a space for deeper reflection towards resilient and skillful leadership.
We are organising at a time when hope often feels scarce for people, a sense that it’s already too late is widespread: crises deepen faster than our movements seem able to respond, and the feeling that nothing we do will be enough can be hard to shake. In this climate, those holding responsibility in our groups have an extra weight to carry. We are looked to, to offer direction and energy, even as we experience the same conditions for exhaustion and uncertainty as everyone else. How we embody leadership together, hold responsibility sensitively and skilfully without being crushed by it, and build organisations that are both effective and inspiring, matters a great deal. Movements that struggle to sustain or share their leadership well will struggle to sustain much else. This retreat is a response to that need.
The retreat aims to support organisers and activists holding positions of significant and/or long term responsibility within their groups and movements to develop and enhance leaderful skills and resilience.
It is designed to create space for reflection, experience exchange and collective exploration of challenges that come with stepping into formal and informal leadership roles within social movements, and to facilitate relationship building and peer-to-peer support.
How do we relate to leadership in social movements? What views and preconceptions do we have about leadership and authority? How do these influence the way we enter and hold positions of responsibility and influence? How can we hold positions of responsibility and influence and still be aligned with the deeper values we want to see in the world? What qualities, behaviours and practices can support us in navigating power and rank in our groups? How can we empower ourselves and each other to use power and rank skillfully rather than shy away from exerting influence for the good of the whole? How does socialisation and systemic conditioning influence the ways we relate to and hold positions of power? What can we do about it? How do we remain joyful, resilient and energised by the bigger purpose when under pressure of responsibility?
The Leadership Retreat will aim to open up these and other questions related to leadership, navigating power and influence. We will create a space for inquiry, exploration of challenges and sharing of practices. We will aim to pause cycles of constant action by opening space for reflection, pausing and creating conditions for a deeper understanding of our own behaviours and patterns and those of our groups and movements.
In practice this means we will introduce a mix of personal reflection time – space to slow down, inquire and bring awareness to ourselves and our work – alongside group activities that will open up questions and shared experience through a range of creative and reflective activities and approaches.
This will not be a course of ‘management best practice tools’. It will be a space of deeper inquiry where we can explore some of our inherited and less conscious beliefs about leadership, about how we embody our aspired to values and how we can work more effectively and creatively with others in our movements.
What are the aims of the event?
So, the event will help participants to:
Who is it aimed at?
Anyone involved in socially engaged action on environmental, political and social justice issues who hold ‘leadership’ positions (formal or informal, long term, and/or involving significant responsibility). We embrace a broad definition of activism, including: 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.
The main spoken language on the retreat will be English.
For accessibility and venue information see here.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
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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.
Location:
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.
Location:
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.
Location:
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.
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.
