Summer 2025 Organizer Leadership Training Program

Organizer Leadership Training Program

The Student PIRGs and Green Corps train thousands of young organizers every year. Our training program is built on more than 50 years of experience, organizing students and community members around the country on some of the most pressing issues of the day. 

Our training programs don’t just talk about the issues, we train organizers to take real action, from reducing the use of toxic pesticides in Colorado to educating thousands of students about the issues of fast fashion on college campuses across the country. Here are some of our accomplishments this past year. 

The goal of this program is to give you hands-on experience organizing campaign actions in your community. 

This summer we are launching local campaign actions to:

• Stop fast fashion practices and promote sustainable alternatives
• Clean up our waterways of plastic pollution 
• Address local community food and housing needs 
• Protect endangered species 
• Stop wasteful practices by ensuring people have the tools and resources to fix their own stuff

Participants should expect to learn the skills and implement them immediately by engaging community members at local farmers markets, hosting educational events at local libraries, and talking to decision-makers like the mayor and city council members.

You will have the opportunity to learn from some of the top social change organizers with decades of experience in campaign work. Graduates of our program continue their organizing work into the school year with new leadership skills and professional connections with top-student leaders around the country. 

Students who complete the program will receive the Organizer Leadership Certificate and a campaign leadership badge for each completed project you work on. These include:

• Environmental Conservation Leader Badge 
• Waste is out of Fashion Leader Badge
• Youth Vote Leader Badge
• Textbook Affordability Leader Badge

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How it works

There are two components of the program:

1. Learn the skills: Attend our Activist Classes and learn the skills to be an effective organizer. Learn how to make change on environmental issues from experts in the field 
2. Make an impact: Work on urgent campaigns with a team of students across the country and run a local project to make a difference in your community 

The program takes place over the course of 4 weeks over the summer. We have flexible start and end dates to work around your schedule. Participants should expect to have a 10 hours/week commitment to complete the full program. Here is a general breakdown of a 4 week program: 

• Week 1: Attend a virtual Activist Bootcamp to learn the basics of grassroots organizing and choose a Campaign Project you want to organize in your community. Some in-person trainings available.
• Week 2 – Week 4: Work with a campaign coordinator to implement your plan. You will receive one-on-one guidance with an experienced organizer remotely while you organize in your own community. The goal of this project is to give you hands-on experience educating your community about the issues and advocating to decision-makers. 
• Week 4: Work with our Career Experts to get connected with future opportunities in social change organizing, including: internships, campaign leadership roles, part-time and full-time jobs. By completing the full program, you will earn your certificate and campaign badge. You can earn multiple badges over the course of the summer. 

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Learn the Skills

Learn organizing and leadership skills from experienced organizers to help you effectively engage your community on the issues you care about. Here are some of the skills you will learn:

• How to craft and deliver and campaign and personal story
• 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!

You will also have a chance to learn from leading experts in various issue fields to apply the latest insights and learning to your organizing work. 

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Make an Impact on Issues

Students will join campaign teams of students to organize a campaign action in their community by the end of the program. In addition to skills training, you will have one-on-one support from campaign coordinators who will help you create a plan to achieve the goals for your specific campaign. 

By completing the goals of the project, you will receive the campaign leadership badge. Our campaign projects this summer include:

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Waste is out of Fashion

The fashion and clothing industry generates massive amounts of waste — and emits a lot of pollution in the process. Clothing and other textile waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the country. Around the world, the equivalent of one dump truck filled with clothing is sent to a landfill or incinerator every second, and more than $100 billion worth of materials are wasted each year. 

What makes this waste all the more outrageous is that millions of these clothing items are never even worn. A staggering 30% of all clothes made around the world are never sold. 

Campaign Actions:

1. Create a thrift and sustainable store guide. Publicize (online and in person) in your local community
2. Host a community educational event. Some ideas
   1. Host a Thrift store tour and educate people about the importance of sustainable fashion. 
   2. Host a sewing group workshop for basic garment repairs
   3. Host a clothing swap 
3. Get local thrift stores and businesses to sign on to a letter of support 

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Break Free From Plastics

Plastic pellets, known as nurdles, are tiny beads of plastic made from gas or oil. They are used to make water bottles, plastic bags and countless other items. Lightweight and numerous, they often spill during transport. Once in the environment, these tiny pellets can cause huge problems. 

