Our second Arena Academy Online begins tomorrow. As with all our Academies, we’ve worked hard to ensure that the next graduating class of Arena Academy looks like the constituents who will be voting in key races in November.
I’m proud that Arena’s data shows our efforts to make the Academy accessible to anyone who wants to join have paid off.
To date, 68% of all Academy attendees have received registrations scholarships. 62% of Academy grads have been women or nonbinary, and 54% have been people of color. Many of these grads have gone on to land jobs through Arena Careers, which has almost 3,000 active users and 150 open listings for progressive jobs this week.
These trends have continued in our rising class:
- 71% of attendees received scholarships, an increase from our 2019 average of 66%
- 58% of attendees are female or gender nonbinary
- 52% of attendees are people of color
We’re also recruiting campaign staff who have demonstrated a commitment to working in battleground states:
- Half of all attendees live in Arena’s targeted battleground states where we’re working to flip state legislatures — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas
- The state with the largest representation is Florida, where we had told state campaigns to expect an influx of trained staff before Coronavirus hit and made us take our Orlando training virtual
- Because we are focusing on battleground state races, this Academy will be made of about the same percentage of attendees from Florida as previous Academies had from traditional political hotspots like New York and DC
We feel confident that this Academy is among the strongest classes we’ve ever had.
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram on @arenasummit to see more updates about the upcoming Academy. You can keep up with the training remotely using the hashtag #ArenaAcademy, where we’ll be sharing clips and livetweeting our most popular sessions.