Train the Trainer Program

Location: Virtual

The Black Public Defender Association Train the Trainer program is a two-day virtual intensive program designed for public defenders who develop and deliver training within their offices and professional communities. This program equips participants to design and facilitate training through a racial lens—starting from the premise that race is not an add-on to public defense work, but a structuring force that shapes law, practice, and institutional culture.

Rather than treating race as a discrete topic or specialized module, this training teaches participants to approach all training design decisions—learning objectives, content selection, hypotheticals, framing, and delivery—with deliberate attention to race and power. Participants will examine how seemingly neutral training choices—what cases we use, whose perspectives we center, how we frame problems—can reproduce racial hierarchy, and how antiracist design principles can be integrated from the outset to produce more honest, effective, and responsible training.

The program addresses both pre-training design and in-the-room facilitation, covering the role and responsibility of the trainer, principles of antiracist training design, and strategies for facilitating difficult conversations about race while managing power, resistance, and harm. Throughout, the focus remains on practical judgment, professional responsibility, and sustainability—so trainers can do this work well and keep doing it.

Please Note: The schedule is Subject to change)