How to Fight
Winning Campaigns in Times of Crises
Online Training
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In moments of crisis, how do you respond with strategy, courage, and skill? At Movement Law Lab, we believe that every advocate fighting for justice must be prepared to act decisively and effectively when the stakes are highest. With the acceleration of the global authoritarian project, a looming domestic constitutional crisis, and increasing precarity, every move counts. That’s why we designed this new course, designed to supercharge your existing campaigns and help you imagine new campaigns to build social movement power.
The current climate of fear and repression has put many of us in a defensive stance, uncertain about the way forward. Freezing, protecting or going underground is understandable–but we can’t stay there. We need sharp, visionary campaigns now more than ever: strategic efforts to reach a goal, within a limited time, when there is opposition and no clear path forward.
From a two-week blitz to defend a single family from deportation to a months-long policy fight to win a mansion tax to fund social housing, to a multi-year national effort to exploit wedges in the MAGA-bloc, now is the time to deliver transformative campaign wins. Notably, the degree to which we are effective in executing our campaigns will determine the future field of play. If you are committed to using strategic action to drive change, whether through comprehensive long-term campaigns or agile responses to emerging situations, we encourage you to register and bring your team.
This training now offers CLE credits!
Who Should Attend This Course?
This training is designed for lawyers, legal workers, and organizers actively engaged or interested in developing campaigns at any size, stage, or scope—local, state, federal, or international. You’ll get the most out of the course if you move through it with the crew you’re campaigning with; bring your legal-organizing team!
Whether you’re an attorney who wants to more effectively flank movements, a seasoned organizer moving integrated law-and-organizing strategies, or just getting started, this space is for you. You're an ideal candidate if you're executing legal work and thinking through how to connect it to broader organizing efforts, or connected to a formation, organization, or network that hopes to use legal tools to bolster a campaign.
We strongly encourage participation from directly impacted folks, including BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), women, LGBTQ+ folks, those from low-income backgrounds, and formerly incarcerated people.
Applications Closed
Spots are limited.
What Does The Training Cost?
We have a pricing structure to accommodate individuals and organizations of all sizes. Payment is due to secure your spot once you’ve been accepted.
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Individuals Paying On Their Own Without Organizational Support: Please use the following guidelines (on the honor system) to choose the tier that’s right for you:
Tier 1 (Reduced Rate): $325
For individuals with significant financial need.
You do not have disposable income or a financial safety net.
You experience financial strain when paying bills.
You have not attended private education or do not hold an advanced degree.
Tier 2 (Standard Rate): $435
For individuals with moderate financial means.
You have some disposable income or a partial financial safety net.
Your bills are generally paid on time, but you may experience occasional financial strain.
You may have attended private education or hold an advanced degree, but it’s not a consistent indicator of your financial situation.
Tier 3 (Supporter Rate): $535
For individuals who can afford to pay more to support others.
You have disposable income or a strong financial safety net.
Your bills are regularly paid without financial strain.
You have attended private education and/or hold an advanced degree.
Individuals Supported By Their Organization: The tuition is sliding scale based on your organization's budget. The tuition for one person is:
Organizational budget of less than $2 million = $360
Organizational budget of more than $2 million = $560
We offer a 15% discount for two or more individuals from the same organization. We also encourage teams to take the course together and offer the same discount cross-organizationally to folks working in active law and organizing partnerships.CLE Admin Fee (Optional Add-on): There is a $75 additional charge per person for CLE credit.
Scholarships: We will do our best to ensure money is not a barrier to your participation in this course. Both partial and full scholarships are available on a first-come, first-serve basis and must be requested in your application. Scholarships do not cover the cost of the CLE administrative fee.
This Training Covers Real-World Strategy Tools You Can Apply Immediately:
✅ Visualize a campaign’s “tug of war” in a way that reveals strategic opportunities
✅ Go beyond making a demand to stake a claim that roots you in collective values
✅ Write a story that arcs naturally and forcefully toward your campaign goal
✅ Design your next best move using the neuroscience of persuasion
✅ Use negotiation skills to shift power and secure meaningful, stepwise wins
✅ Tap into your inner wisdom to run your campaign with grace, power, and skill. We’ll cover not just what you need to do, but who you need to be.
Here’s What People Say About This Course
How Can This Training Build Your Campaign Skills?
