If you and your community want to do civil disobedience or nonviolent direct action but aren’t sure where or how to start, the CDC can facilitate trainings that help you pull off a successful campaign.  Our trainings go well beyond skills and tactics to help your community identify the principles that ground you and help you think through how to use those principle to guide your efforts.  Unlike other direct action trainings that assume an action ends at the point of arrest, our trainings are designed from the beginning to help activists strategize actions that extend into successful courtroom confrontation and long term campaigns.  We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we can ask the critical questions that have grown out of our own experiences of civil disobedience in the climate movement.

If you have already taken action and gotten into some good trouble, the CDC can help you make the most of it.  We can help you craft your strategy inside and outside the courtroom.  We may be able to help you find low cost or free legal representation, and we can help you work with your lawyers to ensure they understand your own goals, as well as the movement impacts of your legal case. We’ll walk you through the process of connecting to resources, identifying your needs, and filling the gaps. Courts are isolating, but we know that now is the time to figure out what strategy is best for you and your group or campaign, and you may even be able to use this moment to keep building power through organizing! Whether the support you need is legal, logistical, organizational, media, moral, spiritual, or something else, we’ve got your back. 

We provide all our services, from phone consultation to extended on-the-ground organizing, free of charge for activists who are taking bold, creative and principled action against the fossil fuel industry and the systems that prop it up. Because none of us are free until all of us are free, we show up with these support resources in many spaces where folks are fighting for (and creating) justice. 

We occasionally work with larger organizational partners to bring the experience and resources of Climate Disobedience Center into their organizing spaces. Because those organizations are well-funded, we do take payment for this sort of work. Those organizational contracts help us to be available to continue providing support to activists on the front lines.