Activist Academy

One of the projects that I will be working on over the next 12 months will be setting up the TUC Activist Academy.

The Activist Academy is being set up to increase the number of lay union reps accessing organising training, support the efforts of unions to engage lay activists in organising and recruitment activity and build on the work of the Organising Academy.

The organising training materials aimed at lay reps - ORGANISE - have recently been updated and re-launched as ORGANISE 2, however the number of lay reps attending specific organising related training is particularly low especially when placed along side the numbers attending training related to either Health and Safety or Industrial Relations/Collective Bargaining.

The Activist Academy will pull together unions nationally and regionally as well as Region TUCs and TUC Education Units to offer training combined with specific work and/or community based organising projects.

The Activist Academy will be trialled initially in three TUC Regions - Yorkshire and Humber, Midlands and Southern and Eastern with national roll-out scheduled for early 2009. If you want to know more about the Activist Academy drop me a line at here.

Welcome to TUC O&R Team Blog

Via this blog, you can find out more about the day to day work of the TUC's Organising & Recruitment Team.

The team is headed up by Paul Nowak the TUC's National Organiser and includes Liz Blackshaw, Director of the TUC Organising Academy, Tom Mellish, Organising Policy Officer and Carl Roper, National Training and Consultancy Officer (Organising).