WORC’s Principles of Community Organizing helps turn concerned residents into leaders. Here are the stories of some of them.
At Western Organization of Resource Councils, we believe deeply in the power of everyday people coming together to have a say in the decisions that impact their lives. We also believe in their power to strategize, campaign, and manifest the future they want to see for their families and communities. That’s why we created and hold the Principles of Community Organizing training–to support organizers, leaders, and community members in building stronger organizations, running more strategic campaigns, and bringing about a future where rural communities thrive, our institutions reflect the people they are meant to serve, and the people and places we love are safe.
At our last POCO training, in late April, 25 leaders and staff members from throughout the WORC network and region gathered in Rapid City, South Dakota to immerse themselves in the core theories and skills of community organizing. Over the course of three days, and taking part in a variety of hands-on facilitation formats, participants gained experience in how to identify good issues, turn them into campaigns, find and develop leaders, build power for change, and use storytelling to connect people to shared values.
Here are the stories of some of those participants.
Maria Katherman, POCO ‘25
Maria Katherman spent her career as a plant pathologist living and working in Colombia, Chile, Kenya, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia before returning to her hometown of Casper, Wyoming. She returned because she missed having easy access to public lands, something that was hard to find in other countries.
Public lands mean more to her than just a place to retreat or relax. When she was in seventh
grade, her biology teacher took her class to some state parcels of public lands on the outskirts of Casper to learn about the natural world there. She found her calling as a scientist that day. “I’d been through a whole year of biology without noticing that it’s the very stuff I was already interested in,” she says.
How she found her life’s calling is the story Maria told Wyoming’s governor, secretary of state,
and others who make up the State Board of Land Commissioners. Maria told it while giving testimony in opposition to proposed gravel pits the board was considering on the same state parcel of public land Maria’s seventh-grade biology class had visited in the 1960s.
A longtime member of Powder River Basin Resource Council (PRBRC), Maria found the
inspiration to tell this story after attending WORC’s 2025 Principles of Community Organizing (POCO) training in Rapid City, South Dakota. Maria decided on going to POCO after appreciating the change in one of her fellow PRBRC board members who had attended the training before her. After attending POCO, the board member began offering solutions that struck Maria as “incisive and inclusive” and that “helped the board a lot.”
At POCO, Maria learned about the characteristics of community organizing and the power of
personal narrative as a strategy for inspiring people to act. The training compelled her to think
about her own narrative in relation to the fight she was involved in to stop the gravel pits in
Casper.
After attending POCO she realized that the people she needed to organize were people like her
seventh-grade biology teacher–educators in Casper who use public lands as places for educating and inspiring students. Maria knew many local educators from having been a continuing education instructor with Wyoming Field Science Camp and as a teacher of biology and botany at Casper College. Many former students had learned in those classes how to incorporate field studies on public lands into their class curriculums.
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“Without POCO I would never have seen that this is the community I need to reach to influence the state land board,” she says. “It just became clear to me after POCO.”
A week before the land board meeting, Maria called every teacher she knew to get them to
contact the land board. She wrote an action alert and emailed it out to as many educators as
she had email addresses for. She also helped organize carpooling to Cheyenne on the day of
the land board meeting.
“Without POCO I would never have seen that this is the community I need to reach to influence the state land board.”
-Maria Katherman
On the way there, she thought about what she had gained from POCO and knew the narrative
about her seventh-grade field trip to the state land parcel should frame her testimony before the board. While giving testimony, Maria cited some data to support her argument about the value of public lands in education. “But it was the story they responded to,” she says. “You could feel the room perk up and change.”
The land board ended up ruling against the gravel pits. When speaking to a WORC staff member a few days later, Maria could hardly contain her elation. “It was fabulous,” she said. “A strong, organized community effort succeeded!”
Sticking to what she learned at POCO, Maria was ready to help organize a picnic celebration of
the land board decision and think about how she and her fellow organizers might use it to help launch a campaign to protect the state land that almost became gravel mines from any future threats of development.
Julie DeFor, POCO ‘25
The first time Julie DeFor saw grassroots organizing in action was at her home. An organizer for Nebraska Organizing Project, her son Grant used her and her husband’s home as a space for NOP members to meet and collectively decide on the issue they wanted to organize around. A visitation specialist at a community college, Julie enjoyed the meetings and loved getting to know NOP’s members. When NOP started holding power-mapping sessions on how to win on the issue they had decided to work on (language access for non-English speakers in Norfolk), she was, as she says, “hooked on” community organizing.
“I’ve just never been to anything that’s been so productive and inclusive,” she says. “Everybody got to participate.”
WORC’s Principles of Community Organizing (POCO) training took place in Norfolk in 2024, shortly after Julie had become a member leader in NOP. But she had already made plans to be out of town during the training. When she returned, her fellow member leaders could talk of little else. Julie vowed to go to the next POCO training, held in Rapid City in 2025, and she kept it.
“I left POCO feeling like this is my calling. It aligns so perfectly with my core values, with who I am as a person.“
-Julie DeFor
“Everything was very purposeful, and so well planned and executed,” she said after attending. “I loved the mix of presentations versus small group participation.”
Participation included role-playing a scenario in which a grassroots organization takes on a copper mining company that has already polluted a local creek and now wants to expand its operations. The scenario ends with the organization planning for and implementing a direct action at a hearing before the department of environmental quality on whether to approve the expansion or not.
Julie had seen the elements of grassroots organizing put into action as NOP was deciding on its issue and preparing to convince the Norfolk City Council to adopt a language access plan (which it did). But POCO allowed her to see how all of the elements, including successful campaign planning and implementation, all come together, from soup to nuts.
The part of the training that spoke to her most emphatically was how to conduct one-on-one interviews with potential members and develop them into leaders. She realized that she had been on the receiving end of that development in her early days with NOP, but she now had the skills to be on the delivery side, able to develop others.
“I immediately started thinking about who I am going to have one-on-ones with, who I see as potential leaders,” she says. “I had this vision of what I’m supposed to be doing.” Since returning from POCO and in her role as NOP’s membership captain, Julie has already conducted seven one-on-one interviews with prospective member leaders, many of whom she didn’t know before sitting down with them.
“I left POCO feeling like this is my calling,” she says. “It aligns so perfectly with my core values, with who I am as a person.“
Learn more:
Grassroots Organizing in Colorado Wins Historic Public Health and Safety Protections
Pat Sweeney: 40 Years of Grassroots Action
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