Build the capability
to move the work

LEARN

FIRST TERM CURRICULUM

LEARN

First-Term Curriculum

Learn what moves the work.

Street Angels Institute courses are built around problems people are already trying to solve. The first-term curriculum brings together organizing, canvassing, mobilization, field operations, communications, organizational capacity, technology, data, leadership, and community problem solving.

Every course develops a defined capability. Courses can stand alone, combine into pathways, support work inside a Street Angels Lab or Think Tank, or become part of a participant’s individualized learning plan.

Practice Area 01: Canvassing + Field Operations

CANV 101: Canvassing Fundamentals

Nobody is having the conversations we need.

Learn the foundations of effective community and field canvassing, including preparation, approach, listening, scripts, authentic conversation, data capture, follow-up, safety, and what separates completing a door from actually making contact with a person.

The goal is to develop canvassers who understand both the mechanics and purpose of the work and can conduct effective, consistent conversations in the field.

CANV 120: Conversations That Move People

Our canvassers aren’t having good conversations.

Learn how to move beyond reading a script and into conversations that create understanding, trust, persuasion, commitment, and action. The course covers listening, questioning, objections, persuasion, message adaptation, conversation quality, and the difference between talking at someone and actually reaching them.

The goal is to improve the quality and effectiveness of conversations across canvassing, organizing, recruitment, and mobilization.

FIELD 210: Targeting, Turf + Community Mapping

We don’t know who we should be talking to.

Learn how to determine where field resources should go and why. Participants work with targeting, audience segmentation, geographic and community mapping, stakeholder identification, turf development, voter and community data, and prioritization.

The goal is to replace broad, unfocused outreach with intentional field strategy.

FIELD 230: From Contact to Relationship

We knock on doors, but we don’t know what happens next.

Learn how to build the infrastructure that connects an initial contact to follow-up, participation, volunteering, leadership, and longer-term relationships. The course connects canvassing data, CRM workflows, supporter identification, follow-up, conversion, and relationship management.

The goal is to make every meaningful contact capable of becoming the beginning of something instead of the end of a transaction.

FIELD 310: Field Leadership + Canvass Management

We need better field leaders.

Learn how to plan and manage field operations, including recruitment, training, turf, deployment, shifts, team communication, quality control, coaching, performance management, reporting, safety, and continuous improvement.

The goal is to develop people capable of moving from doing field work to leading effective field operations.

Practice Area 02: Organizing + Leadership

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ORG 101: Organizing Fundamentals

We need better organizers.

Learn the foundations of organizing people around shared interests, problems, values, and action. Participants develop skills in relationship building, one-on-one conversations, recruitment, leadership identification, commitments, follow-up, power, strategy, and collective action.

The goal is to understand organizing as the development of people, relationships, leadership, and power rather than simply the production of events and activities.

ORG 130: Base Building + Community Expansion

We keep talking to the same people.

Learn how to identify, reach, recruit, and develop people beyond an organization’s existing network. The course covers base building, relational organizing, network mapping, community entry, recruitment, outreach, relationship development, and expansion strategies.

The goal is to build organizations and movements capable of growing beyond the people already inside them.

ORG 220: Power Mapping + Stakeholder Strategy

We don’t know where the power is.

Learn how to identify who has formal power, informal influence, relationships, resources, decision authority, opposition, and leverage around an issue. Participants build power maps and use them to make strategic decisions about targets, allies, influencers, and actions.

The goal is to stop treating every stakeholder as equal and understand where change can actually be moved.

ORG 240: Campaign Strategy + Building a Win

We have an issue but not a campaign.

Learn how to turn a concern into an organized campaign with a defined problem, goal, target, constituency, strategy, tactics, escalation path, timeline, measurement, and definition of victory.

The goal is to move organizations from reacting to issues toward intentionally building campaigns capable of producing outcomes.

LEAD 210: From Volunteer to Leader

We have volunteers but no leaders.

Learn how to identify leadership potential, give people meaningful responsibility, coach development, delegate power, create accountability, and build leadership pipelines.

The goal is to stop concentrating the work in a few people and create more people capable of leading it.

Practice Area 03: Mobilization + Communications

MOB 101: Mobilization Fundamentals

Nobody is showing up.

Learn how to move people from awareness and interest to commitment and participation. Participants study turnout strategy, asks, commitment, reminders, confirmation, follow-up, friction, urgency, accessibility, and the systems behind successful mobilization.

The goal is to build repeatable systems that reliably move people into action.

MOB 120: Activation + Calls to Action

People care, but they aren’t taking action.

Learn how to convert concern, attention, agreement, and support into meaningful action. Participants examine calls to action, commitment ladders, activation pathways, barriers to participation, timing, messaging, and conversion.

The goal is to shorten the distance between “I care about this” and “I’m doing something about it.”

