More About The Midwest Academy The Midwest Academy offers a basic five-day session. Enrollment is limited to approximately twenty-five to thirty-five students with two or three instructors. Settings are residential. Students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and organizations. Weekend and one-day sessions designed specifically for your organization, are available on a contract basis, as is Academy consulting.

The Training Includes:

Partial List

• Understanding power relationships.
• Criteria for choosing the issues that
  make up your organization's program.
• Developing a strategy.
• Building coalitions.
• Holding public officials accountable.
• Working with the media.
  

Why Thinking Strategically Matters

In our work with many hundreds of organizations, most have been trying to gain some specific change regarding such issues as health care, civil rights, affordable housing, jobs, environmental protection, consumer justice, education, public financing of elections, workers rights and many other objectives.

All too often groups believe that they will win because:

• They are morally right.
• Truth is on their side.
• They have the best information.
• They speak for large numbers of people.
  

These qualities are indispensable, but alone, they are not sufficient.

Being right is not enough.

An organization must also have the power to compel the person who makes the decision to give the group what it wants. In every case there are strong forces on the other side that are trying to make that decision go in the wrong way. Strategy is about getting that power. The key lies in figuring out the cost to the Decision Maker of various actions that your organization can take in the public arena, so that you can get concessions for not taking them. This is why thinking strategically matters.