working with power, complexity and solidarity in activist learning spaces.
Our organising work sits within a global and historical system of interlinking forms of oppression. These shape the material, relational, and psychological conditions that influence every one of us. Unfortunately, as many of us will have witnessed, this means that within our groups and organisations, we are likely to reproduce mechanisms of oppression, often unconsciously. Without the skills to identify and transform those patterns, they will give rise to tensions and misunderstandings and will make our organising poorly aligned with the values of solidarity and empowerment we strive for. It is easy to find ourselves reproducing the barriers to participation, empowerment and well-being that exist and play out in the world around us. This is especially depleting for people who are already marginalised and discriminated against and needs to be addressed if our groups are to be genuinely empowering and transformative spaces.
As trainers, our capacities to support the holding of spaces that are literate in this particular sense – that are sensitive to power and privilege dynamics, that are not afraid of and able to facilitate difficult conversations usefully, that are emotionally aware and embody care, that can hold complexity, pain and difficulty without losing touch with purpose, direction and strategy, and so on – are particularly important. This training of trainers is based in Ulex’s Active Solidarity methodology. It will explore how creating social movement learning spaces rooted in an approach like this can help us build the collective power we need to act on systemic transformation in meaningful ways.
This course is for those already acting as trainers and facilitators and with experience of holding these roles in social movement learning spaces. It is not an introduction to the theme.
In order to build collective power, a practice of deep solidarity is needed in our movements.
As activist trainers and group members, we are likely aware of the ways that training spaces reflect the wider systems in which we live. Oppression and privilege can show up explicitly and obviously, and also subtly – in group dynamics, in facilitation choices, or even simply in how we respond to tension. This course offers a space to explore these realities, experiences and patterns with honesty and rigour, and to practice finding ways of holding power in transformative, grounded, enabling and relational ways.
Together we’ll reflect on how we navigate our influence as trainers, how we use our rank and influence responsively, in service to our group’s purpose. We’ll explore how to support groups to move beyond guilt, blame, and shame dynamics, towards greater understanding, responsibility, and solidarity.
Through experiential learning, reflection, and peer exchange, participants will work with frameworks of power and identity to better recognise how intersecting dimensions of privilege and marginalisation show up in groups and in ourselves. We’ll explore the different ways in which power manifests, addressing and unpicking dynamics related to different kinds of power – structural, contextual, psychological etc. We’ll apply tools and analytical models for analysing group dynamics, exploring training skills needed to navigate and work with power skilfully in its different manifestations.
The course will also focus on building emotional literacy and resilience, cultivating the ability to stay present with conflict and complexity, and strengthening the skills needed to centre positive values rather than reactive patterns when working with oppression.
Using case studies from participants’ own experiences, we will explore what supportive structures can sustain this kind of work, and reflect on how to find nourishing, long-term motivation for cultivating solidarity as a core element of transformative training.
The course will foster a peer-to-peer learning community of trainers – a supportive space to share practice, test approaches, and deepen collective understanding of how to create more resilient and transformative learning environments rooted in solidarity, care and aimed at structural transformation.
Aims of the course:
Main themes
Who is it aimed at?
Anyone with substantial experience in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues and with experience of holding training roles in social movement learning spaces. We embrace a broad definition of activism that includes any form of contribution to change and social and ecological justice. That might include: Resistance – action preventing further damage to ecosystems and social justice; Renewal – action focused on developing and creating alternatives for healthier societies and communities; and Building Resilience – action supporting increased resilience in communities to weather the uncertain times ahead.
Note that an understanding and experience of active solidarity (anti-oppression) tools and practice will be required, alongside substantial experience of organising with and being part of social movements. This course is not an introduction to the topic. If you are looking for a more basic course, see our Active Solidarity training. This is a training aimed at those who are already trainers and facilitators and experience of holding these roles in social movement learning spaces is required to participate in the course.
Attendance in online preparatory sessions and preparatory reading will also be a requirement.
The main spoken language on the course will be English.
For accessibility and venue information see here.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
Location:
Binta wears many hats – educator, facilitator, organizer, activist, social entrepreneur, and mental health advocate – in support of community-led initiatives focused on social and climate justice. She has 10+ years experience working internationally on issues related to digital literacy, educational, social, and economic inclusion of marginalized communities, capacity and community building, and intercultural communication. In addition to organizing and working with anti-racist and feminist organizations in France, her current work focuses on helping movements structure and grow their impact, training youth leaders and activists in campaigning, community building and mobilization, and building networks of peer learning, support, and empowerment for marginalized communities.
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Ilaj’s background is in grassroots organising, involving them in various strands of social movement work for nearly two decades, mostly in Eastern and Southern Europe. In more recent years, they have turned their attention to broader European movement building as part of the Ulex core team, where they design programmes, coordinate training teams and facilitate on a wide range of training courses. Ilaj is an experienced trainer with a broad range of skills, particularly in holding space for collective exploration of burnout, weathering repression, navigating trauma and cultivating solidarity in social movements. They are passionate about working with body awareness as a radical means of deconstructing internalised systems of oppression. They have been exploring the intersection between transformative somatics and political organising for a number of years.