MOB 220: Volunteer Recruitment + Growth

We need more volunteers.

Learn how to build a repeatable volunteer recruitment engine using direct asks, relationships, referrals, events, digital channels, outreach, recruitment funnels, onboarding, and conversion.

The goal is to stop treating volunteer recruitment as an occasional push and build it as an ongoing organizational function.

MOB 240: Volunteer Retention + Belonging

People show up once and disappear.

Learn what happens after recruitment. Participants examine onboarding, relationships, meaningful work, communication, recognition, leadership opportunities, feedback, belonging, volunteer journeys, and re-engagement.

The goal is to turn first-time participation into sustained involvement.

COMM 210: Messaging + Narrative That Moves

Our message isn’t moving anybody.

Learn how to build messages around audience, values, stakes, story, persuasion, action, and the realities people actually experience. Participants develop and test messages instead of assuming the first version is right.

The goal is to communicate in ways people understand, remember, trust, and act on.

COMM 230: Visibility + Community Communications

Nobody knows what we do.

Learn how to make an organization’s work understandable and visible through communications strategy, storytelling, community outreach, media, digital content, partnerships, social platforms, and consistent narrative.

The goal is to turn good work that nobody knows about into work people can find, understand, support, and join.

DIGI 250: Digital Organizing + Online-to-Offline Action

We have followers but not a movement.

Learn how digital communities become organizing communities. Participants work with digital recruitment, social engagement, email, SMS, online communities, relationship development, activation, conversion, and online-to-offline organizing.

The goal is to turn attention into relationships and relationships into action.

Practice Area 04: Organizations + Collaboration

OPS 201: Strategy, Priorities + Execution

Everybody is working, but nothing is moving.

Learn how to translate mission and ideas into priorities, goals, ownership, timelines, execution systems, accountability, and measurable outcomes.

The goal is to help organizations distinguish activity from progress and build operating systems that move the work.

COLLAB 210: Coalition Building + Collaborative Power

Our coalition can’t get on the same page.

Learn how to build and operate coalitions around shared purpose without pretending every participating organization has identical interests. Participants examine coalition design, roles, governance, decision-making, communication, conflict, shared goals, accountability, and collaborative execution.

The goal is to create coalitions capable of doing together what individual organizations cannot accomplish alone.

COLLAB 230: Ecosystem Mapping + Ending Duplication

We’re doing the same work as everybody else.

Learn how to map organizations, resources, programs, relationships, services, assets, gaps, and duplication across a community or issue ecosystem.

The goal is to see the whole field before building another program, identify what already exists, find what is missing, and create better opportunities for collaboration.

OPS 260: Meetings That Move Work

Our meetings waste everybody’s time.

Learn how to design and facilitate meetings that produce decisions, ownership, accountability, participation, and movement. Participants work with agendas, facilitation, decision structures, documentation, follow-through, and meeting design.

The goal is to turn meetings from recurring calendar events into operating infrastructure.

LEAD 310: Sustainable Leadership + Distributed Capacity

We’re burning out the people who care the most.

Learn how to distribute responsibility, develop additional leaders, design sustainable workloads, create boundaries, build succession, document knowledge, and reduce organizational dependence on a few indispensable people.

The goal is to build organizations where commitment does not require exhaustion.

Practice Area 05: Data, Technology + Evidence

DATA 101: Community Data Fundamentals

We have data everywhere and can’t use it.

Learn how to collect, structure, clean, organize, connect, and interpret information across spreadsheets, databases, CRMs, surveys, voter files, field systems, and other community data sources.

The goal is to turn disconnected information into usable organizational intelligence.

DATA 210: Community Research + Listening

We don’t actually know what our community needs.

Learn how to ask before assuming. Participants use interviews, surveys, listening sessions, observation, community research, needs assessment, and participatory approaches to understand what people experience and what problems actually need to be solved.

The goal is to make decisions with communities rather than designing solutions around assumptions about them.

DATA 250: Measuring What Matters

We can’t prove our work is working.

Learn how to define outcomes, identify meaningful indicators, build KPIs, collect evidence, evaluate programs and campaigns, create dashboards, report results, and use measurement to improve decisions.

The goal is to move from “we did the work” to “here is what changed.”

TECH 220: Technology for Organizing + Community Work

We don’t know how to use technology for this work.

Learn how to evaluate and use CRMs, automation, AI, digital organizing platforms, data systems, collaboration tools, integrations, and workflows based on the actual problem being solved.

The goal is not to collect software. The goal is to build technology infrastructure that makes people and organizations more capable.

LAB 201: From Idea to Experiment

We have an idea but don’t know how to test it.

Learn how to define a problem, identify assumptions, research existing approaches, design a small intervention, build or prototype it, gather community feedback, measure results, and iterate.

The goal is to move promising ideas out of conversation and into disciplined experimentation.

