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This is a training that offers a range of tools that can be used to help catalyse engagement within diverse communities. The participatory approaches it shares can be used to help people, communities and organisations engage in empowering dialogue, critical reflection and find motivation for decisive action.
We live in a time of ‘reflexive impotence’. Communication technologies bring the images and stories of world events into our lives in ever more Retina Screen™ detail in proportion to a growing sense of helplessness. We are all-too-well informed about the failings and irrationalities of our times. We’re deeply conscious of them – and often self-conscious of our complicity. And yet, ways to meaningfully influence what’s going on can seem elusive. All too often we resign ourselves, perhaps with some discomfort, to our part in it all, as onlookers. And yet, as Edmund Burke once wrote, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.”
The tools and approaches shared in this course will help organisers and activists support people to think more critically about their role in shaping society. They will enable you to bring communities together in inquiring and empowering dialogue with each other. They will give you more confidence to assist others to find the inspiration and courage to step up as active and critical citizens. These are crucial skills at a time when progressive values need to be defended and extended through vigorous engagement.
The training focuses on helping trainers and organisers to gain the skills and increase their confidence to facilitate and share participatory processes in diverse communities. Participatory approaches such as Theatre of the Oppressed, Popular Education and other experiential learning methodologies have been developed in the empowerment of communities across the world. The LABO team have been applying a spectrum of these methodologies amongst diverse communities in Belgium for many years. Here they share the tools they have found to be most useful in a wide range of pluralistic and multicultural settings.
In 2009, Mark Fisher wrote that for many people “the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable.” This training provides tools and practices that can help us to reclaim the radical imagination and extend the horizon of the thinkable to include a life affirming and socially just future.
Note: This event will take place at the Abella site of our partner centre, close to the Ulex project.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
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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.
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: del Llatí, (argelaga en català) nom:
1. Arbust espinós de fulla perenne i floració, amb gran capacitat de regeneració i resistència. Les seves pues s’obren en entrar en contacte amb el foc i torna a brollar dels tocones carbonitzats. Planta successional que creix bé en condicions difícils. Millora la fertilitat del sòl mitjançant la fixació de nitrogen, preparant el terreny per a una renovada biodiversitat.
2. Una opció tradicional per a encendre focs. Crema amb intensitat i lluentor.
3. Un projecte en xarxa que aporta nutrició i fertilitat als moviments socials europeus a través de la formació
