Bay Rising has prioritized fellowships as a cornerstone of its capacity-building efforts. The DOTS (Digital Organizing Training and Strategy) Fellowship exemplifies this commitment, having connected 25 young organizers with 20 Bay Area organizations rooted in working-class communities of color from 2020-2023. This initiative not only bolstered the digital organizing capabilities crucial in today’s political landscape but also provided vital support to Bay Rising network organizations grappling with increased demands.
Looking ahead, Bay Rising recognizes the evolving need to empower organizers with the skills and resources necessary to effect systemic change. By continuing to refine and expand its fellowship programs, Bay Rising aims to cultivate a new generation of leaders capable of reshaping political dynamics in favor of working-class people of color, thereby strengthening the foundation of grassroots activism in the Bay Area. In 2024 Bay Rising created a brand new Lead Organizing Fellowship to equip organizers with the necessary skills to become campaign managers. Check out the fellowships Bay Rising has offered below.
2024 Lead Organizer Fellowship
To get what we want we need to radically change the political landscape of the Bay Area by transforming the power structure in favor of working-class people of color and building mass electoral majorities through recruiting and involving constituents, leveraging social power, developing the skills of organic leaders, and expanding our base: Organizing.
Organizing requires a lot of time and a lot of people. We can’t control time, but people are everywhere! We need people to run these campaigns, to manage the organizers who are recruiting and developing voters, to create the strategies that expand our base. The Bay Rising Organizing Fellowship will equip organizers who already have field experience with the skills necessary to running and winning campaigns through training, coaching, community-building, and hands-on experience. Meet our newest fellows in the field.
2022-2023 Digital Organizing and Training Strategy (DOTS) Fellowship
Helping our organizations build online-to-offline power is more important than ever in the digital age. This need hit home with the COVID-19 shelter-in-place, when we were faced with restrictions on in-person organizing, along with many questions on how to best reach our communities with different language needs and ways of interacting with the digital world. Skill-building alone was not enough; our organizations needed more staffing and sustained support to level up their organizing in this way.
Our Program
Bay Rising designed the Digital Organizing and Training Strategy (DOTS) Fellowship to build the long-term digital organizing capacity of Bay Rising and our partner groups. We want organizations in the Bay Area to come out from the pandemic stronger than ever, with more capacity for digital organizing and organizing overall, integrated online and offline organizing, and a pool of alums who are committed to working in Bay Area movement organizations and confident in their (digital) organizing abilities.
Our fellowship connects young organizers to Bay Area organizations rooted in working-class communities of color. The 2021 pilot DOTS fellowship took place over the course of six to eight months, where each fellow dedicated 15-20 hours per week doing digital organizing work at their host organization. Fellows received about 40 hours of digital organizing training, peer support, and coaching for their teams at their host organizations. They also had the opportunity to earn a Digital Campaigning Certification from Social Movement Technologies, one of our training and coaching partners.
In 2022 we created DOTS 2.0 to bring on ten full-time DOTS fellows, seven of whom were new to the Bay Rising network, to work with our member organizations from July 2022-June 2023. DOTS 2.0 fellows also receive digital organizing training, peer support, and coaching for their teams. Since then four of the DOTS 2.0 fellows have been offered positions with their organizations following the end of the fellowship in June 2023.