Practice Area 06: Capacity, Funding + Expertise

FUND 210: Funding Readiness

We need money but aren’t funding-ready.

Learn what needs to exist before an organization goes looking for money, including organizational clarity, budgets, programs, outcomes, documentation, impact evidence, governance, financial readiness, funder research, and the ability to communicate a credible case for investment.

The goal is to make organizations ready for funding before the opportunity appears.

FUND 240: Beyond the Grant

Grants can’t be the whole strategy.

Learn how organizations can build more resilient funding models through individual giving, recurring support, earned revenue, memberships, sponsorships, partnerships, contracts, campaigns, and other appropriate revenue sources.

The goal is to reduce dependence on one funding mechanism and build a healthier revenue mix.

EXP 210: Turn Experience Into Expertise

I know this work but don’t know how to teach it.

Learn how to identify the knowledge buried inside experience and turn it into a framework other people can understand and use. Participants work with methodology development, curriculum, facilitation, documentation, teaching, case studies, and thought leadership.

The goal is to help practitioners transform what they know into knowledge that can travel.

EXP 101: Building Experience Through Real Work

I want to do this work but nobody will give me experience.

Learn through applied projects connected to actual community and organizational needs. Participants develop professional practice, collaboration, documentation, feedback, portfolio evidence, and demonstrated competency while contributing to meaningful work.

The goal is to break the experience-requires-experience loop by creating structured opportunities to do the work.

First-Term Pathways

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Courses are individual building blocks. Pathways connect those blocks around something a participant is trying to become capable of doing.

Community Canvasser → Field Leader

Build the ability to have effective conversations, understand the field, use data, manage follow-up, deploy people, and eventually lead a field operation.

CANV 101 Canvassing Fundamentals → CANV 120 Conversations That Move People → FIELD 210 Targeting, Turf + Community Mapping → FIELD 230 From Contact to Relationship → FIELD 310 Field Leadership + Canvass Management.

Volunteer → Community Organizer

Move from participating in the work to developing other people and organizing collective action.

ORG 101 Organizing Fundamentals → MOB 220 Volunteer Recruitment + Growth → ORG 130 Base Building + Community Expansion → LEAD 210 From Volunteer to Leader → ORG 220 Power Mapping + Stakeholder Strategy → ORG 240 Campaign Strategy + Building a Win.

Mobilization + Engagement Strategist

Build the infrastructure required to find people, communicate with them, move them into action, and keep them involved.

MOB 101 Mobilization Fundamentals → MOB 120 Activation + Calls to Action → COMM 210 Messaging + Narrative That Moves → DIGI 250 Digital Organizing + Online-to-Offline Action → MOB 220 Volunteer Recruitment + Growth → MOB 240 Volunteer Retention + Belonging.

Community Problem Solver

Learn how to understand a community problem before attempting to solve it, bring the right people around it, develop an intervention, test it, and measure what happens.

DATA 210 Community Research + Listening → COLLAB 230 Ecosystem Mapping + Ending Duplication → ORG 220 Power Mapping + Stakeholder Strategy → DATA 101 Community Data Fundamentals → LAB 201 From Idea to Experiment → DATA 250 Measuring What Matters.

This pathway can move directly into a Street Angels Think Tank and then into a Street Angels Lab.

Organizational Capacity Builder

Develop the skills needed to strengthen organizations behind the work rather than simply adding more work.

OPS 201 Strategy, Priorities + Execution → OPS 260 Meetings That Move Work → DATA 250 Measuring What Matters → TECH 220 Technology for Organizing + Community Work → FUND 210 Funding Readiness → FUND 240 Beyond the Grant → LEAD 310 Sustainable Leadership + Distributed Capacity.

Practitioner → Instructor → Thought Leader

Turn experience into transferable knowledge and build a body of work around what you know.

EXP 210 Turn Experience Into Expertise → LAB 201 From Idea to Experiment → DATA 250 Measuring What Matters, followed by an applied teaching experience, practitioner-led course or pathway, Lab leadership, case study development, and contribution to Street Angels Institute curriculum.

How the Institute Fits Together

The Institute is not a collection of disconnected classes. The curriculum is the knowledge layer. Pathways organize that knowledge around capabilities. Think Tanks bring different forms of knowledge together around problems that need deeper understanding. Labs give participants somewhere to apply what they are learning and test what the network thinks might work.

Applied work produces experience, evidence, case studies, methodologies, tools, and new knowledge. That knowledge can return to the curriculum, improve an existing course, create a new class, inform another Lab, or become something a practitioner teaches.

That creates the Street Angels Institute learning cycle: people learn what they need, put it to work, measure what happens, improve it, document what they discover, and move that knowledge to the next person.

The first term starts with thirty problems because those problems are already here. The curriculum exists to increase the number of people capable of doing something about them.