STRATEGY STRAND

This strand shares key tools and helps build skills for developing effective and responsive strategies. Using a hands-on and applied-experiential learning method, participants will learn to analyse contexts, create vision, identify opportunities and challenges, and develop responsive plans to move towards their objectives. At this crucial time for our social movements, the need for focused, well-crafted, and well-informed strategies couldn’t be more important.

The training will follow the structure of a ‘strategy arc’, covering the tools and skills to carry us from clarifying purpose to realising our goals. We’ll explore methods that enable us to develop clear pathways for action, building the capacity and power needed to follow them, and the responsiveness to keep learning and adapting as we go.

“What can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?” (Paulo Freire)

The structure will enable us to explore cutting edge approaches to:

• Creating vision and clarifying purpose
• Analysing the context and issues
• Mapping power
• Theories of change
• Establishing critical pathways and objectives
• Getting things done
• Building feedback loops and responsiveness into our practice
• Evaluating and learning from our actions.

A more detailed outline of strand content and structure will follow in the coming weeks.

NARRATIVE STRAND

We witness the power of narrative and story on a daily basis. Division and hatred are spread by the rightwing press, and sometimes by politicians. The issues of the day are quickly framed on social media. Historical stories provide deep undercurrents of understanding of our national and global psyches. And, within this ecosystem, our movements are also telling stories of need and despair, hope and change: think Greta and the school strikers, campaigners for marriage equality, or the Movement for Black Lives.

But how can we be sure that the stories we are telling—the way we are communicating the issues we care about—are effective? How do we know that they are catching people’s attention, engaging, motivating, building our movements for change, and ultimately creating change?

The training will focus on the role of framing in work on climate justice and tackling the rise of the far right in Europe. It will draw on PIRC’s work on Framing Equality, Framing the Economy, and their recent Framing Climate Justice research project.

In the training, we’ll explore the process for developing effective narratives. We’ll demystify the terms around story, framing and narrative and take a whistle-stop tour through the theory behind the framework. And we’ll move through developing a vision, understanding the narrative landscape, and creating and testing new routes through this landscape.

In detail, the training will cover:

Developing vision

• Understanding framing as a movement process
• Community-building through vision development
• Building clarity on goals and our core story

 Understanding the narrative landscape

• Understanding narrative as popularly and often deeply-held beliefs
• Exploring existing narratives
• Exploring methods for investigating existing narratives

 Developing new frames

• How to develop new ways of communicating issues
• Guiding principles for effective communications
• Getting creative

Testing frames

• The importance of testing our communications
• The accessibility of testing
• The multitude of methods of testing

The training will be participatory and practical throughout.

Participants can expect to gain:

• Practical understanding of framing and narrative,
• Skills in participatory narrative development,
• Tools to analyse the narrative landscape around an issue,
• Methodologies for creating and testing communications.

“It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”

—Ben Okri, Author