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You will learn a systematic, step-by-step method for building and running a campaign across various conditions, both offensive and defensive, and a range of time frames, from 2 days to 2 years.
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We’ve specifically designed this course to supercharge your campaigns in a climate of brazen authoritarian federal power grabs and shrinking space for state and local-level campaigns.
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You’ll learn how to embody equanimity with courage and skill through relentless friendliness, compassionate action, and sympathetic joy.
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Whether you’re new to campaigning or an experienced strategist, our hands-on curriculum is designed to equip you with new tools you can immediately apply to your current or emerging campaign.
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If you’re looking to grow alongside other social-movement thinkers in a collaborative, rigorous learning container, this course is for you!
How to Apply:
Register Your Interest
Submit your initial registration form to receive a link to the full application This will complete the first step in the process.
2. Complete Your Application by April 30th
You'll receive a detailed application to tell us more about yourself and your work. Your completed application will then be reviewed, and you'll be notified by email if you’re accepted.
3. Pay and Secure Your Spot
Upon acceptance, you'll need to process your payment to reserve your place in the course. Your spot is not confirmed until payment is received.
Your Course Faculty
This training is organized by Movement Law Lab and taught by Nikki Thanos, MLL's Director of Training and Praxis, and Kung Li, a longtime litigator, campaigner, and Senior Strategist at MLL.
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Kung Li is a movement strategist and former litigator who as staff attorney and then Executive Director at the Southern Center for Human Rights acted as lead or co-counsel in class action litigation regarding prisons, jails, detention centers, and other components of the criminal-legal system throughout the South. They have been involved in campaigns to close prisons and jails, minimize the detention of migrants, change sentencing laws, and reallocate municipal and state budgets away from punishment to invest in community-centered services.
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Nikki is an accomplished movement lawyer multiplier and popular educator dedicated to building our collective capacities to carry out liberatory strategy. She is a tenacious cross-pollinator, bridging the fields of law, organizing, political theory, and cultural resistance. Nikki cut her teeth organizing transnational networks in the Americas to challenge US military, economic and development policies with organized labor, churches, peasant movements and community organizations. In 2010, she returned to the US to earn a J.D. from Loyola University College of Law. Nikki pioneered a movement lawyering solo practice model that extended strategic legal tools to organizers and social movements without in-house counsel in the Gulf South. She is the former Legal and Policy Director at the Black and immigrant organizing project, the New Orleans’ Workers Center for Racial Justice. She believes our sector needs to level up our campaigning skills to deliver real, material wins for our people.
Not ready to join? Download “Interests Iceberg” now!
Negotiations are essential for every campaign. But they can be intimidating. That’s why we created this handy negotiations framework for lawyers and organizers just like you. Working legislative issues, building coalitions, or entering a high-stakes conversation with your opposition? This tool will help you feel confident.
Frequently Asked Questions
Course Details
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This course equips lawyers, legal workers and organizers with strategic tools to build and execute effective campaigns for social change. A campaign is a way to reach a goal, within a limited time, when there is both opposition and no clear path for getting there.
Effective campaigning can take many forms and can be waged on short or long time horizons. Large-scale organizing campaigns might build a broad base to achieve systemic change, such as passing legislation to redirect funding from policing to community resources. Short-term blitzes or “mini-campaigns” are also increasingly important–for example, organizing with your neighbors to defend a single family from deportation. Across our movement ecosystem, we need higher levels of strategy in all of our campaigning efforts, particularly in the face of opposition intent on inflicting the maximum damage possible to our communities.
This training will give you the tools to understand the landscape, systematically build the right campaign, and then continually make the most strategic moves possible as the campaign meets opposition. You will learn to quickly identify opportunities and implement targeted actions that create meaningful change, regardless of your campaign's size or scope.
If you're committed to using strategic action to drive change, whether through comprehensive long-term campaigns or agile responses to emerging situations, we encourage you to register.
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This training is designed to provide practical, real-world strategy tools for legal workers and This training is designed to provide practical, real-world strategy tools for legal workers and organizers engaged in high-stakes campaigns. Through a mix of interactive presentations and hands-on exercises, you will learn how to:
Map out the “tug of war” between opposing forces in a way that reveals strategic opportunities
Write a story that arcs naturally and forcefully toward your campaign goal
Design your next best move to improve your position and shift momentum toward victory using the neuroscience of persuasion
Use negotiation skills to shift power and secure meaningful, stepwise wins
Tap into your inner wisdom to run your campaign with grace, power, and skill. We’ll cover not just what you need to do, but who you need to be.
Registration and Eligibility
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This training is designed for lawyers, legal workers, and organizers actively engaged or interested in developing campaigns at any size, stage, or scope—local, state, federal, or international. You’ll get the most out of the course if you move through it with the crew you’re campaigning with; bring your legal-organizing team! Whether you’re an attorney who wants to more effectively flank movements, a seasoned organizer moving integrated law-and-organizing strategies, or just getting started, this space is for you. You're an ideal candidate if you're executing legal work and thinking through how to connect it to broader organizing efforts, or connected to a formation, organization, or network that hopes to use legal tools to bolster campaigns.
We strongly encourage participation from directly impacted folks, including BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), women, LGBTQ+ folks, those from low-income backgrounds, and formerly incarcerated people.
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There are no formal prerequisites for this training. However, to ensure that participants get the most out of the experience, we encourage attendees to be:
Lawyers or legal workers working with movements: You should be actively working alongside an organized community group and considering how legal strategy can advance broader movement goals.
Organizers: You’re moving a campaign that includes legal tactics or you want to build one soon. You do not have to be a paid or full-time organizer. We will give preference to organizers who register in conjunction with an attorney they’re working with.
Involved with or ready to plan a campaign: Whether you're involved in a large-scale organizing effort or a smaller, targeted community intervention, this training is for you. We welcome participants at all stages—from those just beginning to plan a campaign to those looking to refine an existing one.
Able to attend all 3 sessions: To ensure a rigorous collective learning container, we require that you commit to attending all three sessions. If an emergency comes up and you are unable to attend a session, we will provide you with a recording and request that you view the recording before the next session. Recordings will also be made available as a supplementary resource for your reference and review. You can revisit these recordings to reinforce your learning, but they are not intended as a substitute for live participation. Credit hours and CLEs are only available for live session attendance.
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If you attended our 2022 Campaign Strategy training, you’ll find this course quite similar. Many of the same tools will be taught along with a host of new material, including situating each campaigning tool in a context of rising authoritarianism. We think most folks will find it useful to take this updated course and we welcome you to the space.
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Yes, each person must submit their own application even if multiple individuals from the same organization attend the training.
Cost and Payment
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You will receive:
12 hours of live virtual course instruction
Copies of the slide decks, course handouts, and related materials
Recordings of all sessions for your reference and review
An easy-to-download course certificate of completion from Movement Law Lab
An additional CLE certificate of completion directly from the American Bar Association for those who register for and complete the CLE requirements
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CLE credits are available for this course for all states. MLL works with the American Bar Association to issue your certificates and ensure compliance with all state requirements. The exact number of CLE-eligible hours will be determined by the ABA, and may differ slightly from state to state. The certificates are generally available within 30 days of the course. The administrative cost for CLE processing is $75. If you are accepted to the course, you will receive a payment link that will ask you to make a selection between obtaining CLE credit or not. Your overall tuition will then include the fee if it is selected as an option. Credit hours are being offered for live sessions only; CLEs are not available if you only watch the recordings.
Logistics and Accessibility
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The virtual training will be hosted via Zoom on May 9, 16, and 23 between 10-2 PM PT/1-5 PM ET. The sessions build on each other and participants are required to attend all three sessions. The course is only open to participants who can commit to attending all three sessions in full. If you are new to Zoom, please check out our troubleshooting guide.
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Participants will receive all related information including join links via email once selected. The sessions are live and will be recorded. As noted before, CLE hours will only be available for live sessions, and not recordings.
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MLL is committed to creating accessible training spaces and will do our best to accommodate any access needs. Closed captions will be available. Please note that the course will only be offered in English this time.
Policies
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Full tuition and CLE refunds are available up to 3 days before the course start date. Please contact us at campaigns@movementlawlab.org if you’d like to initiate a refund.
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We require that folks commit to attending all three sessions. All participants will be able to access recordings of the sessions through the participant portal, but this should be used as a substitute for live attendance only in the event of an emergency. CLEs are not available for recorded sessions.