How We Founded Resistance School

One evening in late January of 2017, I and nine other Harvard Kennedy School graduate students came together to mourn, vent, and plan. The despair and pain we felt after 2016 had morphed into passionate energy to resist and reclaim our country. The Women’s March pushed millions of people onto the streets and groups like Indivisible, Sister District, Pantsuit Nation, and dozens more were creating grassroots groups to begin mobilizing and organizing.

In this backdrop, we asked ourselves a very simple question: how can we support the movement? How can we help these millions of recently mobilized people to be effective and sustainable in their organizing? With our backgrounds in organizing, campaigning, and education we knew the answer was training. We needed to figure out how to train at scale, something which was lacking in this critical movement moment.

So we created Resistance School. Resistance School was meant to be four live trainings in the month of April that we would stream on Facebook. These training would be led by grassroots organizers from the Obama campaign like Sara El-Amine and Professors from the Kennedy School like Marshall Ganz. We weren’t sure if the idea would take off, but when we launched our website one week before the first training, the response blew us away.

Dozens of news outlets picked up on “Harvard’s Dumbledore Army” (a spinoff from the Harry Potter books and NOT the messaging we wanted, but hey, it worked!), dozens of groups including Pantsuit Nation shared this resource, and by the end of April we had over 175,000 folks who tuned into the trainings. It became clear that Resistance School’s free trainings were in demand.

I have been leading Resistance School since the summer of 2017. With my background in campaigning and education, I saw so much potential for our work from the beginning. The thing is, you can learn anything online — cooking, coding, marketing, you name it. But organizing? There’s a huge gap in providing free organizing knowledge and skills, and it’s one we’ve aimed to fill.

Since that initial January meeting, we’ve expanded beyond what our original team ever thought was possible. We’ve created 25 trainings, a first of its kind online organizing training platform, and have worked with groups like Pantsuit Nation to create specific trainings that they need. Earlier this month, we created a course called “How to Move from Online Activism to Offline Action” with Pantsuit Nation’s Executive Director Cortney Tunis.

It’s a training we’ve always wanted to create because there are millions of people who are very active online, and while that is so important, we believe real and lasting change happens in streets, homes, businesses, government buildings, and in-person. So Resistance School and Pantsuit Nation created a course designed to teach exactly that! How we can all leverage online tools to act more effectively in-person.

We’d love for you all to watch the course AND to share it with your friends and colleagues on social media, email, and every other medium you use! These free trainings will not only help us to become more effective in the short-term, but they can help build a movement that is equipped to fight for years to come.

Conor Hand is the Executive Director of Resistance School.