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Isa (she/her) is an educator, facilitator, and author. She grew up in France before setting off on an adventure to London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, French teacher, and administrator for a community arts organisation, all while writing her PhD on the concept of community. She became Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK), where she taught for 10 years before leaving academia to breathe the air of freedom and collective action. She co-founded and co-facilitates, with Jay Jordan, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which has been bringing together artists and activists since 2004 to co-design and implement creative forms of direct action that are as joyful as they are politically effective. Active in social movements for over 20 years, she has facilitated assemblies of several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, and trained thousands of people in reinventing forms of civil disobedience. Her passion is exploring collective dynamics and all the ways in which these can be made more fruitful, joyful, and caring, particularly through popular education and rituals. She has been involved with the zad in Notre Dame des Landes since 2016.
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An Maeyens (she/her) is a facilitator and trainer with over two decades of experience in grassroots movements. She specialises in creative, inclusive agenda design and brings deep expertise on group culture, power dynamics, and transformative learning. Starting of in the anti-globalisation movement she has trained thousands in civil disobedience, supported international coalitions, and developed multilingual training programmes and toolkits. Her work spans movements, cultures, and countries, guided by a commitment to care, accessibility, and leaderful organising.
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Ari’s activism began in 2002, at age 16, as a Bosnian refugee in Canada, where they founded and coordinated a group for LGBTIQ high school students and allies. They were a co-founder and leader at kolekTIRV in Croatia and Trans Network Balkan, involved in community organizing, advocacy, program management, team coordination, capacity building, education, media work, campaigns, events, fundraising, etc. In 2024, they joined the Supervisory Board of the Croatian Trade Union Collective of United Precarious Workers and Activists (SKUPA).
Beyond the Balkan region, Ari served as a Board member at Transgender Europe (TGEU), where they held roles as Secretary, Treasurer, and later Co-chair. They have also been a trainer with the Center for Artistic Activism and served on the Advisory Committee and since 2022 as a Community Care Facilitator at FRIDA — The Young Feminist Fund. Since 2024 they are the Operations Manager at Global Philanthropy Project.
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Sergio (all pronouns) was born in Romania and migrated to Germany in the early 2010s. In the past, he was a social worker with homeless people and a social consultant for Eastern European migrants for various organisations. Trained as a filmmaker, he spent two years making a documentary about the ‘civic reawakening’ in Romania and the waves of protest it brought with it. In connection to this, Sergio is currently co-steering the development of an online open-source participative knowledge production platform on activism in Romania. Over the past nine years, Sergiu has offered his skills to various journalists, grassroots collectives and campaigns, mostly working within the labour rights, climate justice, international solidarity and anti-authoritarian movements in Germany and Romania. Nonetheless, his biggest focus since 2020 has been his work as an organiser with the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union, where he focuses mostly on organising Romanian migrant workers on construction sites, in factories and in the agricultural field.
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Linzy Na Nakorn is a movement director, politicised somatics practitioner, community organiser and facilitator. For the past decade she has been facilitating movement, body work and creating theatre, dance and participatory performance that advocates for and organises with communities in pursuit of housing, disability and racial justice. Her movement practice focuses on trauma-informed approaches to building resilience, capacity and joy via way of the body for personal, interpersonal and community sustainability. Linzy was a Co-Director of The Big Ride for Palestine in partnership with The Gaza Sunbirds, Native Woman Ride and Middle East Children’s Alliance; using cycling as a tool for mobilising active solidarity and in support of campaigning for the rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. Linzy is part of a UK network of activists and artists advocating for Radical Care – supporting organisations, researchers and institutions to work towards system change in societal approaches to labour, leadership and access.
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Jeroen (he/him pronouns) has been involved in grassroots social movements for more than two decades now, starting back when he was fifteen. Throughout the years the fights for “climate justice” and “migrant justice” have been consistently on top of the list of struggles that make his heart beat faster. A key transformative moment for Jeroen was reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy gave him a language to support the creation of emancipatory learning environments, rooted in a desire for collective liberation. Jeroen has also been exploring in depth Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects among other methodologies to build his trainer’s toolkit. Inspired by the liberatory possibilities of these traditions, he started an organization with a friend, LABO vzw, based in Belgium, where he has worked as a trainer and campaigner between 2013 and 2023.
Ulex: Latin (argelaga Catalan, gorse English) noun:
1. A thorny-evergreen flowering shrub, with a high capacity for regeneration and resilience. Its seedpods open in contact with fire and it reshoots from charred stumps. A successionary plant that grows well under challenging conditions. It improves soil fertility through nitrogen fixing, preparing the way for renewed biodiversity.
2. A traditional choice for igniting fires. Burns hot and bright.
3. A networked project adding nutrition and fertility to European social movements through training and capacity building. It kindles the realisation of social justice, ecological intelligence, and cognitive vitality.