Host a Nurdle Hunt at a local beach, river,or waterway to look for plastic pellet pollution and record what they find, so we can all have a better understanding of where this pollution is happening.

Campaign Actions:

1. Create a data report of your nurdle hunt to present to local decision makers and educate the public 
2. Host a nurdle hunt at a local beach, river, or waterway. Bring some friends and ID other volunteers in the community to work with 
3. Get media coverage by inviting media to your event or writing a letter to the editor 

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Save the Bees

Bee populations are dying off at an alarming rate and without these important pollinators we wouldn’t have many of the foods we enjoy today. In short, no bees means no food. So we are encouraging our campuses and local communities to make commitments to become Bee Friendly.

Campaign Actions:

1. Create a guide about native bees in your area. Educate your community by collecting petitions and passing out the guide
2. Host a community educational event. Some ideas:
   1. Hold an educational table at your local Farmers Market or Library
   2. Host a pot painting or seed planting action 
   3. Partner with a local restaurant and have them label everything that is pollinated by bees
3. Meet with your City Council Members and Mayor about making a Bee Friendly City Commitment 

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Hunger and Homelessness

No one should have to worry about whether they will have food on their plate or a roof over their head. But the reality is that hunger and homelessness are widespread problems that affect far too many people. There are a lot of ways to address the issue from volunteering locally, educating community members about the issue, and advocating for policy solutions.

Campaign Actions:

1. Create a service project guide and publicize in your local community
2. Recruit some friends to participate in a local service project in your community 
3. Get 3 community organizations to sign on as a PIRG Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week partner 

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Right to Repair

Companies don’t make things like they used to, and that’s a big problem. Manufacturers of cell phones, medical devices, appliances and even tractors have implemented various legal, digital and physical barriers that prevent consumers from doing their own repairs or using independent repair shops.

The result is a massive amount of waste — in fact, electronic waste is now the fastest growing waste stream in the world. Americans purchase about 160 million new smartphones each year — a habit that takes some 23.7 million tons of raw material to satisfy. Continuing to extract, produce and consume electronics at this rate is simply not sustainable.

Campaign Actions:

1. Create a local repair guide to highlight local repair shops and resources in your community 
2. Host an educational event at a farmers market or local library. Work with local groups to do a presentation on repair 
3. Get media coverage by inviting media to your event or writing a letter to the editor 

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Training Calendar 

Here is the schedule for the various training cycles this summer. After attending an Activist Training Boot Camp you will start your 4 week program cycle. 

We will also hold a number of supplementary trainings to help you effectively work on your organizing projects. 

Training Program	Time of Boot Camp	Date of Boot Camp	End Date of Training Cycle
Activist Boot Camp Virtual Session #1	5 – 8pm ET // 2 – 5pm PT	5/12	6/7
Activist Boot Camp Virtual Session #2	5 – 8pm ET // 2 – 5pm PT	5/27	6/21
Activist Boot Camp Virtual Session #3	5 – 8pm ET // 2 – 5pm PT	6/9	7/5
Activist Boot Camp Virtual Session #4	12 – 3pm ET // 9 – 12pm PT	6/22	7/19
Activist Boot Camp Virtual Session #5	5 – 8pm ET // 2 – 5pm PT	7/7	8/2
Activist Boot Camp Virtual Session #6	12 – 3pm ET // 9 – 12pm PT	7/20	8/16

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Issue Specific Trainings and Briefings 

Trainings will be added throughout the summer. Some times and dates are subject to change.

New Voters Project

Young people represent the largest group of potential voters in the county, but our voices are not heard because we don’t vote consistently in elections. Learn how to make your campus #voteready for upcoming local elections by building a vote coalition on your campus and making a vote action plan.

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Protect our Endangered Species – Save the Whales, Wolves, and more

Many species like the Florida Panther, Right Whale, and Grey Wolf, are at risk of going extinct. There are many causes of this so we are educating our local communities about the importance of protecting these special animals. May 16th is Endangered Species Day, so we are calling our decision makers at all levels of government to protect these at risk populations.

