As part of the National Education Association’s (NEA) upcoming Focus Academy on “Advancing LGTBQ+ Justice,” the training includes a Campaign Planning module focused on “Centering Equity.”

According to the NEA: Campaigns “provide a structured approach to addressing specific issues by mobilizing resources, engaging stakeholders, and building collective power. Through strategic planning and targeted actions, campaigns enable groups to focus their efforts on achievable goals that create tangible improvements in people’s lives. … Ultimately, campaigns are not just about achieving immediate objectives but also about creating a foundation for sustained progress and long-term impact.”

In the “Centering Equity” component of the training, the NEA shares that “Race, class, and gender dynamics, disparities, and divisions permeate our society, communities, schools, and classrooms.”

“Systemic oppression is so deeply rooted in our history, culture, and institutions that there is no escaping it,” the training reads. “Visible or not, the impacts are ever-present.”

The Campaign Lab training then shares how to “engage in a systems analysis of a racial issue” and ensure that the “campaign demands center race, class, and gender justice.”

When addressing solutions to a problem, the NEA asks its participants to consider, “How would different racial groups be impacted by proposed solutions?” Participants are then asked to consider the causes of a problem, its history, solutions, strategies, leadership, and additional equity tool questions. These additional questions ask again, “How do our demands center race, class, and gender justice?”

The NEA then outlines a problems-oriented approach to campaigning that identifies a specific “demand” and a clear target. A target, according to the NEA, is a person or organization with the “decision making or resources to solve your problem.”

This problems-oriented approach includes a “primary power analysis” and “spectrum of allies” power analysis. The “primary power analysis” asks participants to examine their given campaign issue and pinpoint a target. The handout reads, “Be specific. A target has a name, a face, and an address.”

In a “Primary Target Power Analysis,” participants are asked to identify the target’s position, self-interest, relationships, and power, including questions such as, “What power does the target have and where does their power derive from?” In the “Spectrum of Allies Power Analysis,” the NEA teaches participants to organize their campaign by who is with them and against them. Specifically, the NEA categorizes people into active allies, passive allies, neutral, passive opponents, and active opponents.

In describing “Active Opponents,” the NEA characterizes them as: “people, organizations, institutions that you think have some interests that would be opposed to your vision; they may have relationships with people who are actively opposed to you.” The NEA continues, “If your target is located in this area of the spectrum – your tactic goal would need to put them into a great dilemma.”

The closing sections of the training, titled Messaging, Strategy and Tactics, and Building Power & Developing Leaders, once again asks participants to focus on their targets: “Put pressure on the target (push them out of their comfort zone)” and “Name how each tactic would disrupt the target(s) self-interest, relationships, or power.”