Making our work together empowering, effective, and transformative.
This training will help organisations to put in place practices and structures that will support sustainable and effective collaboration. Working with others is not always easy. It can feel frustrating, draining and unproductive. Meetings drag, personalities clash, power conflicts arise, chaos reigns and all this gets in the way of achieving what the group or organization set out to do at the beginning. All of this becomes harder when faced with additional pressures such as financial resourcing or political hostility. We’ll draw on Ulex Transformative Collaboration training and adapt the curriculum to address specific challenges faced by organisations in Central and Eastern Europe.
This training is part of the Ulex Central and Eastern Europe Programme pilot year. It is designed and delivered by a training team embedded in CEE social movements.
In whatever way we envisage contributing to the wellbeing of our world, for most of us it is going to mean working with others. It is going to mean collaborating. Collaboration is key to collective agency and empowerment. It’s a basis for effectiveness, a crucial means of embodying our values, and it can bring forth emergent and creative qualities that alone we could barely imagine. And collaboration is not only a root of social transformation, it also provides a vital context for individual transformation, enabling us to share and live out our deepest values.
But working in groups is not always easy. It can feel frustrating, draining and unproductive. Meetings drag, personalities clash, power conflicts arise, chaos reigns and all this gets in the way of achieving what the group or organization set out to do at the beginning.
This training will help you to learn how to collaborate, communicate and make decisions effectively. It will help you to draw out the best in yourself and others, to stay in healthy relationship, build teams based on shared values – and get things done! We will look at challenges related to financial sustainability and meeting the ongoing resourcing needs of our groups. This course integrates practical skills and approaches to group and organisational development with reflective and group practices that explore the personal-interpersonal dimensions of organisational life.
This training is for activists and organisers based in CEE. It is part of Ulex CEE Programme pilot year.
Through a blend of participatory education and immersive learning you will learn how to:
This course description will be refined by the training team early in 2024.
This training will take place in Kunbábony, Hungary
This venue is accessible for people with limited mobility.
Some travel bursaries will be available. There is no charge for the training, so economic difficulties should not prevent you attending!
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
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Marika (she/they) is organizer, trainer and facilitator in the climate justice movement in Czech republic. After being involved in grassroot group Limity jsme my for 5 years and organizing several climate camps, she moved to the coal region in Northern Bohemia, where she organizes local communities for just transition from fossil fuels. She worked in Re-set: platform for social-ecological transformation around the topics of divestment from fossil fuels, energy poverty and community energy. She is co-founder of a social housing cooperative, which runs a community center. As a trainer, she takes part in trainings focused on capacity building in grassroots movements, just transition, community organizing or facilitation. Apart from that, Marika is passionate about mushroom growing, picking wild herbs and gardening.
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Zsófi has been passionate about social and climate justice since her teenage years. She has been involved in Hungarian activism, focusing on economic democracy, mental health, and green sustainability. She volunteered during the founding of Hungary’s first green party and was a member of the Gólya Cooperative from its establishment. After leaving Gólya, she directed her energy toward supporting groups in forming more cooperatives and facilitating the development of existing ones. She served as the coordinator of the emerging Solidarity Economy Network at the Solidarity Economy Centre. Later, she collaborated with various network members, leading different projects on organizational development and horizontal decision-making. Additionally, she deepened her knowledge of community building through training and internships with the Global Ecovillage Network. Over the last five years, she has been one of the main organizers of the ‘Gyüttment’ sustainable knowledge-sharing festival, as well as organizing different green events such as summer universities, training sessions, and other festivals.
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Lives in Budapest, community organizer, and director of Civil College Foundation. Organizers of the Clear Vote coalition and campaign, to prepare local communities and a network of activists to understand and oppose voter fraud and illegal influence on constituencies. Has experience in neighbourhood organizing, green politics, union organizing, building coalitions and networks, and interest in adapting Sociocracy .
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Jakub (he/him) works at the interface between social movements, academia, and non-formal education. His journey began at anti-fascist blockades, later he became involved in the climate justice movement and the Limity jsme my movement organizing climate camps in Czech coal regions. Those included both collective education and direct actions against fossil fuel infrastructure. Alongside this, he worked for several years as a youth worker training on the tools of activism and political organizing. Nowadays, he develops material and curriculums relevant to the CEE context in the trainers platform for social- ecological transformation. On the academic front, Jakub delves into studies on social- ecological resilience, focusing on the exchange of knowledge(s) and practices among different actors.
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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.
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Ella brings more than 10 years’ external experience working with not for profit and community based organisations across diverse themes including: advocacy for migrant communities; local community engagement in national policy making; and structural relationships between poverty and disenfranchisement, and education and poverty. Immersed in critical theory in her early 20s she brings a holistic and questioning approach, and is passionate about systemic solutions that centre relationship and interconnection between ecology and society. A long standing member of the collective, Ella has been part of the core team since the inception of the Ulex Project. Her work bridges facilitation, developing project partnerships, governance, strategy, operations, and project and programme evaluation. She has developed and overseen more than 70 partnerships with a range of different actors across European social movements.
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Alex has been facilitating courses geared towards social and personal transformation for the past 6 years. They have spent the last 10 years as a core member of the collective running the Ulex Project and has a deep experience of the integral approach we have developed. Their area of training expertise is sustainable activism and skills for developing ‘deeper resources’ for action. Their commitment to social justice and history of political activism have involved them in direct action and affinity group work focused on climate justice, anti-capitalism, queer politics and gender identity. A strong focus on the somatic dimension and embodied practice (informed by their work as a dance artist and yoga teacher) underpins both their approach.
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Nina (they/she) is a participatory artist, community organiser and political theatre maker. Theatre of the Oppressed has been a core part of their practice since they trained in India with Jana Sankriti in 2018. They are an artistic director of queer led theatre company, You Should see the Other Guy, who work on and off stage to tackle social injustice and make raucous musical verbatim plays. Nina has designed and delivered multiple TO training programmes in activist, community and academic settings, often combining TO with song making to collaboratively explore themes around power and identity. Their current fascination is thinking about TO as a practical manifestation of queer theory and asking: Is Theatre of the Oppressed queer?
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Marianne is a Holistic Security Trainer and Coach, part of the Holistic Protection Collective. She accompanies activists, human rights defenders and journalists globally. Being an activist herself, she is also a trainer for direct action and civil disobedience, and having a background as a mediator, she trains other activists how to facilitate dealing with conflicts in grassroots groups and diverse teams.
Tools for effective and sustainable activism
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new stories: different worlds
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Knowledge, skills and perspectives to challenge oppression and create spaces of solidarity.
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Tools for effective and sustainable activism
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Navigating the complex terrain of migrant and migrant-solidarity organising
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an introduction to a holistic and transformative approach to activist training and facilitation
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Go to the people, learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have – Lao Tzu
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Building facilitation capacity through participatory practices.
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a space to think critically, to ask challenging and transformative questions, and find deeper inspiration and understanding to empower social change.
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building and strengthening regenerative praxis for BIPOC organisers.
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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.