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Student PIRGs Program Highlights

This past year, our student leaders took action in 47 states and Washington DC, this past year to protect the environment, alleviate poverty, make textbooks more affordable, and get their peers engaged in elections. Students on 350 college campuses and high schools took more than 42,000 actions on our campaigns, from signing a petition to organizing a service event in their community. We trained more than 1,000 student volunteers led by 300 coordinators who took on a major leadership role. We also trained over 300 students in our Summer Activist Bootcamps. 

Meet our student leadership from clubs across the country! Here are some of their stories below:

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Calling on Companies to make Waste out of Fashion – Spring 2025

Billions of garments of clothes are manufactured every year and about a third of it is never sold. Many companies actually burn and throw away this overstock. These fast fashion practices are destroying our environment and producing way too much stuff that we just don’t need. Student PIRG Clubs across the country kicked off our Waste is out of Fashion this Spring to call H&M to change their practices and educated thousands of people about more sustainable ways to repair, reuse, and recycle clothing. 

Our team of student leaders and volunteers at Georgia State, led by Waste is out of Fashion Coordinator Tammy Joseph, recruited nine local fashion designers who created amazing pieces of clothing for 25 student models. More than 200 people showed up to participate and learn more about sustainable fashion! On Earth Day, we will deliver more than 20,000 public comments to H&M to call for change

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Creating Hunger-Free Campuses and Communities – Winter 2025

No one should have to worry about whether they will have food on their plate but the reality is that hunger and homelessness are widespread problems that affect far too many people, including students on college campuses. In North Carolina, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have worked to address this on their campus and in the local community by donating more than a thousand basic needs items and food. NCPIRG Students Co-President, Mide Olajide coordinates the Hunger and Homelessness Campaign. This past winter they hosted an event with dozens of student volunteers who made more than 500 sandwiches they donated to the Durham Health Coalition to distribute to families in need.

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Turning Out New Voters in Michigan – Fall 2024

PIRGIM Club President at Michigan State, Lucas Gravett (Second from Right) built a team of more than 30 student volunteers and coordinators starting from scratch. Over the course of the semester their campaign made more than 10,000 get-out-the-vote contacts with Spartans helping them register and ultimately turn out to vote. The students focused on peer-to-peer tactics to educate classmates and help them get registered to vote. They made announcements in classes, called hundreds of students in the days leading up to Election Day and hosted events like A Plan to Vote and Pet a Goat to make voting fun and engaging. Before the voter registration deadline, they connected with their peers at Lansing Community College to help students get registered to vote there.

The on-campus polling location reported a 66% turnout rate. This represents a 44 percentage point increase from the 2020 voter turnout rate (23.9%) at these same polling locations when we had a much more limited peer-to-peer presence on campus.

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Make Textbooks Affordable – Stop Automatic Textbook Billing – Summer 2024

Textbooks often come with exorbitant prices that strain students’ budgets. Our Affordable Textbooks campaign works to alleviate these burdens by advocating for more options for students including free open textbooks and other resources. Over the last several years, we have been tackling the issue of automatic textbook billing, or “inclusive access” programs that automatically bills students for the cost of their course materials unless they opt out. 

Julia Trachtman, student leader with our PennPIRG Students club at the University of Pennsylvania, helped raise awareness about this issue by educating fellow students, faculty, and administrators on her campus. She also got an opinion editorial published in the Pittsburgh Gazette. 

“Inclusive access” would be more inclusive if students could choose whether or not they want to buy a textbook instead of automatically being billed.” – Julia Trachtman, PennPIRG Students

Student leaders like Julia worked across the country calling attention to this issue by directly educating their campus stakeholders, advocating for solutions to leaders in Washington D.C., and releasing resources like the latest Student PIRGs report: Automatic Textbook Billing: Limited Choice, Uncertain Savings. In Spring 2025, Julia led a team of students from Pennsylvania to Washington D.C. where they met with their members of Congress calling on them to support textbook affordability. 

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Alternative Spring Break to Protect the Environment – Spring 2024

While many students spent their spring breaks partying or taking a break from the semester, PIRG students from across the east coast went to Atlanta, Georgia to support our team at Georgia State University on their campaigns to stop a proposed titanium mine near the Okefenokee Swamp and educate Georgians about how they can save money and fight climate change through the Inflation Reduction Act. GeorgiaPIRG President at Georgia State University Caleb Gustavson (Front Left) and the student team educated hundreds of community members about the campaign to protect the Okefenokee Swamp and held a rally at the Georgia Capitol steps to call for action.

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