Take 10 – Building Power to Win

  • Alpha Life Enrichment Center, Get Out the Vote Campaign

You have tremendous power to create change when you harness the power of the community’s voice through civic engagement.

Spirit in Action’s interactive online training and coaching program will help you train volunteers and leadership infrastructure that builds power within disenfranchised communities, where grassroots folks hold top positions, locally, statewide and nationally, and learn how to hold public officials accountable.

This training effort will build a strong, ongoing civically engaged volunteer base in your community. Most importantly, your work will continue to build strength and issue-based empowerment for rural, low-income and marginalized people through 2022 and beyond.

We are so grateful that Linda Stout and her ‘Take 10’ model has come to Maine. In this political moment, it’s critical that grassroots community leaders are supported to do deep organizing work in their own communities that builds leadership and infrastructure for the long term. Linda helped us understand that when low income communities can connect relationships, the power of stories, and the lifeblood of culture with new systems for mobilizing, powerful things can happen!

— Kate Brennan, organizing and community outreach director, Maine Equal Justice

Learn how to use Voter Registration and Get-Out-the-Vote with our TAKE 10 model of organizing.

  • Goals and workplan: create from now to the election. After the election we will craft a longer vision for work through the next year and beyond.
  • Clear messaging: connect issues people care about through language that resonates for them. It matters what words we use!
  • Listening Project: implement a process to build your base and learn about the issues facing your community.
  • Canvassing: learn how to do it in rural and suburban areas,
  • Voter registration/GOTV: learn the nuts and bolts and how to multiply your impact.
  • Language: create materials and templates.
  • Build a volunteer program: support long-term and sustainable volunteer leadership base.
  • Storytelling and materials: learn to create compelling messages based on your constituency’s experiences.
  • Voter forms and list management: materials and templates.
  • Long-term sustainability: learn how to build and keep a viable organization as the basis to your voter registration and GOTV strategy.

Read more about how we use TAKE 10 and why it works.

The get-out-the-vote training is uplifting and informative, full of great stories along with tools and strategies that build powerful change. If you’re getting ready to mobilize around the elections, take this training first, and your work for the election will also build long-term power, for the next election and beyond.

— Sarah van Gelder, PeoplesHub founder

Check out our resources and order a copy of the Take 10 material for your own use.


Meet the Trainers

Kierra Sims brings over a decade of experience as a youth organizer in the U.S. South and in central Appalachia, focusing on the school to prison pipeline, introducing restorative practices to young people, and creating a just transition away from a coal dependent economy. She is a facilitator, movement builder, and educator that is dedicated to moving resources to radical, imaginative ideas.

I thrive off of creating space for people to share, connect, and build together.

— Kierra Sims


Linda Stout is the executive director of Spirit in Action. She has been a grassroots organizer and activist for more than three decades, identifying and working against injustice within her world, her country and her community. Linda founded Spirit in Action in 2000 to seek out transformative tools, models, and resources for building a powerful and visionary progressive movement.

I know that this type of on-line training can be successful. I first developed this model in rural North Carolina that went from registering and getting out the vote of 500 people in the first year to 44,000 by year five. This multiracial model continues to be used in the U.S. and internationally. I trained youth leaders in South Africa with our model after the fall of apartheid, when internalized oppression especially impacted their new constituency’s willingness to register and vote.

— Linda Stout

Bethsaida Ruiz – Bethsaida is a board member, consultant, coach and trainer with Spirit in Action. As a gifted activist, transformative and restorative justice change agent, who has worked in the nonprofit and governmental agencies for more than 25 years, she is driven and adept at cultivating high-performance teams and developing collaborative relationships with a wide range of diverse communities, stakeholders and government agency partners.

In Reverence, Grace and Humility, Deep Bows of Gratitude

– Bethsaida Ruiz