A reflection from Michaela Mujica-Steiner, student leader with Fossil Free Northern Arizona University and Fossil Fuel Divestment Student network
Michaela was a mentor in the Fossil Free Training Corps program which skilled up 18 student trainers, and 6 mentors, with training skills to increase the capacity of the student divestment movement. This involved writing collaborative curriculum, attending a week-long training for trainers, and giving trainings throughout the fall. We believe training is an integral part of powerful movements – to develop more comprehensive strategies, build strong teams, and bring more people in. More reflection on training and divestment here. This is the first of multiple blog posts reflecting on the program.
Being a mentor in the 350.org Training Corps program has supported me in understanding, not just how trainings can support individual leadership development, but also how crucial trainings are to movement building on a broad level. In the program, I organized and facilitated bi-weekly peer-to-peer mentorship calls, bi-weekly discussion calls, and wrote national training curriculum. Through this entire process, I have come to believe trainings are a huge part of what allows movements to be fluid and sustainable so as to incorporate new ideas and principles to meet the current political context. The more I have engaged with the Training Corp program, the more I’ve realized how important both skilled and politically educated leaders are to the success of both individual campaigns and to this broader movement. Our administrations strategically wait for student leaders to graduate and for campaigns to die. For example, as a senior working on the Fossil Free Northern Arizona University (FFNAU) campaign, I have found assurance that my own campus campaign will continue beyond my own involvement because of the training we’ve done on the campus. Just a couple weekends ago, we held a training for the FFNAU team that dove specifically into power and campaign strategy. As a core team, we became more aligned around a common vision and strategy and some knowledge that I possess was passed onto new leaders. Through this process, they are now supported to hold strategy and campaign skills, hence providing on-boards for increased campaign engagement.
The author painting a banner for the People’s Climate March
Just as with my own campaign, I have found that trainings supported all my mentees’ campus campaigns through the dissemination of movement and campaign knowledge. For example, we worked through and talked about how trainings were supporting the growth and development of core teams. By implementing a training culture, we support leaderful movements that can weather the storm of student turnover. A training culture ensures that campaigns don’t just die when a leader leaves and thus training continues to expand the power and capacity of our movements to create the political and social realities we envision for this world.
Being a mentor in the Training Corp has meant more than helping to build up the collective knowledge and muscle to actually win this fight– my participation in this program has also given me the opportunity to grow in my own leadership, understanding and insight regarding how I can be a better mentor and support in student organizing work. As unrealistic or silly as it may sound, I came into the Training Corp with a mistaken idea that the ‘teacher or mentor’ is an all-knowing possessor of movement knowledge and I was gladly proven wrong. Mainstream society tends to teach us that the ‘mentor’ or ‘teacher’ will simply pass on information to a student. Yet this sort of non-reciprocal relationship is founded on the understanding of ‘the student’ as an empty vessel, devoid of their own personal knowledge and experiences. Since the people I were mentoring were full of amazing knowledge and inner wisdom, I found myself learning as much from my mentees as they were hopefully able to learn from me. I want to share with you what my experiences as a mentor in the Training Corp have taught me about supporting folks in this movement. The main topics I will specifically be diving into are how I was best able to adapt national goals and priorities to fit local contexts and how I worked with my mentees’ personal experiences to help them reach new insights about training and organizing.
The goal of the Training Corps was to deepen the training skills of the fossil fuel divestment movement through supporting 18 national student leaders to attend a training for trainers, lead trainings and deepen their political education. Each mentor in the program was teamed up with three mentees to support them in flexing and growing their training skills. As a national mentor I honestly felt stressed about being able to meet mentees where they were at and still support these folks in meeting the national Training Corp goals and outcomes. Each student in the program faced unique training and campaign dilemmas therefore requiring me to adapt national goals and priorities to work for individual leaders. What this often looked like was me scratching or modifying an intentionally crafted call agenda, as my mentees knew their contexts best; often the emergence of the moment produced the most fruitful content to work with that allowed national training goals to be adapted to local contexts. In order to do this, I had to let go of my own preconceived notions of success, and actually meet people in the program where they were at.
