Building on a successful training program that has provided skills and training for thousands of students over the last 50 years, the Student PIRGs’ Civic Leadership Training Program will provide students the training they need to run effective campaigns in their community. Students who complete the program will receive a badge of completion on LinkedIn and opportunities for future leadership during the school year.
Skills you will learn
- Building a team of student volunteers and leaders
- How to use peer-to-peer tactics to mobilize students (phonebanking, class announcements, and in person events)
- Organizing strategic in person and online actions and events
- Developing campaign coalitions
- And more!
Expectations
This virtual, 3 week program will run multiple times in the months of May, June, and July. There will be about 4 hours of activist class each week and an additional 4-6 hours of independent work to be completed and reported by Friday afternoons. Students should expect to a 8-10 hours/week commitment
In addition to participating in weekly activist class, students will also join campaign teams to organize a campaign action in their community by the end of the program. Campaign teams may work on issues areas such as:
- New Voters Project
- Affordable Textbooks
- Save the Bees
- Hunger and Homelessness
- Break Free From Plastics
- Restoring America’s Wildlife
- And more
Training Calendar
Here is the schedule for the various training cycles this summer. We will run the same 3 week training multiple times over the course of the summer. We will also run a 2 day boot camp, an accelerated version of the program.
|
Start Date |
End Date |
Duration |
|
|
Training Cycle #1 |
5/22 |
6/9 |
3 weeks |
|
Training Cycle #2 |
6/12 |
6/30 |
3 weeks |
|
Training Cycle #3 |
7/10 |
7/28 |
3 weeks |
|
Activist Training Boot Camp #1 |
8/1 |
8/2 |
2 days |
|
Activist Training Boot Camp #2 |
8/19 |
8/20 |
2 days |
Meet some of our graduates
Quanzelle Austrie, Class of 2023, University of South Florida
Quanzelle is the Florida Campus Outreach Intern and New Voters Project Campaign Coordinator for University of South Florida. As a PIRG student leader, she worked with the Bulls Vote Coalition to help their campus earn an ALL IN Campus Democracy Goal Seal by achieving a student voting rate of 74.7%, an eleven percentage point increase from 2016. Quanzelle is working with vote coalition partners to help students from all four campuses at USF replicate her success and participate in the midterm election.
Andres Cubillos, Class of 2024, Florida State University
Andres Cubillos is a 3rd year political science and international affairs double major at Florida State University. Andres helped establish Florida PIRg Students at FSU’s first club in 2020 as the Campaign Coordinator for the New Voters Project Campaign and helped increase FSU precinct voter turnout by 13%. Andres now works as the external affairs and outreach chair focusing on club building and coalition development.
Maria Ayala, Class of 2022, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Maria was a PIRG student leader in North Carolina at UNC – Charlotte and joined our team to work full-time organizing students in the state. Since graduating, Maria hit the ground running, working with a dozen college campuses in North Carolina to help them create and hone their campus civic engagement action plans leading up to the November elections.
Hanna Lesiak, Class of 2023, Northwestern University
Hanna, a student and member of the women’s volleyball team at Northwestern University, worked with our national partners at All Vote No Play and Athletes Unlimited to organize a panel and training for student athletes to learn how to train their teams to become civically active this fall.
Sydney Greenway, Class of 2024, Wayne State University
Sydney is a 2nd-year urban studies and sociology double major at Wayne State University. As president of PIRGIM Campus Action at WSU, Sydney has worked to further establish PIRGIM on WSU’s campus and strengthen relations with PIRGIM clubs across Michigan. She worked as campaign coordinator for the New Voters Project at WSU ahead of the 2022 Midterm Election where she mobilized students on her own campus and others in the Detroit area.