The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) has announced a series of in-person Undoing Racism/Community Organizing workshops to be held in White Plains, NY, in the spring of 2024.

The Undoing Racism/Community Organizing workshop is PISAB’s signature training workshop, offering a “humanistic process…to explore how we have been racialized, socialized, and conditioned to think about race and racism.”    

Since PISAB was founded in 1980, it has trained over 2 million people in its Undoing Racism workshops all over the United States and in other parts of the world.

Each Undoing Racism starts on a Friday evening and continues with full-day sessions on Saturday and Sunday, co-facilitated by three of PISAB’s team of over 100 core trainers. 

The anti-racist training is an intensive, interactive process challenging participants to analyze themselves first, then the structures of power and privilege that hinder social equity and prepares them to be effective organizers for justice.

The workshop begins with an analysis of class, power, and institutional/individual relationships to and within communities.  As power is analyzed, the workshop explores how people play a role in maintaining the current disparate racial outcomes that every system and institution produces.  PISAB workshops help to develop effective community organizers who are well informed about race and racism. 

“The fabric of racism is inextricably woven and constructed into the founding principles of the United States,” PISAB says.  “Racism was done and it can be undone through effective anti-racist organizing with, and in accountable relationship to the communities most impacted by racism. The People’s Institute believes that effective community, systems and institutional change happens when those who serve as agents of transformation understand the foundations of race and racism and how they continually function as a barrier to community self-determination, self-sufficiency, and interdependency.”

PISAB’s principles and training have formed the foundation for New Rochelle Against Racism (New RoAR), which has been organizing in New Rochelle since 2014 against manifestations of systemic racism in housing, employment, education, health, policing, and throughout city life. 

Among the goals of the PISAB trainings are for participants to:

•    Develop a common definition of racism and an understanding of the different forms it takes–individual, institutional, linguistic, and cultural;
•    Develop a common language and analysis for examining racism in the United States;
•    Understand one’s own connection to institutional racism and its impact on his/her work;
•    Understand why people are poor and the role of institutions in exacerbating institutional racism, particularly for people and communities of color;
•    Understand the historical context for how racial classifications in the United States came to be and how/why they are maintained;
•    Understand the historical context for how U.S. institutions came to be and who they have been designed to serve;
•    Understand how all of us, including white people, are adversely impacted by racism every day, everywhere;
•    Surface assumptions about how your work is (or is not) affected by racism;
•    Develop awareness and understanding about ways to begin undoing racism®;
•    Gain knowledge about how to be more effective in the work you do with your constituencies, your organizations, your communities, your families;
•    Understand the role of community organizing and building effective multiracial coalitions as a means for undoing racism.

Participants frequently describe the Undoing Racism workshop as a “transformative” or “life-changing” experience.

For further information or to register for a local Undoing Racism workshop, email PISABNortheast@pisab.org.