The Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership

The Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership (also known as “The Truth School”) offers classes with the goal of promoting and facilitating the skills required to build a movement. The School teaches the organizing skills necessary to equip people—young, middle years, and old—to be active, effective, and empowered.

We believe that knowledge and education bolstered by support and guidance lead to empowerment—and empowered people make change.

When people have the skills and confidence they need to organize a vigil, run for elected office, write guest editorials for local and national newspapers, engage in civil disobedience, visit their elected officials, or talk with care and sensitivity across differences, the result is real and lasting change.

Our trainers have expertise in their fields; experience teaching, training, and mentoring; and a commitment to a participatory model of teaching and learning. The trainers include educators, social change activists, elected officials, journalists, social workers, members of the clergy, and others with valuable skills to share.

What We Do

We teach movement-building skills.
Class after class, week after week, month after month.
We prepare social change leaders to win movement struggles.
Join us.

Fall & Spring Semesters

We run two semesters of classes each year, Fall and Spring, with around 40 classes each semester.

Our trainers are paid
Our classes are free

Money is not a barrier to participating in Truth School classes. We encourage those who have financial means to donate to the school.

Class Topics

From the contemplative to the nuts and bolts, Truth School classes speak across movements.

 

Want to teach with us?

We are committed to:

  • Amplifying the leadership of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC); they lead all Truth School classes, or offer them in bi/multi-racial/cultural teams
  • Approaching movement-building skills from a horizontal and vertical lens (breadth and depth) and creating course catalogs which reflect this range
  • Relationship-building as the heart of movement-building; this informs the style of our classes, and our relationships with site partners, hosts, trainers and volunteers
  • Connecting people across counties, economic standing, racial identity, physical and mental ability and gender expression

 


Join us.


 

Where We Are

The Truth School does not have a building. Since our founding in 2017, the Truth School has held classes in donated spaces in five towns and cities in three counties in what is today called the Connecticut River Valley.

We recognize that the Land we live on, and the river we organize around is known in different ways and called by other names by the people Native to them – the Nonotuck, Agawam, Pocumtuck and more. Quinnetuckut or Kwinitekw and other variations is how the river is called in Algonquian languages.

We recognize that the extractive, white-supremacist mindset of our country’s settler colonial inheritance has been, and continues to be, a cause of great harm. We acknowledge the living Indigenous peoples and nations of the greater region: the Nipmuc and Wampanoag, the Wabanaki, the Mohegan and Pequot, the Mohican and Abenaki and those who are not formally recognized.

These acknowledgments inform our work as we recognize the need – for the sake of the survival and thriving of all – to decolonize our ways of being, including our ways of organizing for social change.

Truth School Trainers

Photo of Ann Augustine

Ann Augustine

Photo of Carrie N. Baker

Carrie N. Baker

Booker Bush

Spring 2023 Classes:

Photo of Dwayne Chamble and Emily Mentin-Chamble

Dwayne Chamble

Photo of Zion Chamble

Zion Chamble

Photo of Amber Chand

Amber Chand

Photo of Sarah Hickman

Sarah Hickman

Photo of Rabbi Devorah Jacobson

Devorah Jacobson

Spring 2023 Classes:

Photo of Diane Liebert

Diane Liebert

Photo of Jana McClure

Jana McClure

Spring 2023 Classes:

Fall 2022 Classes:

Being an Ally Not a Savior

Photo of Tiffany McGee-Hickman

Tiffany McGee-Hickman

Photo of Dwayne Chamble and Emily Mentin-Chamble

Emily Mentin-Chamble

Photo of Keamo Mokone

Keamo Mokone

Photo of Sheila Ramirez

Sheila Ramirez

Photo of Loretta J. Ross

Loretta J. Ross

Photo of Dr. Amilcar Shabazz

Amilcar Shabazz

Spring 2023 Classes:

Photo of Wendy Sinton

Wendy Sinton

Photo of Carlie Tartakov

Carlie Tartakov