CIWO Events

Upcoming Events

Please check back soon for our upcoming events.

Recent Highlights

UALE Summer School for Women in Unions and Worker Organizations at SMLR on July 10-14, 2023

Link to English Flyer | Link to Spanish Flyer

Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations is hosting this year’s 46th UALE Northeast Summer School for Women in Unions and Worker Organizations! This is a 4-day residential program that brings together rank-and-file members, staff, and officers of unions and workers’ rights organizations to develop their leadership and strengthen their knowledge and understanding of the U.S. labor movement.

Visit https://smlr.rutgers.edu/wss2023 for more information.

In April, CIWO hosted a WILL Empower Experience to bring together nine dynamic women of color leaders who are moving transformative Bargaining for the Common Good strategies with the Portland Association of Teachers. 

As educators and leaders, they show up for their students, families, and union members everyday. The WILL Empower Experience, facilitated by Sheri Davis, provided space to step back, reflect, and support each other in the challenging and crucial work they take on as women of color individually and collectively. While they fight for broader bargaining demands for their students and communities, WILL Empower aims to nurture and cultivate the visionary leadership they provide in Portland schools, communities and beyond. Since its inception, CIWO has centered visionary leadership, building healthy sustainable organizations, and emergent strategies like Bargaining for the Common Good. WILL Empower continues to provide the space to cultivate, support and grow the leadership of women of color, while Bargaining for the Common Good provides additional strategies for those leaders to implement their values and commitment to racial and gender justice in our workplaces and unions.

Interested in a WILL Empower Experience? Email willempower.labor@gmail.com!

Bargaining for the Common Good Webinar and Summit

BCG Bargaining Webinar
Over 400 union members came together in March  for our “Negotiating, BCG Style” webinar to build strategies for Bargaining for the Common Good! Leaders joined from over 50 different unions, with folks joining from all over the country and beyond, including delegations from Nigeria and Mexico. This gathering lifted up key lessons from experienced organizers and negotiators across the country, along with space to strategize for every local who joined. Our panel included Rob Baril from SEIU District 1199 New England, Brahim Kone from SEIU Local 26, Jackson Potter from the Chicago Teachers Union, and Kavitha Iyengar from UAW Local 2865, UC Student-Workers Union. Nell Geiser from CWA and the BCG Advisory Committee emceed the packed hour and half. If you attended, please fill out a survey and stay tuned for follow-up training to put these key lessons into action!

BCG and NEA Leadership Summit
NEA leaders from across the country came together for a NEA Leadership Summit workshop on March 11th to build power Bargaining for the Common Good! The training was led by NEA’s National Senior Bargaining Specialist Brian Beallor and BCG Education Director Sandra Lane and was accompanied by updates and key lessons from  Portland Association of Teachers’ contract negotiations by president Angela Bonilla. Fifty union leaders from schools across the country strategized around what changes students, parents, and educators want to see in our communities, and how to win them with Bargaining for the Common Good campaigns.

Always Essential Fellowship Story Slam

The Always Essential (AE) Fellowship closed on February 21st with an incredible story slam featuring the 2022-2023 fellows. Essential workers from across the country shared 5 minute stories about a moment that made them who they are in front of a live zoom audience of supporters from their organizations, fellows from previous cohorts, and their friends & family. To prepare for the story slam, fellows were trained by Javier Morillo (AE Fellowship Lead Trainer, Moth Story Teller, CIWO Fellow and previous President of SEIU Local 26) over two class sessions on ways to identify and share their story. All fellows were offered 1:1 and group coaching after those two class sessions to talk through their story with trainers.

The story slam and storytelling class sessions are a core piece of the Always Essential Fellowship curriculum because of our belief that the better that we are at telling our own stories - the better we are at listening to other people's stories. Fellows are also organizers who engage with their coworkers to make changes in their workplaces that further economic, gender, racial, and/or climate justice. Training fellows on identifying their own moments of power can only support these organizing efforts to help essential workers across the country find their power too. 

This March We Are Celebrating 5 Years of WILL Empower Programming!

This year is the 5th anniversary of WILL Empower Programs. One way we're celebrating this milestone is by reflecting on what WILL Empower participants have told us about their experiences in our programs:

"WILL Empower taught me the value of showing up as the whole me."

"I realize that I have gifts to give in who I am and how I come to the work."

"WILL Empower is about being unapologetic and unafraid."

"I've never been in a leadership development space like this."

"I've learned to be in the practice of asking for what I need."

"This retreat was important to remind me why I'm in the position I'm in, about the power I have, and that I need to use it."

"I've been in my workplace three years, and we've never had a discussion about race. I'm going to push for that discussion."

