental methods of organizing, to build mass movements that can win victories that transform people’s lives.
Our strategic advantage is numbers, and there are no shortcuts to transform the deeply troubled moment we find ourselves in. We must start building real power by engaging and organizing the people who don’t already agree with us, to build high-participation, strategic organizations that can win big.
Organizing methods are not intuitive or self-evident. Organizing is a craft we learn and never stop practicing.
Our trainings are:
- Participant-centered: with interactive exercises and break-out groups, allowing you to learn by doing, and start practicing the methods.
- Designed to strengthen your group’s campaign: including practical assignments and sessions to apply the methods to your own context.
- Led by experienced organizers, with on-the-ground experience of winning campaigns.
- Tried and tested by our participants, who have gone on to lead a number of successful campaigns in Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Germany, the USA, and countless more countries.
Our history
Organizing for Power was born in September 2019, impulsed by acclaimed labor organizer and educator Jane McAlevey, organized by O4P Coordinator Ethan Earle, and hosted by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
- September 2019: O4P’s pilot workshop attracts thousands of organizers, revealing an unmet need of progressive groups for new approaches to fight injustice.
- March 2020: An online training organized with five days’ notice aims to meet the fast-unfolding Covid crisis, once again attracting thousands of organizers.
- September 2020: O4P starts scaling up with Strike School, our first program requiring group registration, bringing together 3,000 organizers from 70 countries, with interpretation in 7 languages.
- May 2021: Our core skills program Workers Rising Everywhere kicks off a rhythm of yearly six-week organizing trainings for groups worldwide.
- January 2022: Our first one-off event, What Winning Looks Like, celebrates the victory of hospital workers in Berlin who applied the O4P methods.
- 2022-2025: The Core Fundamentals, our six-week training on the skills and methods to build majority-led structures and win campaigns, is run yearly.
- October 2022: Power and Participation, a new advanced training for O4P graduates, teaches the power of big, open negotiations in labour campaigns.
- December 2023: The Fight of Our Lives, an interview with Jane McAlevey where our founder turns the attention back to the audience: what do we need to do now to win more and better?
- July 2024: Our founder Jane McAlevey passes away at 59, after a long fight with cancer. We honoured her memory with an online community vigil.
- November 2025: Power-Up, our new core training, includes introductory and advanced trainings as well as Booster sessions, and links labor and community issues to offer more learning opportunities for non-labor groups. Register for our next training.
75% of our participants
Are trade unions and worker organizations, followed by housing and climate justice groups, other community organizations, civil society NGOs, and political parties.
FOUNDER
Jane McAlevey was O4P’s co-founder and lead trainer. She was an organizer, educator, and the author of numerous books on the subject of organizing.
Ethan is O4P’s Co-founder and General Coordinator. He has formerly worked at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s New York Office and The Working World. He lives in France.
Sarah is O4P’s Co-Coordinator. She has formerly worked at Corporate Europe Observatory and Agir Pour la Paix in Belgium and Campaign Against Arms Trade and Global Justice Now in the UK. She lives in Portugal.
Nadia is O4P’s Program Associate. She has a long history of engagement in national and international movements for social change, including building the Iraqi Social Forum. Since 2020 she has been O4P’s Arabic translator and interpreter. Nadia was born, raised, and is based in Baghdad.
Daniel is O4P's Community Coordinator. As an organizer, he has built campaigns and movements and worked for a wide range of organizations including The Left Party (whom he also represented as Member of Parliament), Solidarity Sweden-Latin America and Amnesty International. He works with the Zetkin Foundation and lives in Sweden.
Kirsten has formerly worked for the UC Berkeley Labor Center and SEIU Healthcare 1199NW, and was a member organizer for Teamsters Local 2010. She lives in the United States.
Clémence does communications work for O4P. She has formerly worked for Friends of the Earth Europe. She lives in Brussels.
Jollene is an O4P trainer. She works for United Teachers Los Angeles.
KB is an O4P trainer. She lives in Philadelphia and works for Bargaining for the Common Good.
Preethy is an O4P trainer. She lives in Toronto and works for the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
Lena is an O4P trainer. She lives in Hamburg, Germany and works for the service workers union ver.di.
Over the years, dozens of experienced trainers with on-hands experience with organizing and from all parts of the world have led and shaped our programs. Trainers Jollene Levid and Preethy Sivakumar have acted on an O4P leadership team since 2024. KB Brower and Lena Wachweger provide critical support on pedagogy, course preparation, and course materials.
Other trainers that have accompanied our journey over the years include Jon Hegerty, Susana Barria, Alejandra López, Antonio Marx, Frida Mwangi, Aidan Macdonald, John Paateri, Daniel Oberko, Lilia Rodríguez, Katie Miles, Gagandeep Kaur, Abigail Lawlor, Andrea García, Preeti Oza, Hong Bui, Pia Amerongen, Marissa Glidden, and Bora Mema.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to the enormous assistance provided over the years by Tamar Almog, Tsafrir Cohen, Jeff Rousset, Fanni Stolz, Florian Wilde, Julian Lattimore, Alan Sable, Peter Kuhns, Jo Grady, Marielle Benchehboune, Sudhir Katiyar, Rajiv Kumar, Luigi Wolf, Hasriadi Masalam, and Cynthia Phinney.
Our global program thrives thanks to the work of thousands of volunteers: group leads, breakout group facilitators, regional and language coordinators, and “friends and family” who provide all kinds of support behind the scenes. Our curriculum would not exist but for the input of thousands of workers who have put its ideas into practice.
Until 2024, O4P was a project of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, funded entirely by the foundation with public money from the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. Today, O4P operates as a fiscally-sponsored independent project, thanks to the support of a small number of forward-thinking foundations alongside a generous community of past participants and other individual supporters who have donated via our website.
Thanks to the ongoing support of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung-New York Office, we are proud to be able to make our programming available in a wide and growing number of languages spoken by global South-based participants. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.
We are eager to expand our collaborations with additional funders. Contact info@organizing4power.org if you are interested in supporting the program.
Watch Jane McAlevey talking about Organizing for Power:
