skills and practice for building movement solidarity and collective power.
We are living at a historical point of crisis which holds both great difficulty and great possibility. The dying engine of neoliberal growth, bankrupted political leadership, deepening inequalities in wealth and power, ongoing racist and patriarchal violence, and the fierce urgency of the ecological crisis define the ground on which we need to fight for our future. Against a backdrop of a rising far right, and the ongoing gathering of unaccountable power by elite groups, we have a lot to do. In this context, we need to build movements with the power and scale to effectively organise for systemic change.
Often though, when people from different organisations, networks or movements come together, they bring competing agendas, preferences and prejudices about one another, which can worsen existing tensions and limit the potential for finding new and transformative ways of collaborating across differences. This course exists to help us build the alliances and coalitions we actually need: not just the easy ones, but the difficult, unfamiliar ones, capable of shifting the balance of power.
It isn’t easy to build social power from below that’s capable of facing down authoritarian governments and far-right movements, or of taking on the forces of climate destruction, violence targeting migrants, LGBTQ+ people, racialised minorities, women or disabled people. If our movements and communities aren’t able to do this on our own, we need broader and deeper alliances, with other movements and other communities in struggle. We need to work together, powerfully. But this is far easier said than done: differences of power and social inequality, complex cultural dynamics, different ways of organising and talking, are real reasons why we aren’t doing this already – or are trying and failing.
Every “movement” or “community” is already a considerable achievement: a coming-together of people who are often very aware of the differences between them, as well as their similarities. This itself takes attention and work to sustain. Beyond these structures though, exists a wider ecology of social movements, made up of individuals, networks, informal groups and formal organisations sharing space. Often between them exists as much competition and conflict as solidarity and understanding. Typically, activism starts from a particular place: a specific demand, tactic, issue or social grouping. To build effective movements or communities we need to reach beyond the people who already agree with us, and, further still, to build links between issues (climate and social justice; Palestine and labour struggles; feminism and racial justice) and solidarity between communities and movements that may not obviously see themselves as connected.
Some alliances come easier, when there is already broad agreement and nobody has to ask much of anybody else. But the “easy alliances” also mark out the edges of our existing strength, and our limitations. It is the difficult alliances, across movements, communities, languages and political cultures that don’t yet understand one another well, that hold the real potential to grow our power and face down opponents we cannot currently win against.
This course focuses on those difficult alliances: what makes them hard, and what it takes to build them anyway.
It means recognising that different movements and communities organise and talk in different ways, shaped by different political cultures, material interests and relationships to everyday life, and that bridging these differences takes real time and skill. And it means learning to decentre ourselves: to stop starting from what we hope others will do with us, and instead to see other movements and communities on their own terms, as part of a wider social movement landscape that includes both the places we already know well, and the ones that still feel unfamiliar, or even a little daunting.
Building alliances of this kind asks something more of us than the solidarity we already practise with people much like ourselves. It asks us to bring the same collective strength we’ve learned to find with close allies into relationships that are new, asymmetrical, or genuinely uncertain. Done well, this is how movements actually grow: not merely as single organisations pursuing their own campaigns, but as an expanding, overlapping set of alliances that can support “a world in which many worlds fit”.
Through participating in this course, you will learn how to:
This course is practical and participatory, working directly with the real alliances participants are already trying to build, or struggling to build, in their own organising. If you have any questions about this feel free to reach out to us at events@ulexproject.org.
Who is it aimed at?
This training is aimed at experienced activists and organisers, who bring substantial experience and opportunities for putting the learning to good use at a movement building level.
Participants should:
This includes people involved in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues. 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.
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:
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.
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.
