Training and Mentorship for Grassroots Advocates

Demand for our research and advocacy support consistently exceeds what our team can provide, underscoring the overwhelming need for this work globally.

Through our Follow the Money trainings and strategic support program for grassroots advocates, we are fostering a global community of Follow the Money practitioners to meet this need.

In 2022, we began offering intensive courses that cover our full Follow the Money sequence, from investment and supply chain research through designing multi-pronged advocacy strategies to prevent and remedy harm.

So far, we have trained dozens of advocates from Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific region to implement the approach from start to finish. Several participating organizations have gone on to offer their own versions of the training to interested civil society organizations in their own networks, expanding the reach and impact further.

Following these trainings, we provide ongoing counsel and strategic support to participants as they execute advocacy strategies developed during the course—engaging supply chain actors, working with investigative journalists to spotlight harms, filing complaints to independent accountability mechanisms, and more.

We foster ongoing communication and collaboration among former participants by hosting webinars and sharing resources, including via group messaging platforms where participants can raise questions and share advice with each other directly.

“It’s a door of opportunity that has been opened for our organization”

– Wokulira Geoffrey Ssebaggala, Follow the Money training participant from Witness Radio, Uganda

Curriculum

For our standard intensive trainings, participants engage closely with our team for several months, including through online webinars and two week-long in-person workshops. The skills and topics that are covered include:

Our “Follow the Money” theory of change

Researching corporate structures, investors, lenders and supply chains
Using investment chain research to identify pressure points and design effective multi-pronged advocacy strategies
Pursuing specific advocacy approaches such as filing complaints to independent accountability mechanisms and engaging with shareholders
Hands-on group work researching specific projects and designing advocacy strategies for cases that participants are currently working on

The course is structured around actual harmful investment projects that participating organizations are working to challenge. Following the training, we provide ongoing strategic support for participants as they implement Follow the Money approaches with their colleagues, including through one-on-one meetings and communications, joint webinars and resource-sharing via group messaging platforms, where we also aim to foster peer-to-peer learning and cross-collaboration.

Participation

We generally conduct one or two trainings per year, each tailored to groups from a specific region. We put out a call for applications for upcoming trainings approximately three months [CONFIRM/UPDATE] in advance.

When designing and selecting participants for our trainings, we prioritize groups whose goals align with our strategic focus on advancing a rapid and rights-based transition away from fossil fuels. That includes groups working to stop new fossil fuel development and those advocating for human rights protections in renewable energy and transition mineral supply chains.

Training by Request

In addition to our intensive, weeks-long regional trainings, we are sometimes able to offer more tailored or targeted trainings upon request, for groups or coalitions whose goals are aligned with our mission and who are able to cover the costs of travel and preparation for our team [CONFIRM/UPDATE].