Courses and Events

This week long event will bring together a group of richly talented facilitators and practitioners to share and explore creative tools that can be used in a variety of social change settings. It will take a cross/multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on theatre, story, image, dance, and music – and apply these to community empowerment, campaign development, and direct action.

We hear a lot about fragmentation within our movements and about the need to make them more diverse, inclusive, and empowering. We know that there are deep challenges involved in overcoming racism, patriarchy, classism, ableism, all the forms and faces of oppression which can be reproduced within our movements. This training aims to help us explore these challenges and to develop practices and strategies to build diverse movements, capable of embodying active solidarity and mutual empowerment.

This workshop offers a range of tools, collective and personal, which can make our activism more effective and sustainable. These methods can help us avoid burnout and stay in it for the long haul, adding continuity to our movement building. They can be used to ensure the collective and organisational dimensions of our activism exemplify the values we’re struggling for. A ‘regenerative’ approach goes beyond sustainability to explore how we can organise in ways that actually renew or revitalise our own resources and those of our groups – this can help us stay inspired, nourished, & more creative in our tactical approach.

Effective strategies for social transformation involve the contest for how we think, how we see, and the stories we tell about our world. New stories, new thinking, help new worlds come into being. This training aims to help our movements to tell better stories for a different world.

This training will offer the know-how of building more inclusive and empowering environments for activism and social change work. Applying knowledge, frameworks and concepts used in anti-oppression work, we'll explore ways to deal with discrimination and oppression at the individual, organizational and systemic levels - learning how to understand our struggles through the lens of intersectionality.

This workshop offers a range of tools, collective and personal, which can make our activism more effective and sustainable. These methods can help us avoid burnout and stay in it for the long haul, adding continuity to our movement building. They can be used to ensure the collective and organisational dimensions of our activism exemplify the values we’re struggling for. A ‘regenerative’ approach goes beyond sustainability to explore how we can organise in ways that actually renew or revitalise our own resources and those of our groups – this can help us stay inspired, nourished, & more creative in our tactical approach.

This training is designed to help us navigate the complex terrain of migrant and migrant-solidarity organising, taking into account our distinct roles and experiences in relation to the nation-state and the emotions that often accompany this work. We will unpack these dynamics and together, co-develop tools and strategies to engage with them more intentionally and sustainably.

This course offers a practical introduction to facilitation and training skills, specifically designed for activists and organisers who want to step into facilitation roles with more skill and confidence. It will focus on the application of holistic, participatory methods which can support learning and empowerment tailored to activists and changemakers.

This training will share a framework for Leaderful Organising. It includes practices and understanding that can help organisations and groups to distribute power and leadership effectively. It offers an approach that addresses two related issues: the problems of leadership, that can lead to entrenched power interests, poor accountability, disempowerment, and traditional hierarchical structures, and; the problems of leaderlessness, where social movements and organisations, rejecting leadership adopt ‘horizontal’ structures in ways that can lack direction, continuity, and coherence.

How can we stay creative, responsive, effective, and most importantly - in relationship - amidst the inevitable tensions of working with others? The Participatory Facilitation course will be a space to engage with this challenge, opening opportunities for exchange and exploration of a range of facilitation tools and methodologies, deepening facilitation skills and sensibilities, for those who already hold facilitation roles in their groups and organisations. 

This course draws on our longer Ecology of Social Movements Training - redesigned as a week-long course adapted to the context of Central and Eastern Europe. A training for experienced activists and organisers involved in movement level thinking and practice. Participants will engage in deep analysis of their own movement practice and ecology. They will gain skills and understanding to make their activism and organising more powerful and transformative.

This workshop is designed to address the specific needs, challenges, and lived realities of BIPOC activists and organisers. We will explore the relationship between identities and burnout, asking how our positionality as BIPOC activists shapes our capacity, resilience, and engagement in social change work.