Practice & Action Workshops
Practice & Action workshops and sessions equip participants with concrete skills to organize and sustain change—in their personal lives, institutions, and communities. Current Practice and Action sessions include Fundamentals of Institutional Organizing, Monthly Race-Based Caucusing, Creation as Sustenance & Resistance, and Coffee with Crossroads. Some Practice & Action workshops and sessions build directly on frameworks from our Deepening workshops and require prior training accordingly.
Fundamentals of Antiracist Organizing: A Primer on Antiracist Organizing in Institutions
Overview:
Good intentions don’t transform institutions. Organizing skills do. Marshall Ganz defines organizing as “leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want.” For forty years, Crossroads has been building exactly that capacity—equipping people inside institutions with the skills to drive real, lasting change. This workshop is for people who are already working for change—and are ready to organize others to do it with them. You’ll leave with frameworks, tools, and hands-on practice for:
Building collective power
Creating shared vision
Driving institutional change toward antiracist practice
This is a Practice & Action workshop designed to equip participants with concrete skills to organize and sustain change—in their personal lives, institutions, and communities. Although no prior experience with Crossroads is required participants who have attended the following:
Animating Antiracism as a Way of Being
Introduction to Antiracism or Introduction to Systemic Racism
Understanding and Analyzing Systemic Racism
Toward Liberation
Workshop Outcomes:
Participants in Crossroads’ Fundamentals of Antiracist Organizing workshop will deepen their capacity to:
- Understand organizing as relationship-building: See how relationships and collective power—not position or authority—are what move institutions toward antiracist transformation.
- Identify essential organizing skills: Learn the core skills of antiracist organizing: building shared vision, engaging stakeholders, and creating the critical mass needed for lasting change.
- Put these strategies into practice: Begin the individual and collective reflection needed to bring these tools into your real work—in your institution and beyond.
Workshop Delivery:
Through engaging discussions, group activities, case studies, and practical exercises, participants will develop a shared understanding of, and practical approaches to institutional organizing.
This workshop can be delivered in two ways: online (via Zoom) or in person.
It is interactive and uses several different ways of learning to keep participants engaged.
Meetings with your institution
The workshop includes a meeting before the session and a meeting after, so we can plan with your institution and follow up afterward.
Time commitment
When delivered in full, the workshop takes eight hours total:
6.5 hours of facilitation and participant interaction
1.5 hours for breaks and lunch (non-contact time)
Flexible scheduling for online sessions
If delivered online, the workshop can be split into two sessions held on two consecutive days. For example: two morning sessions of about 3.5 hours each.
Workshop Fee:
Crossroads’ workshop fees are on a sliding scale, based on an organization’s budget. Here are the rates for the Fundamentals of Antiracist Organizing workshop:
Equity Rate: $3,000 per day
(Annual budget less than $400,000)
Sustainer Rate: $4,500 per day
(Annual budget between $400,000 and $2 million)
Supporter Rate: $6,000 per day
(Annual budget between $2 million and $16.5 million)
Builder Rate: $7,500 per day
(Annual budget over $16.5 million)
Creation as Sustenance & Resistance
Overview:
Across nearly every workshop and conversation Crossroads hosts or facilitates, a theme keeps surfacing: this political moment has people overwhelmed, discouraged, drained, and angry — and rightly so. Which is exactly why grounding ourselves and cultivating our imaginations isn’t a luxury in difficult times; it’s a necessity for resistance.
Our imagination is one of the most powerful tools we have. When we let ourselves imagine and play together, something opens up — we get to share our struggles and hopes in ways everyday life rarely allows, and truly know and be known by one another.
Crossroads’ Creation as Sustenance and Resistance workshops are practice labs where we animate collaboration and replenish the wells of imagination from which the liberation of all living things can be dreamed into being.
This is a Practice & Action workshops and sessions equip participants with concrete skills to organize and sustain change—in their personal lives, institutions, and communities.
Workshop Objectives:
Participants in Crossroads’ Creation as Sustenance and Resistance workshop will deepen their capacity to
Experience collective joy as a practice of resistance and sustenance, not an escape from the work
Connect with community through creative practices
Reconnect with imagination and play as tools for envisioning change
Workshop Delivery:
This an in person workshop.
It is interactive and uses several different ways of learning to keep participants engaged.
Meetings with your institution
The workshop includes a meeting before the session and a meeting after, so we can plan with your institution and follow up afterward.
Time commitment
When delivered in full, the workshop takes 8 hours total:
6.5 hours of facilitation and participant interaction
1.5 hours for breaks and lunch (non-contact time)
Workshop Fee:
Crossroads’ workshop fees are on a sliding scale, based on an organization’s budget.
Equity Rate: $3,000 per workshop
(Annual budget less than $400,000)
Sustainer Rate: $4,500 per workshop
(Annual budget between $400,000 and $2 million)
Supporter Rate: $6,000 per workshop
(Annual budget between $2 million and $16.5 million)
Builder Rate: $7,500 per workshop
(Annual budget over $16.5 million)
Click here to learn more about our fees and sliding scale.
Exploring and Interrupting Internalized Racism
Overview:
We are all shaped by racial messages—in media, institutions, and culture. These structures don’t just define policy; they get inside us, shaping what we notice, who we trust, and how we move through the world. In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois described what it means to measure one’s soul by the standards of a world that looks on with contempt—a “double-consciousness” that forces people of color to see themselves perpetually through the eyes of others. Decades later, Lillian Smith observed that this distortion imprisons everyone: the “warped, distorted frame” placed around every Black child from birth is also placed around every white child—each pinioned on a different side. What both described is internalized racism—and it remains one of the most underexamined barriers to building truly antiracist organizations.
