Our flagship program, MON’s civics and legal information program, through our community partners, trains community members on their rights in the legal system and on the legislative process, in order to empower them to fight for themselves and for their communities. Our strategies include the use of storytelling and a focus upon topics of Black history and Black women’s contributions to America’s civil rights and social justice movements.

Legal Literacy forms the core of our programming. We provide our participants a range of workshops on the topics of employment law, family law, and civic engagement. As our participants learn their rights, they take steps to assert them. This leads to broader awareness of and engagement in civic life, as they realize their own potential to affect public policy.

In these workshops, participants select a policy problem and are given the tools to study issues and brainstorm solutions. This culminates in an advocacy action such as letter writing to officials, a media event, a public education campaign (such as leafletting), or testimony before the City Council.

We use a two-tier training model and train students as trainers, who, in turn, train others.