By focusing on skill-building for key progressive leaders, the Rockwood Leadership Program proposes to organize national and regional think tank leaders and facilitate collaboration in visioning, messaging and program across the boundaries of organization, issue focus, and geography. Drawing on training methodologies from community organizing, private sector leadership development programs, and its deep experience facilitating progressive social change, Rockwood delivers intensive workshops that help key leaders create the visioning, partnership and implementation skills associated with highly successful public policy campaigns. The stages in infrastructure-building, in the Rockwood model, begin with:
Since 1999, Rockwood has convened and trained more than 1,500 advocacy leaders, including the leadership of networks and coalitions focusing on prison reform, habitat protection, corporate accountability, human rights, public health, media reform and climate change.
Recent events make it clear that the energy exists within the Hispanic community to enable Hispanics to reach their full political potential, which, if managed correctly, can sustain the progressive movement and help it grow. However, in order to be successful, progressives must communicate effectively with the Hispanic population through an approach that can deliver messages utilizing new technologies at the neighborhood level. Iowa, a bell weather of politics and demographics, can serve as a testing ground for on-going engagement with the growing Hispanic population. Housed within the Center for Civic Participation, which operates nationwide in a number of states from its Minneapolis office, the Iowa Project is an expansion of the strong and targeted community-specific work that has been done in Iowa's Hispanic community. Hispanic civic participation is critical to the lasting implementation of progressive agendas; The Iowa Project is a long-term strategy that can achieve rapid intermediate results, with the possibility of subsequent expansion into other Midwestern states, as well as those states with large Hispanic populations.
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