“We Grow Power to Build Change”
The Organizing School is a collection of North Texas community organizers and change-makers that span generations and causes. We’ve come together to share our collective knowledge, skills, and expertise to our peers who are seeking their own change.
The Organizing School gives everyone access to time tested community organizing principles and lessons, a pool of expertise in effective campaign building, and a network of peers focused on making things better across a wide spectrum of issues.
Through our classes, we grow the ability to change the status quo by providing key tools for healthy democratic participation. We believe that a more just world is possible, but it can’t be won without more people being able to organize their communities. Americans are concerned about our future. People are growing disillusioned with our political process and a combination of cynicism and nihilism threatens to make all positive change look impossible. Organizing is the solution to these problems. When people know how to organize, they can work within their communities to build the just future we all want. Through its various programs and classes The Organizing School trains new and established community leaders in time-tested organizing skills and makes civic participation, and change, more possible.
OUR COMMITMENTS
We’re committed to making our education accessible to everyone who wants it.
We’re committed to growing new grassroots leadership, as well as enhancing the capacity of veteran activists and organizers.
We’re committed to using all non-violent tools to fuel social justice with collective action and obtain a more perfect union.
We’re committed to building networks of diverse changemakers who share a common understanding of how to build winning campaigns.
OUR MISSION
The Organizing School provides a quality education in the mechanics and skills of effective grassroots Change. We do so by applying lessons passed down by our elders and predecessors, as well as a critical analysis of fundamental community organizing principles. Our goal is to graduate students who use what they learn to win Change in their lives and communities.
OUR BOARD
Kim Aman is a former public-school teacher and graduate of the College of Constructive Hellraising, (Class of ’19) who works in the Urban Ag and Slow Food movement. She’s the Founder/Director of Grow Garden Grow, where she holds the title of Farmer Kim, integrating curriculum in schoolyards across North Texas. Additionally, she works with Grow North Texas, and started a nonprofit, the NTx School Garden Network, supporting education in the local food system.
Her farming roots run deep from her Grandfather who grew crops in the rich soil of central Ohio. He taught her about the earth, soil, plants, animals and the beauty of a bite from a vine ripe tomato. On any given day, you can find Kim in the garden working side by side with student farmers, teaching them about the land and the food they eat. She knows that she is fortunate to be doing what she loves and looks forward to every day that she can spend digging in the soil.
Kim Batchelor is the coordinator of Texas Christians for Reproductive Justice which is addressing Texas’s oppressive abortion bans and high maternal mortality rate. She co-founded the anti-nuclear energy group the Armadillo Coalition of Texas before moving from Fort Worth to Dallas in the late 1970s to work for the Bois d’Arc Patriots, an organization which focused on low-income whites in coalition with communities of color to successfully make change. She’s organized against the wars in Central America and worked on immigrant justice. For 20 years, she managed clinical and behavioral research for a major academic medical center and developed and taught workshops throughout the US on community assessment and evaluation largely based on participatory methods for a nationwide training center housed at the medical center
Mavis Belisle is a lifelong DFW organizer. She’s currently a board member of the Dallas Peace and Justice Center. She’s been a important part of anti-racist, anti-nuclear power and weapons protests, and anti-war work, as well as training generations of North Texans in the effective use of non violent civil disobedience. She’s an important link between DFW and groups based in the Northeast, such as the War Resisters League, the American Friends Service Committee, and Movement for a New Society. She served as executive director of the Peace Farm, a non-profit organization next to Pantex nuclear weapons plant for five years.
Changa Higgins has been a longtime organizer for police reform, and racial justice in the Texas and Oklahoma region. For over 20 years, he has founded and led strategic organizations, including The Harambee Brotherhood, Unify South Dallas, and Dallas Action. He is also the founder design2action, a research, strategy, and design consultancy, that incorporates his unique perspective to organizing. He has worked for city governments, non-profits and small to enterprise across multiple industries, including the City of Dallas, Twitter and Google. His work blends years of research, design thinking, and human-centered design practices to engage communities to work on solutions to public safety, policing, and justice issues.
Changa is leading the Dallas Community Police Oversight Coalition, which spearheaded the creation and implementation of Dallas’ new Office of Police Oversight in October 2019. He is also a consultant to The Leadership Conference Education Fund’s New Era of Public Safety Campaign, and the Community Data Empowerment Project.
Dr. Marsha Jackson is a mother of two daughters, she has two grandsons, two granddaughters, two great-granddaughters, three great-grandsons, and a Shitz Shu fur baby.
