ORP TRAININGS

Option #1

Title: Reconciliation as a Tool of Social Change

Course Background: For the last four years, the Oregon Remembrance Project (ORP), an organization dedicated to the creation of truth and reconciliation projects surrounding historical injustice, has been building a movement to end the death penalty in Oregon centered on the legacy of lynching, historical repair, and the story of Alonzo Tucker, Oregon’s most widely documented African American victim of lynching. ORP has created a reconciliation narrative arc surrounding the lynching of Alonzo Tucker as the vehicle to push forward a death penalty abolition movement. Taylor Stewart, executive director of ORP, will share with participants a template for how he created this project and lead participants in developing their own historical reconciliation project aimed at affecting a contemporary social issue.

Course Description: This session will cover four sections.

1. Participants will analyze ORP’s lynching-death penalty reconciliation project alongside Taylor Stewart.

2. Participants will practice applying ORP’s project template to the practice example of “vaccine hesitancy in the African American community.”

3. Participants will begin applying ORP’s project template to an issue within their organization while receiving support for crafting the beginning phases of a reconciliation narrative arc.

4. Participants will learn how to infuse their personal/organizational story into their reconciliation project to act as the driving force behind the work.

Objectives and Goals: In this session, participants will learn how to:

• Develop a project along the three phases of reconciliation—remembrance, repair, and redemption.

• Practice approaching issues from a past-present-future perspective.

• Articulate the fundamental questions that tie historical injustice to its contemporary manifestations.

• Practice narrative creation and transformation.

• Form project partnerships within relevant communities.

• Create project buy-in from those around them.

Duration: 2 hours

Option #2

Title: How do you reconcile historical injustice?

Speaker: Taylor Stewart is the executive director of the Oregon Remembrance Project (ORP). ORP helps communities with truth and reconciliation projects about repairing historical injustice. ORP connects historical racism to its present-day legacies in order to inspire contemporary racial justice action. Stewart is a Portland native and graduated from the University of Portland with a degree in Communication and Portland State University with a Master’s in Social Work. Stewart is a former TEDx speaker with TEDx Portland, the largest TEDx venue in the world.

Talk description: Stewart will share ORP’s approach to the question “How do you reconcile a lynching?” and lead participants through a new approach to DEI work focused on historical reconciliation. Stewart will describe ORP’s projects surrounding lynching, sundown towns, and Black exclusionary laws with the aim to inspire more communities and organizations to make contemporary change by reckoning with their past to create a more just future.

Duration: 35 min + 25 min Q&A

Option #3

Title: Strategies for Racial Justice Organizing

Course Description: Taylor Stewart, executive director of the Oregon Remembrance Project (ORP), will share ORP’s strategies for community organizing irrespective of institutional power. These strategies are outlined through the following analogies:

1. Prison Yard: starting with the most difficult entity to ease future interactions.

2. Staircase: bringing an audience gradually up a series of building acceptances to reach an ultimate realization.

3. Tree Rings: power mapping along a circular-gridded ideological center.

4. Hourglass: building levels of engagement up to an inflection point that then spurs wider interaction.

Objectives and Goals: Participants will learn how to do the following.

• Create model champions for their cause.

• Develop ideologically stacked messaging.

• Plot how relevant individuals and groups will interact with one another.

• Inspire future action among individuals and communities.

Duration: 1.5-2.0 hours