I remember a specific conversation that I had planned with one of the students in the program that was going to be about prepping for an upcoming meeting. I had planned the call with what success meant in my mind– that they would introduce certain topics at the meeting to move forward their campus campaign goals that we had previously talked about. Yet when I got on the call, I found that my assumptions about where the student’s team was at that week weren’t on point and I quickly had to shift the focus on the call to talk through new issues that were coming up for them. All in all, the call ended up being super productive, even if my mentorship had not helped in moving the campaign in where I envisioned it going. If I had attempted to push my own agenda on that campaign, it would not have worked in supporting the leader in where that team was actually at and what they were currently struggling with. And even if it seems like this approach would not meet national goals and priorities, I soon learned that I needed to leave space on each call to talk about what was happening on the ground with campaigns so as to inform the topics of the call with mentees. This open space on calls helped me in understanding what was really going on in the lives of student campaigners and I found that mentorship was most relevant when it was grounded in real experiences and relationships. This emergent design on calls allowed my own support to be individualized and adapted to meet specific campaign contexts, while still meeting national goals and priorities. By letting go of my own preconceived notions of what success means and looks like, I was able to fully meet people where they were at and support them in coming up with their own solutions to obstacles.
I also want to share a bit about my experience with the phrase and belief in ‘the personal is political’. I am not sure I truly understood this phrase before my work with the Training Corp, and perhaps I still don’t. But I truly found that often the most transformative work I was able to do in calls with mentees surrounded the personal, the major life shifts and decisions mentees were facing; I often found that ‘the political’ impacted their personal lives and vice versa. Hence I found myself often trying to emotionally support student trainers through difficult times in their lives and I grew in having to find a balance between providing emotional support and not taking on other people’s feelings and emotions. This balance is important to maintain because oftentimes personal life experiences and oppressions impact how we train and organize so it’s very important to pull out these experiences in order for folks to grow. Yet it can detrimental to leadership development to simply wallow in past experiences. I was able to create this balance by creating my own parameters around how I would utilize emotional material that came up on calls for politicization– rather than just having students sit in the emotional tension, I found myself able to productively use this tension to politicize student trainers. This emotional support often looked like me both affirming students with where they were, but also challenging them to move past emotional barriers that were holding them back or not serving them anymore. Not only did this allow my own self to maintain healthy emotional boundaries with student trainers, this balance of affirming and challenging students gave folks permission to dig deep and use this raw material for political transformation.
When students would move past these emotional barriers that were holding them back, they often had to face personal narratives they had been telling themselves their entire lives. Therefore, I often challenged my mentees to take risks to move past personal oppression. While thinking about this, a particular story comes to mind. One of the students I was working with was struggling with coalition building and working with groups across their campus. In conversations with them, we dug up that one of the main things holding them back from engaging in coalition building was a personal fear of making mistakes. While this fear may not have seemed particularly relevant to campaigning, it seeped into their ability to build relationships across issues. Since this was a root cause of what was preventing them from doing coalitional work, it became very important to pull out this challenge and work with this particular fear. In order to do this, we had to dig deeply into what personal experiences had informed this fear and create next steps that challenged this student to take risks around trying new things that did not guarantee a winnable result.
Furthermore, I often found that a focus on the ‘personal’ in mentorship calls allowed students to apply organizing concepts to their own lives, helping them to realistically grapple with abstract ideas and frameworks. For example, I found that the concepts of privilege and oppression did not become real until mentees could see how these concepts actually played out in their own lives. Especially toward the end of my calls, I made a very intentional effort to always have mentees relate trainings and frameworks to their own lives, replicating what is known as an experiential education cycle to the intentional design of call agendas. This education cycle starts with people’s experiences and uses those experiences to support folks in producing new insights about certain topics and frameworks. In relation to my mentorship calls, I allowed the student trainer’s experiences to help guide the content of the calls in order to reach new insights and personal breakthroughs with training.This required me to exercise a balance between sharing the knowledge I possessed as a mentor, while also evoking the wisdom students had from their own experiences. Therefore I had to design mentorship calls to be flexible and adaptive, to be led by the student’s own experiences, while still being guided by my own expertise.
In closing, the Training Corp has helped me to become more adaptive in my own support skills. It gave me an opportunity to grow in how I could modify national goals to fit local campaign contexts and helped me to support students in connecting their own personal experiences with their campus contexts. I had to take risks in challenging students to dig into what was holding them back from being their most powerful selves. The most transformative work I was able to do in calls with student trainers surrounded the personal, the major life shifts and decisions my mentees were facing. Students’ own experiences were very fruitful for helping to guide the content of our calls together. This growth extended beyond my mentees to their campus campaigns, as they used trainings to help develop other leaders on their campaigns. This supported campaigns to generate and maintain collective knowledge about strategic campaigning and political education. I am still exploring the role of training in movement building but have come to realize we will only be as successful as the investment we put into our leaders and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a part of that process.