This workshop explores: 1) How racialization and internalized racism sustain systems of domination, 2) How these dynamics show up within individuals, between racial groups, and inside organizations, and 3) Practical strategies for recognizing and interrupting these patterns in yourself and your work.
This is a deepening workshop designed to examine how institutional systems perpetuate inequality and provide focused exploration of specific justice topics—from analyzing dynamics of oppression to charting pathways toward reparation. This workshop builds on foundational concepts we explore in depth elsewhere. It is required that participants have previous experience engaging with Crossroads’ analysis of systemic racism by having participated in one or more of the following workshops:
Toward Liberation (in-person or digital)
Understanding and Analyzing Systemic Racism (the pre-2020 in-person)
Workshop Outcomes:
Participants in Crossroads’ Exploring and Interrupting Internalized Racism workshop will deepen their capacity to:
Understand how racism operates as a system: Move beyond individual prejudice to see how racialization creates and maintains power—and who benefits from keeping it in place.
Workshop Delivery:
This workshop can be delivered in two ways: online (via Zoom) or in person.
It is interactive and uses several different ways of learning to keep participants engaged.
Meetings with your institution
The workshop includes a meeting before the session and a meeting after, so we can plan with your institution and follow up afterward.
Time commitment
When delivered in full, the workshop takes 16 hours total split over two days:
6.5 hours of facilitation and participant interaction
1.5 hours for breaks and lunch (non-contact time)
Workshop Fee:
Crossroads’ workshop fees are on a sliding scale, based on an organization’s budget. Here are the rates for the Values Gap workshop:
Equity Rate: $3,000 per day
(Annual budget less than $400,000)
Sustainer Rate: $4,500 per day
(Annual budget between $400,000 and $2 million)
Supporter Rate: $6,000 per day
(Annual budget between $2 million and $16.5 million)
Builder Rate: $7,500 per day
(Annual budget over $16.5 million)
Coffee with Crossroads
Overview:
What began as a pandemic gathering has evolved into something bigger. Coffee with Crossroads is now a conversation series featuring people whose work and ideas push us to think, act, and organize differently.
Each session introduces you to change-makers, thinkers, and practitioners who are reimagining what’s possible. These aren’t polished presentations—they’re real conversations about the challenges, breakthroughs, and questions shaping racial justice work today.
Anyone interested in antiracism and organizational transformation—whether you’re leading change in your institution, exploring these questions personally, or simply curious to learn more
This is a Practice & Action sessions designed to equip participants with concrete skills to organize and sustain change—in their personal lives, institutions, and communities.
Session Outcomes:
Coffee with Crossroads sessions are designed to achieve the following outcomes…
- New frameworks for thinking about change in your organization
- Inspiration from people doing transformative work in real contexts
- Practical insights you can adapt to your own setting
- Fresh energy and perspective to sustain your efforts
Session Delivery:
Coffee with Crossroads is 75 minutes long and unless noted takes place over ZOOM Webinar.
Session Fee:
We offer these sessions for free because transformation happens through learning together, not alone. Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been doing this work for years, pull up a chair. There’s room at the table. That said, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to acknowledge the work Crossroads puts into offering this space — based on whatever value the caucus brings to your life and work.
Monthly Race-Based Caucusing
Overview:
We know that we’re surrounded by unfair, unjust, and biased messages about different racial groups. These messages are everywhere—in media, schools, and everyday life—and it’s really hard not to take them in when they’re about our own racial group or someone else’s.
If we want to build institutions where just practices and culture are a reality, we have to understand how these messages affect us. That means looking at racism, its values, and ways of thinking about others showing up in our thoughts, actions, and relationships with people from different racial backgrounds. One way to do this work is through racial identity caucusing.
Racial Identity Caucusingis a practice where people talk in groups based on their racial identity. It helps people explore how racism has shaped their experiences and how they might have taken in harmful ideas—like believing their group is less than or better than others. The goal is to notice these patterns and learn how to stop them.
This is a Practice & Action sessions designed to equip participants with concrete skills to organize and sustain change—in their personal lives, institutions, and communities.
Session Objectives:
Race-Based Caucusing monthly sessions are designed to build a participants capacity to…
Understand how race functions in society
Get a clearer picture of what race is and how it’s used to shape opportunity, power, and experience in society.
Explore their own identity
Reflect on who you are — including your race, gender, class, and other parts of your identity — and how these shape your experiences. Learn how racism shows up differently for White people and people of color.
Notice and interrupt internalized racism
Build skills to recognize when unfair, internalized ideas about race show up in your own thoughts or actions — and practice ways to interrupt them in everyday life.
Session Prerequisities:
Exploring internalized oppression requires preparation. All participants must register in advance. If you’ve completed Toward Liberation or its precursor Understanding and Analyzing Systemic Racism (aka 2 1/ 2 Days workshop or ABAR in St. Louis), you’re ready to join.
If you’ve attended another antiracism workshop, you’ll need to complete two brief prerequisites: watch a framing video on Race-Based Caucusing and attend a digital orientation via Zoom.
Session Delivery:
Caucusing sessions meet monthly for 2 hours, either via Zoom or in-person for Chicago-area participants.
Session Fee:
At Crossroads, we believe meaningful dialogue should be open to everyone. That’s why Race Based Caucusing s is free. That said, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to acknowledge the work Crossroads puts into offering this space — based on whatever value the caucus brings to your life and work.