Dr. Jackson is the Executive Director and founder of Southern Sector Rising, a 501C3 nonprofit organization, a full-time Fortune 500 Global company employee, a retired AT&T manager, and a guest speaker discussing Environmental Injustice. She received the 2019 Sierra Club Environmentalist Award, 2020 featured in Soledad O’Brien BET Documentary Disrupt and Dismantle, 2020 Recipient of SMU 55th Symposium Women in Profiles Award, the 2020 Juanita Craft Humanitarian Award, the 2020 Green Source DFW Leadership Environmental Award, 2021 Texas Legislative Black Caucus Outstanding Texan Award, 2021 Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year Finalist Nominee, 2022 AFL CIO Community Champion Award, 2023 A Maceo Smith Social Justice Award, and Friendship-West Baptist Church 2024 Betty R. Green for the Vision Nominee.
Dr. Jackson holds a Doctorate in Public Administration, a Master’s in Business Administration with a Concentration in Human Resource Certification, a Graduate HRM Certificate, and a Bachelor’s degree in Business with a Concentration in Management.
Allen McGill Allen McGill is retired, but retirement allows him more time for his passion – advocacy and equity for African Americans, low-income residents, and neighborhoods.
In addition to serving as the co-chair of Southern Sector Rising, Allen chairs the Lane Plating Community Advisory Group for a Superfund Site in Southeast Oak Cliff. When asked what he contributes to these organizations Allen shares, “I listen and amplify the voices on the frontline of racism and polluted neighborhoods and act as an effective advocate for change with residents.” Allen enjoys traveling along the Gulf from Texas to
Adrian Neely is a professional media creator and educator who teaches at the Mountain View campus of Dallas College. He graduated from SMU with an Masters in Cinema/Television and got his BA from Sam Houston State in Radio/TV/Film. He’s a 2024 graduate of the College of Constructive Hell-Raising.
The Hon. Luis Sepulveda is the founder of the West Dallas Coalition for Environmental Justice and led its efforts in the 1990’s to clean-up thousands of tons of poisonous waste dumped throughout his community by the notorious RSR lead smelter. His group’s campaign led to the EPA declaring West Dallas as the nation’s largest Superfund Site and became a model for Environmental Justice fights across the country. He’s considered the “Father of Environmental Justice” in Dallas. Sepulveda is also a former Justice of the Peace.
Harrison Tassopoulos is a partner and co-founder of Kimota, a firm committed to Human-centered design. His background lies at the intersection of business and philanthropy including work in corporate social responsibility, public affairs, strategic communications, organizational development, and external affairs. Leveraging his vast experience in both corporate and non-profit environments, he embraces design as a tool to build community, bring people together, promote collaboration, and create unique spaces and experiences. Harrison holds a BSM in Legal Studies of Business and Spanish from Tulane University and a MA in Design and Innovation from Southern Methodist University. He’s a 2024 graduate of the College of Constructive Hell-Raising.
David Villalobos was born and raised in Laredo, Texas a border town community. After graduating from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a political science degree, David worked as a canvasser for Mi Familia Vota, a non-profit organization focused on engaging the Latino community. In his time there, David registered hundreds of individuals to vote and encouraged thousands of inner city residents and college students in San Antonio to cast a ballot.
David works at the Texas Organizing Project, a community organizing group fighting for racial and economic justice. He has worked on community organizing campaigns that include the areas of housing justice, education justice, immigration justice, and criminal justice reform. David directed TOP’s biggest get out the vote program in Dallas for the 2018 midterm leading a team that knocked on over a quarter of a million doors. David is now the Statewide Political Director of the Texas Organizing Project.
OUR SUPERINTENDENT
Jim Schermbeck was born, raised, and graduated from high school in Fort Worth. He received a BA in Political Science and Religion-Philosophy from Austin College. He attended graduate school for film at both the University of North Texas and the University of Texas at Arlington.
He founded his first group in 1977 to oppose the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. In 1989 he was hired as the DFW Program Director for Texans United, a statewide anti-toxics network where he was responsible for identifying and cleaning-up a State Superfund site, the nation’s largest Superfund site, and banning hazardous waste-burning in Dallas by ordinance. From 1994 to 2024 he was Director of Downwinders at Risk, a DFW-based clean air and environmental justice group, where he successfully facilitated campaigns to end the burning of toxic waste in the Midlothian cement plants, close an illegal lead smelter in Frisco, effectively ban gas drilling in Dallas, and close the notorious Shingle Mountain dump site. He’s also oversaw campaigns that appointed Downwinders’ technical advisor as the first Latine Regional EPA Director, passed the nation’s first municipal “green cement “ procurement ordinance, co-authored the largest “Good Neighbor” agreement in Texas history valued at $2.3 million, deployed the first independent air monitoring network in North Texas, and administered the first community environmental health surveys in the Joppa and Singleton Corridor neighborhoods of Dallas. Before retiring from Downwinders, he helped facilitate the group’s transition to an environmental justice group administered and staffed by People of Color.
As a filmmaker he’s co-written, co-directed, co-edited and co-produced “Larry V Lockney,” a documentary film that debuted on the PBS network as part of its 2003 POV series, and “The Big Buy,” a 2006 documentary film distributed by Brave New Films.