Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. In 2007, there are well over a dozen locations across the country offering Democracy Schools, including the San Francisco schools hosted by Global Exchange!

Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people's movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material, and a copy of Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine or visit www.CELDF.org.

The Schools are built around carefully designed readings, clear presentations and group discussions.

• Each School reveals how it came to be that the law enables corporate managers to dictate their values, and impose their projects on communities.
• Includes an intense, comprehensive history of the judicial bestowal of constitutional rights of persons on corporations.
• Learn the secret of how People's Movements have cut to the essence and won their struggles to be "found" in the constitution.
  o The Anti-Federalists
  o The Abolitionists
  o The Suffragists
  o The Populists
  o The Labor Movement
  o And learn about earlier Movements, including the Levelers and the Diggers.
• Experience the Pennsylvania Story -- an ongoing struggle to take the power to govern out of the Corporate Boardrooms and put it back in our communities where it belongs.
• For people of all ages, interests and occupations
• Classes consist of small groups of 10-15 people like you.