When: Saturday, August 8th, 12:00 – 4:00 pm

Cost: FREE! The Mutual Aid Sanctuary and Colorado Clergy Alliance are sponsoring this training.

Who: This training is offered for clergy, lay leaders, and community members who want to attend and support CCA public actions; prepare for the Protect Our Vote campaign; and learn transferable skills for congregational, community, and public life. 

Register here, by Friday, August 7, at noon.

Location: South Broadway Christian Church, 23 Lincoln St, Denver. This is an in-person training only. 

Free parking is available in the church parking lot. We will be meeting in an air conditioned room. Drinks and snacks will be provided. This church is accessible and open and affirming to LGBTQ+ individuals and families.

About the Training:

CCA and MAS are committed to our collective safety, the safety of those being targeted, and the wider community. This requires us to work together to build a collective culture of and the skills for spiritually- and faith-engaged nonviolence, peaceful resistance, and deescalation.

This training offers up-to-date information about what public action looks like right now in Colorado and across the country, and will include:

• Spiritually- and faith-engaged culture building focused on our practice of collective values, nonviolence, and public witness;
• Reviewing common roles in direct action;
• Protester rights when interacting with law enforcement;
• Safety considerations;
• Marshaling strategies;
• Deescalation tools; and
• Basic health and safety at public actions.

The role of marshals is to facilitate the planned CCA action while ensuring the health and safety of those involved. This is a serious and important role. When you are a marshal, you will communicate between action leaders, safety team members, and participants; deescalate interactions with bystanders; and maintain the safety of the action.

Whether you ultimately sign up to be a CCA Marshal, we all need to learn how marshaling works in public actions to cocreate safe actions for ourselves and the wider community.

Trainer: Z Williams (thy/them) is the director and co-founder of Bread and Roses Legal Center, which exists to disrupt the harms the legal system causes people and their communities. They have a 28-year history as a grassroots community organizer working at the intersection of gender, race, class, and the carceral legal system. At Bread and Roses, Z has organized to pass pro-trans policies including Tiara’s Law, the Kelly Loving Act, and Legal Protections for the Dignity of Minors. They are also a co-founder of the Protest Defense Committee––a collective of legal workers, attorneys, and lawyers that fight political repression. In addition to organizing and anti-repression work, Z is a long time street medic and community herbalist. Z is a graduate of the Sturm College of Law and a PhD student in Transformative Social Change at Saybrook University.