WILL Empower is presenting the 2023 Edna Berger Young Courageous Leader Award in March to one young womxn leader who demonstrates a commitment to worker, racial, and gender justice. Look out for our announcement!

Making Hope and History Rhyme: A New Worker Movement from the Shell of the Old

In this December 2022 New Labor Forum article, authors Marilyn Sneiderman and Stephen Lerner reflect on the lessons of the past half-century & assess the strategic challenges and opportunities confronting a new generation of workers, activists, and organizers.

> Read the full article

> Listen to a discussion of the article on the Reinventing Solidarity Podcast

Build the Bench Advisory Committee Gathers in
Washington, DC

Members of the Build the Bench Advisory Committee and CIWO gathered on Friday, September 9, 2022 in Washington, DC to strategize the future of Build the Bench. It was the first in person meeting for the Build the Bench program since the Annual Convening in July 2019. 

> Read more about the Meeting
 

Always Essential Fellowship Launches September 2022

CIWO is partnering with United for Respect & the Always Essential Coalition for the 2022 Always Essential Fellowship.

The goal of Always Essential Fellowship is to expose and challenge essential worker leaders to learn new skills, tools, and power analyses that allow them to deepen their understanding of their roles in the larger labor movement and connect with one another to win campaigns that make concrete improvements in the lives of all essential workers. The fellowship will run from September 2022 – February 2023.

CIWO Partners with CAWP for Womxn Political Directors Convening May 2022

From May 22nd – May 24th, 2022, past and current Political Directors and labor activists gathered at Rutgers University. CIWO partnered with the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at the Rutgers University Eagleton Institute. Leaders from the following worker justice organizations were in attendance: SEIU 503, United Working Families, Chicago Teachers Union, Washington State Labor Council, The Workers Institute at Cornell University, SEIU 2015, SEIU International, Detroit Action, the Institute for Policy Studies, the NYC Central Labor Council, and AFSCME.

> Click Here to Read More

A Message from CIWO

Our hearts are heavy for the people who were murdered, those who were harmed, and the families and communities who are directly and indirectly impacted by recent mass shootings in Buffalo, NY and Laguna Woods, CA that occurred over the weekend. We also stand with the more than 1 million people who marched for the right to privacy and for protections for all pregnant people to make choices for their future.

The right to an abortion AND the right to live free from patriarchal violence and white supremacy are all labor issues. We at CIWO believe that racial justice cannot solely be about responding to national crises. Race and gender justice is the practice of making connections that expose and eradicate racism and sexism in our communities, our workplaces, and our movements. Racial justice and gender justice should be centered in all the work, all the time, within all forms of worker justice organizations that make up our movements.

In this time of grieving and prolonged mourning, we encourage folks to pause and reflect; to feel the weight of what is happening in this moment. We cannot continue to push forward as if these attacks on our freedoms are isolated one-off incidents. We cannot be(come) desensitized to violence, which is the bedrock of white supremacy and patriarchy. We cannot normalize political violence, which too often is perpetrated by men, and serves to destabilize the march towards justice and freedom! It is imperative that we investigate the ways that the members of our organizations and the diverse communities that we serve are traumatized and hurting. In labor, we must work to remedy these injuries through storytelling, power-building and by leveraging the strength of our institutions for lasting transformation towards a multiracial economic feminist democracy.

If you or someone that you are in network with workers at a TOPS grocery stores in NY State, UFCW Local 1 is offering free counseling. Please see their post linked here to access services.

Strategies & Reflections from the Womxn's Leadership Symposium

WILL Empower hosted the first Womxn’s Labor Leadership Symposium & Awards on September 30 and October 1, 2021. The Symposium featured the testimony and narrative of leaders across the country, including Lauren Jacobs of Power Switch Action; Veronica Mendez-Moore of Centro Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha; Sara Steffens of Communications Workers; Sarita Gupta of the Ford Foundation, Stacy Davis-Gates of the Chicago Teachers Union; and Tanya Wallace-Gobern of the National Black Worker Center.  

> Click here to learn more about the Symposium

CIWO Featured in Rutgers-New Brunswick Impact Report

CIWO's work helping organizations incubate and launch innovative research agendas, strategies, and community/labor organizational programs resulting in stronger workers’ organizations and greater economic and social equality was featured in the Rutgers University Foundation Summer 2021 Impact Report.

"Thanks to the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, my peers and I began an energizing and much-needed dialogue on how we can begin to share what we know and are learning.... This is how we will win, together."

— Lauren Jacobs, executive director, Partnership for Working Families

< Read the complete report

Past Events

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